Whose Religion Counts? Ghana's Convenient Politics of Faith

On August 27, 2026, Archbishop Nicholas Duncan-Williams was among the dignitaries who turned up at Parliament to publicly support Mahama Ayariga, a Muslim, during his vetting as Minister-designate for Local Government, Chieftaincy and Religious Affairs. He sat there, visibly, warmly, alongside NDC grandees, as a Muslim nominee answered questions on his way to a Cabinet seat. Nobody batted an eyelid, and rightly so; Ayariga's faith has no bearing on his fitness to run local government.

But the image is hard to reconcile with the religious temperature of the 2024 election, when Dr Mahamudu Bawumia's Muslim faith became, for a season, a live political talking point. His own party colleague, Victoria Duncan-Williams, sister of the Archbishop, told Ghanaians on record that Bawumia "can never be president," citing the country's Christian majority as reason enough. Rumours, which the Archbishop has denied and moved to legally contest, swirled that he and other prominent pastors had coordinated against Bawumia's bid specifically because of his religion. Whatever the precise truth of who said what, the wider climate was unmistakable: a Muslim candidate's faith was treated by a vocal segment of the religious and political establishment as a legitimate reason for concern.

Two years on, a Muslim nominee walks into Parliament flanked by some of the same religious establishment, to applause. Isn't there an irony here?

The Same Pulpits, the Other Candidate

The irony deepens when you look at what the same clerical class was doing for Mahama at the very moment some of them were casting doubt on a Muslim candidate's fitness for office. On October 1, 2024, at an event tellingly titled "Mahama Fellowships with the Clergy," Rev. Isaac Owusu-Bempah, founder of Glorious Word Power Ministry International, prayed over the NDC flagbearer and prophesied outright that God had handed him the presidency. Prominent clergy including Rev. Sam Korankye Ankrah joined him to lay hands on Mahama that day, and Owusu-Bempah has since said an archbishop also prayed to have every hindrance to Mahama's victory removed. Bishop Salifu Amoako, Prophet Ebenezer Adarkwa Yiadom (Opambour), the Sierra Leonean prophet Elijah Conteh, and Prophetic Hill Chapel's Nigel Gaisie all separately prophesied a Mahama win in the same season.

Notably, Owusu-Bempah himself had been, in his own words, a staunch NPP supporter before that fellowship. His shift is a useful reminder that clerical political alignment in Ghana tends to move with the direction of power, not with unchanging doctrine. If faith genuinely dictated who these men of God blessed and who they warned against, that switch would need an explanation beyond politics. None has been offered.

A Test That Should Cut Both Ways

If a candidate's religion is genuinely disqualifying, or even relevant, then the principle cannot depend on which party the candidate represents. If Ghanaians were right to weigh Bawumia's faith against him in 2024, they should apply exactly the same test to Ayariga in 2026, and to every Muslim nominee thereafter, regardless of party colours. If, instead, Ayariga's religion is rightly treated as irrelevant to his competence, then Bawumia's should have been too.

It cannot be both ways. And when the same standard bends depending on whose candidate is involved, the honest conclusion is that religion was never really the issue. It was the party, and the individual, that mattered; faith was simply the more emotionally potent argument to reach for.

That is precisely where the danger lies. Once religion becomes a convenient instrument rather than a genuine conviction, it stops being faith and becomes propaganda, and it is Ghana's social cohesion that pays the price.

Ayariga Is Not the Only One

It is also worth noting that Ayariga's appointment is not an isolated exception quietly slipped past a watchful public; it extends an already-established pattern. President Mahama's cabinet, unveiled in February 2025, has included Muslim ministers serving without controversy since day one: Mubarak Mohammed Muntaka at the Interior Ministry, Haruna Iddrisu at Education, and Dr Abdul-Rashid Pelpuo at Labour, Jobs and Employment, among others. None of their appointments triggered the kind of religious anxiety that attended Bawumia's presidential bid. The double standard, in other words, was never about whether Ghana could be governed by Muslims in high office; Ghanaians have quietly accepted that for years. It was specifically about whether a Muslim could occupy the presidency, the one office where the anxiety could still be dressed up as principle.

What the Rest of the World Already Knows

Ghana does not need a thought experiment to know that a leader's religion says nothing about their competence. The evidence is already global.

The United Arab Emirates and Qatar, both led by Muslim heads of state with far less arable land, fresh water and mineral wealth than Ghana possesses, have built modern infrastructure, world-class airports, ports and healthcare systems in a generation. Turkey, under a Muslim president, has spent two decades expanding highways, hospitals and a domestic defence industry that now exports globally. In London, one of the world's great capitals, Sadiq Khan, a practising Muslim, has been elected mayor three times over by a majority non-Muslim electorate, judged each time on his record on transport, housing and public safety, not his mosque attendance.

Ghana, by contrast, sits on gold, cocoa, oil, bauxite and manganese, and a population overwhelmingly Christian, and still struggles with basic infrastructure, reliable power and predictable roads. If resource endowment and religious majority guaranteed development, Ghana would already be ahead of the Gulf states rather than studying them. The evidence, plainly, points the other way: what determines whether a country develops is competence, institutions and the discipline of leadership, not the religion printed beside a leader's name.

What Christianity Actually Asks of Us

As Evangelist Akwasi Awuah has rightly observed, going to church does not automatically make one a Christian. Christianity is not simply attendance, public prayer or a religious title; it is measured by whether one lives out the teachings of Christ, love, humility, tolerance, justice and peaceful coexistence. None of that teaches Ghanaians to disqualify a candidate for worshipping in a mosque instead of a church, and none of it excuses using the pulpit as a partisan mobilisation tool while calling it conviction.

Being Christian does not make a leader better. Being Muslim does not make a leader worse. Ghanaians are citizens first, and a presidential or ministerial candidate should be judged on competence, integrity, vision, character and record, full stop.

The Caution Ghana Needs

Those who occupy pulpits and command religious authority carry real influence over public sentiment, and with that influence comes a responsibility not to weaponise faith for partisan ends, whichever party stands to benefit. If Ghana's religious leaders wish to speak on a candidate's suitability, consistency demands they apply the same yardstick to every candidate, in every party, every time, not selectively when it is politically convenient.

A country seeking genuine development cannot afford to sit on the wrong side of this question. The nations pulling ahead of Ghana, in the Gulf, in parts of Europe, under leaders of every faith, did not get there by sorting candidates along religious lines. They got there by choosing competence and holding it accountable. Ghana, with far greater natural resources than many of the countries now outpacing it, has no excuse for choosing differently.

By Rexford Adjei Darko
| Public Relations Practitioner, Governance & AI Advocate and CSR Researcher