EDITORIAL: Forget About The People, Give Us Visas – Our Clergies Cry

The most urgent need of some of the clergymen and women in Ghana today is not the welfare of their flock but how “to ease the trauma some of them go through at the High Commissions and Embassies” to acquire Visa and other travelling documents anytime they are desirous of travelling out of the country.

Incredible, isn't it? But it is true. At least if we are to believe the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, Right Reverend Dr Yaw Frimpong-Manso.

Incredible as it may seem, the urgent-most thing on the mind of Rt. Rev. Frimpong-Manso when he led a delegation to the Castle to pay a courtesy call on President Kufuor was not the additional difficulties that the people of Ghana are having to endure in the face of recent hikes in the price of petroleum products; neither is it even the likely impact of the increase in the price of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) on the environment, nor is it even the unemployment situation in the country today. No.

What is important for Rt. Rev. Frimpong-Manso is how he and his clergy friends could get assistance from State Protocol to facilitate acquisition for visas for them whenever they are travelling out of the country.

According to a GNA report, “Rt. Rev. Frimpong-Manso appealed to the Government to assist leaders of the religious bodies in the acquisition of travelling documents from the diplomatic missions in Ghana to ease the drudgery some of them go through when they had to travel outside the country.”

The GNA report quoted Rt. Rev. Frimpong-Manso as having said, “It will be ideal to accord leaders of the religious bodies some sort of protocol in the acquisition of visas to ease the trauma some of them go through at the High Commissions and Embassies.”

Significantly, Rt. Rev. Frimpong-Manso was making this appeal just a day after the second CJA organised Wahala March to demonstrate against the killer petroleum price hikes, which attracted thousands of Ghanaians of all walks of life, some of who must be of the Presbyterian faith (at least our editor, who took part in the Wahala Marches, is a Presbyterian), as if to tell the President “give us protocol services to procure our visas and we will be happy to remain quiet so you can ignore the protestors”.

Goodness, and these are the people who claim to be looking after Christ's flock? The Good book tells us that “by their fruits ye shall know them.”

God bless the leaders of the CJA. At least they have not sold the people for making life more bearable for themselves and their loved ones. Why, it is not as if the leads of the CJA do not have needs of their own that they could not use some governmental or Presidential intervention to deal with. Yet these leaders have chosen to fight a just cause for the people, while those who claim to be Christ's representatives on earth are going round naming their prices. God, deliver us from these persons.

The time has come for all of us to open our eyes wide so we can see those who really have our interests at heart and those who only mouth platitudes that they do not believe in.