President Akufo-Addo admonished Ghanaians against using working hours for religious activities
Lawyer Godwin Edudzi Tamakloe has chided President Akufo Addo for flouting his own directive.
Few months into his administration, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo asked workers to eschew the habit of using working hours for prayers.
He expressed worry over the current trend where people seem to think that success in fields of endeavour depended on miracles, not hard work. To him, spending the first hour or more of work on prayers, going to all night prayers and coming to work tired and unfit for purpose draws the country back and does not result in the productivity needed to develop the country.
“We come to work and spend the first hour and more not on the job we are paid to do but on prayers. We go to all night prayers and come to work the next day tired and unfit for the purpose. We take out a week for every funeral and expect our businesses to thrive because we evoke the name of the Almighty… The Good Book says there is a time and place for everything. We cannot, and should not, continue to hide behind religiosity to indulge in the practice that has characterised our attitude to work," he stated at the International Conference on Entrepreneurship, Business and Technology, held in March this year in Accra.
Almost a year after assuming office, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government organised a thanksgiving ceremony in the morning of Thursday, December 7, to mark one year anniversary of the 2016 elections which brought them into power.
Analyzing the two instances, Lawyer Tamakloe expressed shock that the President could flout his own directive by holding a relgious service on a working day.
“It came to me as a big shock when the president who is the chief public worker at the time Ghanaian workers are supposed to be at work was at the conference centre praying and doing the very things he had admonished Ghanaian workers against…So the very architecture of our public service was disobeying what the president himself had said in the name of thanksgiving” he said during a panel discussion on Saturday’s edition of Radio Gold’s political platform, "Alhaji and Alhaji".
