Be impartial – Agyinasare to EC
Bishop Charles Agyinasare of Perez Chapel International has urged the Electoral Commission of Ghana to be an impartial and worthy referee in this year’s general elections.
The Presiding Bishop of Perez Chapel International, on Sunday, 16 August 2020, congratulated the EC “for recruiting excellent registration officers” in executing the recently-ended “registration exercise” which captured 16.9 million people onto the new register.
The founder of Perez Chapel International also observed that “the registration officers, too, as long as prospective registrants proved “they were Ghanaians”, duly registered them, noting: “They were very professional”.
He noted, however, that: “The hard part of what the EC has to do going into our election is validating the register”.
“We pray that they would be an impartial referee and not remove names of people they think are not Ghanaians, because I know Ghanaians who are called John Williams, which looks very foreign”.
The EC, he admonished, should not “mismatch pictures with names”.
And prayed that “God would cause the EC and its team to be God-fearing, impartial and divinely protected”.
The Ghana Police Service, Bishop Agyinasare said they were “very professional” during the registration exercise, noting: “I did not see any nasty incidents from them on the news”.
Regarding the soldiers, he some of them, “who were to show up to protect the people, were somehow”, explaining: “Some soldiers were seen getting people out of vehicles, going from house to house searching and claiming some people were not Ghanaians”.
“What shocked me was to see armoured cars in the time of peace in some small towns. It subtracted from the well-known professionalism of the Ghanaian soldier”, he said.
“Some said some of the people in the uniforms on the videos were not soldiers – then it makes it worse because then we are not safe”, the Nation’s Prophet and Pastor, as Bishop Agyinasare has come to be known, observed.
The same, he noted, “has to be said of the national security personnel – it brought down your guy level”.
As the country goes into the 7 December 2020 polls, Bishop Agyinasare implored the army commander and national security bosses to “please let us see better professionalism than what was displayed by some of your staff during the registration exercise”.
“We are not at war”, he admonished, urging: “We must move from the place where every four years, churches have to pray, have all nights and preach about peace for our elections”.
It is not the same in other countries, Bishop Agyinasare noted, citing the UK, for instance, which has had three general elections in the past five years – 2015, 2016 and 2019.
Some people, he revealed, are saying: “Bishop, why don’t you just pray?”
“When there was chaos at the beginning the spirit of God was present but there was the need for God to speak. Until we speak what we want, it would not be done so let us pray and let us speak to change”, he said in response, adding: “May God give us a transformed Ghana in Jesus’ name”.