Four dead is no news (my views on the TB Joshua disaster in Accra)

I am mad at the kind of reportage I am seeing on the stampede that ensued at the Synagogue Church of All Nations. Everybody is busy calling TB Joshua a false profit, (sorry prophet), a fraud, a 419, an anti-Christ, a thief- and I really don’t care what y’all call him because I don’t know him and I don’t know what or who he prays to behind closed doors. I am mad because this issue is not about TB Joshua!

How many sick people went for holy water?  How many more sick people wanted to show up but were too sick to? How many sick people are there in this country? Why don’t they go to the hospital? Have they already been to the hospital? Can they afford to go to the hospital? Have you ever been to a hospital in Ghana? Did you actually get to see a doctor? Did you actually see a doctor without bribing somebody or calling somebody important?  And after you saw the doctor, was the diagnosis spot on? Do you have any idea how many people in Ghana are taking the wrong medication for the wrong disease?  Are we really surprised that four people died and thirteen were injured? How many have our doctors killed because they were on strike, or didn’t know what they were doing or didn’t really care enough or didn’t have the right facilities? Considering how many our health system kills and maims everyday, four dead is no news.

Now, on the stampede: If thousands of people had access to information that TB Joshua was coming to town, can the Police and authorities in charge of law and order in this country tell me they had no such information? At the end of the day, whose job is it to protect the people? Whose job is it? When are we going to stop paying people to do nothing?

Finally, in a country and culture where everything from underwear to headgear is spiritualised; a country where elections run on such slogans as “The battle is the Lords”, and politicians enact the descending of doves and presidents pray for floods to dry up miraculously… 

In a country where we believe some gods and their children cause road accidents and so we spend the money we can use to fix the road on fatted calves for sacrifice; but often see no results till the road is fixed and quite miraculously, once the road is fixed the gods and their children relocate to another badly designed and terribly damaged road…

 In a country where we chase our women out of their marital homes because they are too outspoken or too successful for our liking, and beat our old women out of their own houses because they don’t look like they will die anytime soon for us to inherit their properties, until they all seek refuge in a place we have unashamedly labeled a “witch camp”…

 In a country where children born with disabilities are considered “spirit children” and are deliberately choked to death because they don’t belong here…

In a country where intelligent men and women drench their passports in anointing oil so they can get a visa… 

In such a country, how can anybody be surprised that thousands of people were ready to trample on one another for holy water?

 Of course, it is not the holy water they wanted, it was what the holy water could do for them. Something, the people they voted for, obviously can’t do.

 This beautiful country is not as beautiful as we say it is. I don’t care about the pink sheets because for generations, it has been one set of mostly thieves go, only to replaced by another set of mostly thieves.  What we need as a nation, is a leadership that will hear the heart cry of the citizenry.  Not a government that will watch aloofly, and compensate us with cheap rhetoric, whilst our ancestral lands are desecrated by a bunch of Chinese illiterates, because they take loans from their government or a couple of American idiots from Utah because they are untouchable. 

What this incident at SCOAN reveals is everything that is wrong with this country… and whilst we debate, the people are suffering and crave for help. And when you are dying, all help is help… even if it is coming from a suspicious Nigerian character called TB.