Youth development shouldn’t be afterthought - Rev. Nyakotey

The Senior Pastor of the Shiloh Baptist Church, Dawhenya, has asked leaders to stop seeing youth advancement policies as an appendage to other policies and believing that it will effectively raise the youth into responsible citizens.

Reverend Djaba Nyakotey says, “Any country that forsakes its young people in education, in health and social and spatial planning will pay dearly for it.”

Rev. Nyakotey said this at the St. Mary’s Anglican Junior High School, Tema Newtown, after he led the presentation of 552 copies of the Holy Bible to pupils and staff of the school.

Rev. Nyakotey observed the little effort that went into developing the interest of the youth by saying, “There were places where towns and communities spring up without playing fields, without parks for children to let out excess energy, and this manifest itself in abnormal and deviant behaviors with some becoming criminals.”

In that regard, he indicated that “the way forward for any nation, church, school, family, was to focus and invest in children because that was where the future lie.”

In responding to the high prevalence rate of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases in Tema Newtown, Rev. Nyakotey chided parents for not being there for their children.

He insisted that children ended up throwing away their lives because it was either the parents were physically absent or had abandoned their duties to these children.

He therefore believed that the distribution of the Bibles would help the young ones read texts that would have positive impacts on their lives and take them out of their bad states.

He said, “Since sin came into the world, man has been fairly negligent and consistently running away from God. So going to God is a great insurance, and it helps, but we cannot go to God and raise children without the cooperation of parents, the school and the church.”

He added that “the Bible is light for our path; the Bible gives a person some wisdom; the Bible gives the person some examples to learn from because it has very serious behavioral patterns one can learn from.”

He observed that one could circumvent one’s problems so long as one stuck to the Bible with vigilance and had a relationship with one’s maker.

The Head Teacher of the School, Mrs. Marian Cobblah, in receiving the Bibles, told of the many distractions that confronted the school in the discharge of their duties in the community, and therefore was optimistic that the Bibles would help the children focus in making something meaningful of the their lives.

He asked other organizations to come on board and help in any way that they could to inspire the children to stick to their books and lead disciplined lives as a way of complementing the efforts of the school.

The Bibles were presented by the Shiloh Baptist Church, Dawhenya, through the Glorious Vibrations Incorporated, a Music and Drama Group formed by former students of Tema Secondary School.