When Shepherds Step Back: Why Ghana's Church Leaders Owe the Body of Christ an Apology, Not Just an Explanation

Gana's Proposed National Cathedral

The National Cathedral controversy has produced no shortage of political commentary. Government officials have defended the project. Opposition figures have attacked it. Analysts have argued over procurement, cost overruns and delayed timelines. But one question has received far less attention than it deserves, and it is not a political question at all. It is a pastoral one.

Over roughly two years, five respected clergymen departed the Board of Trustees of the National Cathedral: Dr Mensa Otabil of the International Central Gospel Church, who distanced himself from the board early on; Bishop Dag Heward-Mills of Lighthouse Chapel International, the first to formally resign, citing years of ignored letters about cost, design and fundraising; Rev. Prof. Cephas Omenyo, the immediate past Moderator of the Presbyterian Church, who stepped down for reasons of ill health; and, in October 2023, Archbishop Nicholas Duncan-Williams and Rev. Eastwood Anaba, who resigned jointly, citing an unfulfilled demand for an independent audit and describing their decision as a matter of “conscience and faith.”

Each departure deserves to be judged on its own terms. Rev. Prof. Omenyo's exit for health reasons carries no communication burden at all; no one expects a man managing his health to also manage public perception. But the resignations that were explicitly framed around transparency, accountability and unresolved concerns — Heward-Mills's, and later Duncan-Williams's and Anaba's — were different in kind. They were public acts of moral judgment on a national religious project, and like all such acts, they created meaning the moment they were announced, whether or not their authors intended it.

That is where this argument begins, and it is not an argument about politics. It is an argument about pastoral responsibility.

A Resignation Is Not a Neutral Act

Church leaders sometimes speak as though resignation is a private matter of conscience, closed once the decision is made. It is not, particularly not for public figures whose words carry spiritual weight. When a widely respected archbishop and a nationally known pastor resign from a project built explicitly as a Christian thanksgiving to God, and cite unmet demands for transparency as their reason, they are making a statement the whole Christian public is entitled to understand fully. The same is true of a bishop who resigns citing years of unanswered letters about cost and governance.

None of the departing trustees, to their credit, ever declared outright that the project was corrupt. But none of them said, clearly and repeatedly, what exactly they did mean — whether their concern was procedural, financial, managerial or something else. Into that gap between what was implied and what was actually said, politicians on both sides poured their own meanings, and Christian voters, trusting their pastors, absorbed those meanings as settled fact.

This is where accountability shifts from the government to the church itself. A pastor's resignation is not just an act of personal conscience. It is an act of public communication, and public communication carries public responsibility.

Followers Were Left to Guess

Ordinary Ghanaian Christians did not have access to board minutes, audit terms of reference, or internal correspondence. What they had was the moral authority of respected men of God, walking away one after another from a national religious project and describing their departures in the language of conscience and unresolved concern. For many believers, that pattern was enough. If our pastors keep leaving, something must be wrong.

That is not a criticism of ordinary believers. It is precisely how spiritual trust is supposed to work. Christians extend deference to their leaders because leadership in the church is meant to carry a higher standard of care, not a lower one. The problem is that this deference was never followed up with clarity. Weeks became months. Months became an election cycle. The National Cathedral became a campaign symbol, and the departing trustees whose exits had supplied so much of its moral force said very little more.

Silence from a politician is often read as strategy. Silence from a pastor is often read as confirmation.

The Recent Reversal: Duncan-Williams Now Says Corruption Was Never the Problem

This argument has recently taken on a sharper edge. In a sermon to his congregation in September 2026, nearly three years after his resignation letter cited unresolved audit concerns, Archbishop Duncan-Williams told his church plainly that the National Cathedral stalled not because of corruption, but because Ghanaian Christians were not committed enough to see it through. He said he had been present throughout and was speaking from direct knowledge, and went on to describe believers as more loyal to selfish interests than to the wider vision of the church.

Set against his own resignation letter, which spoke of an audit needed to restore public confidence, and against the years in which his departure was treated by commentators and opposition politicians alike as evidence of financial wrongdoing, this is a significant reversal. It is also, in its own way, proof of the very argument at the centre of this piece. If there truly was no corruption, as the Archbishop now insists, then the ambiguity that surrounded his 2023 resignation did real and unnecessary damage: it allowed a false or at least premature impression of scandal to take root in the public mind, an impression his own more recent remarks now contradict.

What has been conspicuously absent from this reversal is any acknowledgment of that earlier ambiguity, or any apology for the confusion it caused. Having effectively cleared the project of the suspicion his resignation helped fuel, the Archbishop has moved directly to a new critique — the half-heartedness of Ghanaian Christians — without pausing to address the body of Christ he first left uncertain. That sequence, arriving at clarity only after the political damage was long done, and without ever squaring it with the conscience-and-faith language of 2023, is exactly the pattern this piece argues the church can no longer afford to treat as normal.

An Apology Is Owed, and It Is Not the Same as Taking a Political Side

This is the argument at the centre of this piece, and it deserves to be stated plainly: the church leaders who resigned from the Board of Trustees citing transparency and accountability concerns — principally Duncan-Williams, Anaba and Heward-Mills — owe the body of Christ something closer to an apology than an explanation. Not necessarily for their original decisions to resign, which may well have been justified on their own terms. But for allowing serious, ambiguous, spiritually charged actions to sit in the public square for years without the clarity that only they could provide, and now, in Duncan-Williams's case, for arriving at that clarity only after the fact and without acknowledging what the delay cost the church.

