Enforce bye-laws to check indiscipline
President John Dramani Mahama has scolded metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies (MMDAs) for failing to enforce existing laws to check indiscipline in society.
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He said, for instance, that although all the assemblies had bye-laws on sanitation, enforcing them had become a major problem, giving some people the leeway to do all manner of illegal things, including loitering with impunity and building on watercourses.
The President was opening the 83rd annual National Convention of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Mission in Ghana at Pomadze in the Central Region yesterday.
About 40,000 Ahmadi Muslims from all parts of Ghana, as well as foreign delegates, are attending the three-day convention on the theme: "Discipline, the cornerstone for national development".
President Mahama said the fight against indiscipline was a collective one in which the state and individuals should all play their part.
Attitudinal change
Discipline, the President said, imposed restraint on mankind from indulging in impermissible actions, including misappropriating state property, inflating cost of contracts, under-invoicing, indulging in electoral malpractice, among others.
Referring to the past, he said people kept true faith with tradition by living honest and disciplined lives, but with modernisation, a breakdown of those values had become the order of the day.
Mr Mahama said religious denominations had a role to play in building the values of discipline in the people.
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Ghana, he said, was deemed to be the most religious country in the world, with over 90 per cent of the people belonging to one religion or another.
"If that is the case, it must reflect in our attitudes. That means we should be the cleanest country in the world, the most honest country, the least violent country," he said.
Violence
President Mahama condemned the acts of violence, including killings, being perpetrated in some parts of the world in the name of religion and praised religious groups in Ghana for not toeing that line but rather living in peace and tolerating one another.
He consequently paid tribute to all religious leaders in the country for championing peace.
He praised the Ahmadiyya Muslim Mission in Ghana for its development spirit that had contributed to advancing overall national development.
The Ameer and Missionary in charge of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Mission, Alhaji Maulvi Mohammed Bin Salih, said there was no dispute about the fact that indiscipline had become endemic in society.
He said various sections of society should take part of the blame for the speed with which indiscipline had spread.
Politically motivated groupings
To check the problem, the Ameer suggested, among other measures, the need to do away with "politically motivated mercenary groupings such as the Azorka Boys and the Bamba Boys.
“Political youth groups such as the Tertiary Education Institutions Network (TEIN) of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), the Tertiary Students Confederacy (TESCON) of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the Tertiary Students Charter (TESCHART) of the Convention People’s Party (CPP) must also not be allowed to operate.
"We need to learn lessons from historical antecedents because we can only afford to know the starting agenda or motivation behind such unconstitutional partisan groupings but we cannot tell what they finally are capable of becoming in the future," he added.
He challenged Ahmadi Muslims to continue to play their role in national development with all seriousness, saying, for instance, that "if every Ahmadi Muslim policeman says no to bribery and corruption, the whole Ghanaian society will sit up".
Ameer Salih was full of praise for the President for his extraordinary support to the Ahmadi Mission in Ghana.
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Mirza Masroor Ahmad
A message from the Head of the Ahmadiyya Community in Islam, Mirza Masroor Ahmad, read on his behalf, said the progressive Ahmadi presence in Ghana was testimony to the sacrifices old and new members of the Ahmadi faith had made not only in propagating their teachings but also in national development.