National Peace Council chairman, Rev. Professor Emmanuel Asante, has blamed the media for giving some men of God the platform to engage in partisan politics.
According to him, some men of God are attention seekers who use the media to make themselves popular by making self-serving prophesies that the media carries as news.
“Because I want to gain media attention, there are certain things that are pushed to the media”, he said. Prof. Asante wonders why the media allows those things and for what purpose.
“I sit back and I say, are these things really necessary?” he asked. “When somebody says, in two years a president is going to die, does that make news? Does that help build our nation? Who won’t die anyway?” he quizzed. He admitted that some men of God are political in their dealings but others too are more concerned with “heavenly matters”.
“But there are also those who also want to make a name, the prophesies that seem to be going on, I have to be prophesying in a certain manner because I want to make a name.” Speaking on TV3’s New Day, Monday April 9, Prof. Asante said, even though men of God may have sympathies for some political parties by virtue of the fact that they vote, it is not appropriate for them to openly declare their political affiliations.
“The fact that I vote means that I have sympathies for certain political positions but if I openly identify myself with party A, alienating people who are in party B, I will have to be very careful about that”, he observed.
“As a leader of a church that is the microcosm of the nation in the sense that you have people belonging to different political persuasions, I will be very careful identifying openly with any particular political party”, he added. He stated that it will take education for Ghana to rise above partisan politics to what he describes as national politics, adding that such education has to be driven by the media.
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