Africans should pursue debt cancellation instead of reparation - Rev Otabil

Accra, Sept. 28, GNA - A renowned Minister of the Gospel on Monday called on African leaders to pursue the issue of debt cancellation instead of calling for reparation. The Reverend Dr Mensah Otabil, General Overseer of the International Central Gospel Church (ICGC), said this is because Africans played an effective part in the slave trade and that to call for reparation is wrong since they were part of the problem.

Rev. Otabil was speaking at the five-day sixth Pan-Africa Believers' Summit, organised by the Church on the theme "Ready For Change." He explained that Africans were a party to the slave trade. "We sold our brothers and sisters and the white man bought and if anybody deserves reparation, it is the Black Americans and our brothers in the Diaspora, who are victims of the slavery."

"However, if Africa is to make any headway in development in the next millennium, then the continent needs to start on a clean slate by calling for the cancellation of accumulated debts and charting a new path in our way of doing things." "This calls for dramatic changes in, first and foremost, our culture, which is a way of life of every people including Africans."

He said the African with the passage of time has frozen the scientific practices of their forefathers in the name of culture and has since refused to advance it by holding on to them. For instance, giving it a human face value, the trokosi system could have been preserved but Ghanaians held too long to the system that it could no longer be protected.

Rev. Otabil described some of the cultural practices like carrying of chiefs on human heads as under-developed, labour intensive, time consuming, saying "defending them would make the African continue to lose touch with the rest of the world with irrelevant ideas."

Rev. Otabil based his speech on a Biblical quotation in the book of Jeremiah, which asks: "can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots?" He said it is possible for Ghana and the whole of Africa to change the current situation of poverty, hunger and sickness among other woes.

"Change in Ghana and Africa is viable and feasible but we need to recognise that there is a present condition that is not acceptable and needs to be done away with through a change in understanding, beliefs, attitudes, concepts and structures."

He observed that it would not take an outsider to effect changes in Africa as the white man tried to do by introducing his way of dressing and way of eating among other things. It would take an African to change the present situation. He cited Jesus' example where He as a Jew resorted to radical means in questioning certain Jewish practices that were not helpful.

He said it was time for Ghanaian intellectuals, professors, politicians and individuals to put their ideas together and take bold steps to chart a new path for both Ghana and Africa. "No one person has all the solutions to our problems. The individual must begin to ask questions and demand quality lifestyle from the leaders.

"For instance, Ghanaians must demand for change in the approach to management of resources and review of 1930 university syllabuses handed over to us through colonialism, otherwise we will remain where we are."

Rev. Otabil said the Christian's role is to allow his beliefs to bring a change in his life and society and not just remain spiritual in his heart. Other speakers at the summit included the Reverend Francis Forbes of the Gambia and the Reverend Randy Morrison, of USA.