An apology here is not a political concession. It is not an admission that the NPP government was blameless, and it is not a gift to the NDC's opposing narrative either. It is simply an acknowledgment that when spiritual leaders speak into public life, they owe their followers precision, not ambiguity — and when that precision does not arrive, the resulting confusion becomes partly their responsibility, whatever their original intentions were.

Such an apology would sound something like this: we should have been clearer about what our resignation did and did not mean. We allowed room for interpretations we did not intend and did not correct. We are sorry that our silence became political currency, and we recommit to speaking plainly when we raise concerns about matters of public trust. Now that at least one of us has said clearly there was no corruption, we owe the church an explanation of why that clarity took three years to arrive.

That kind of statement would cost these leaders very little. It would not resolve the underlying dispute about the Cathedral's finances, which remains a matter for auditors and investigators. But it would do something more important for the church itself: it would restore the principle that when pastors act in public, they remain accountable to the public they claim to serve, not only to their own conscience.

The Fairer Reading of Their Position

It would be unfair, however, to treat this as a simple failure of integrity. There are real reasons these leaders might have chosen restraint at the time. An unresolved audit dispute is a serious allegation to make definitive without documentary proof, and responsible leaders are right to be cautious about accusing anyone of corruption without evidence in hand. Ghana's political environment is also genuinely hostile to nuance: almost anything a religious leader says about a government project will be seized upon by one side or the other regardless of how carefully it is phrased. The departing trustees may reasonably have believed that further public comment would only deepen the politicisation they were trying to avoid.

These are legitimate considerations, and they complicate any simple verdict of failure. But they do not fully answer the deeper problem, and Duncan-Williams's own recent remarks make that harder to sustain, not easier. Caution about accusing the government is not the same as caution about informing the church. A leader can decline to render a legal verdict on corruption while still telling their congregation, clearly, what they saw, what troubled them, and what they still do not know. That middle path — more transparency toward the flock without premature judgment on the government — was available in 2023 and again in 2026, and was not fully taken either time.

One Leader Who Chose Clarity Over Convenience: The Example of Apostle Prof. Opoku Onyinah

Against this backdrop, one figure deserves direct and unreserved commendation: Apostle Prof. Opoku Onyinah, the former Chairman of the Church of Pentecost, who served as Chairman of the National Cathedral Board of Trustees throughout the controversy. Where others walked away, Apostle Onyinah stayed, and where others left ambiguity to fester, he chose to speak, years before Duncan-Williams's recent about-turn.

When Bishop Dag Heward-Mills resigned and raised pointed concerns about governance, Apostle Onyinah did not hide behind silence. He responded publicly and directly, explaining the board's decision-making process, acknowledging that no single trustee could expect every preference to prevail, and setting out what had and had not been addressed. When Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa pressed corruption allegations against the project, Apostle Onyinah again did not retreat into vague reassurance. He challenged the MP directly to bring his evidence to the appropriate authorities if it existed, rather than allow suspicion to substitute for proof in the court of public opinion. And when accusations continued to mount, including after a critical government-ordered audit, he remained willing to be the public face of the project, absorbing criticism that easily could have been left to others.

Whatever one's final judgment on the National Cathedral project itself, Apostle Onyinah's conduct as a communicator has been a model of exactly what this piece argues was missing elsewhere: a leader who stayed present, spoke plainly, distinguished allegation from evidence, and accepted personal reputational risk rather than letting ambiguity do the talking for him. That is the standard the other departing trustees should be measured against, and the standard by which Apostle Onyinah deserves to be commended, not merely defended.

None of this means Apostle Onyinah's account of events should be accepted uncritically, or that the underlying questions about the Cathedral's finances are resolved; that remains a matter for the audits and investigations already under way. It means only that, as a matter of communication and pastoral responsibility, he did the harder and more accountable thing when it would have been easier to say nothing — and did it years before others reached, tentatively and without apology, roughly the same conclusion.

A Broader Lesson for Church and State

Politicians will always try to convert religious authority into political capital; that is simply the nature of political competition in a religious society. The check on that tendency cannot come from politicians. It has to come from the church itself, through leaders who understand that their public actions create meaning whether they intend it or not, and who take responsibility for that meaning rather than leaving it to be defined by others.

Ghanaian Christians, for their part, also carry a duty here. Respect for spiritual leaders should never become a substitute for independent judgment. Faith should sharpen our commitment to truth, not replace our responsibility to seek it. Believers are entitled to ask their pastors direct questions and to expect direct answers, especially when those pastors have stepped into a matter of national governance.

This is not, in the end, a story about which political party benefited from the National Cathedral controversy. It is a story about what the church owes its own people when its leaders choose to act in public. Some trustees resigned and may well have been right to do so. But right conduct that is communicated poorly still produces real harm, and that harm fell first on the body of Christ, not on any political party. Others, like Apostle Onyinah, chose to remain and to answer for the project in public, at real personal cost, and have now effectively been vindicated by Duncan-Williams's own recent words.

An apology for the harm caused by ambiguity — for the confusion, the unanswered questions, and the years of silence that let others speak for them, followed by a reversal that has still not been squared with the original alarm — would not weaken the departing leaders. It would strengthen the one thing their ministry depends on more than any building project: the trust of the people who still call them shepherd. And it would put them, at last, on the same footing of accountability that Apostle Onyinah has occupied publicly for years.

Rexford Adjei Darko is a Public Relations Practitioner, Governance & AI Advocate and CSR Researcher.