Our "Bullion Van" Cathedral

“The national cathedral would be a legacy, a symbol of our country's hopes and aspirations of righteousness for all generations. The monument would be a national honor to God as the soul of our unity and identity. That’s why it must be funded from the public purse rather than private pockets.”

I am much troubled by the acrimony and national uproar against the national cathedral project.

Led by the distinguished critic, Kwesi Pratt (who unfortunately has no valid records of speaking for God on such matters) they wonder why monies committed to the project would not be used to construct hospitals for pregnant women and children in remote parts of Ghana to reduce the spate of preventable deaths or to facelift many dangerous roads in the country.

The timing of the project too has not helped matters. At a time of unprecedented rise in the price of food and everything money can buy, expending millions of tax-payer resources on such a presumptuous presidential project could provoke a national uproar and drive extremists into understandable indignation.

But the ways of God are not the ways of men, and neither is God’s wisdom affiliated to the wisdom of men. The clamor and opprobrium against the project may be understandable, but it does not necessarily translate into God's rejection of the project. The voice of the people is not always the voice of God.

When presidential judgments and cabinet wisdom keep leading us all into the bottomless pit of inflation, who do we turn to for salvation? Do we turn to the economic professors in Legon, the opposition or the IMF? Each time the children of Israel turned to God in repentance, he intervened in their national affairs and rescued them from hunger and inflation. This president is convinced that our nation’s economic salvation is from above ─ from the skies rather than the depreciating theories of demand and supply.

Let the critics know that the cathedral, by itself, is a hospital. It would provide spiritual healing, emotional rehabilitation and a national fervor to all Ghanaians who step into its holy perimeters to pray. It would be a center of refuge from all economic pandemics, now or in the future. It would hoist our national identity aloft as a theoretically Christian country, even if in practice we are a calamitous hoax.

Since independence, our leaders have expended resources on frivolous projects that have impoverished than benefitted us. Only this president has been valiant enough to dedicate state resources towards capturing our national aspirations as a country united under God and aspiring for righteousness.

The national cathedral would be a legacy, a symbol of our country's hopes and aspirations of righteousness for all

generations. That’s why it must be funded from the public purse rather than private donations. Christianity, more than anything else, has contributed to the unity and peaceful development of this country for many years. The monument of a cathedral is an honor to God as the soul of our unity, identity, dreams and righteous aspirations. This is what the politicians have failed to communicate to us.

As for the poor and the sick, like Jesus said, they will always be with us. Those who will die will die whether we build a thousand hospitals or construct railroads from Bibiani to to Paga. And of course, those who will live will live, as it has always been, to praise the Lord in the cathedral!

Going to heaven is an expensive business. The state should be applauded for making money available to oversee citizen’s passage to the other world, hospitals or no hospitals!