Come again, Bishop J.Y. Adu

FORMER PRESIDENT J.J. RAWLINGS

“If we can behave in such an ignorant manner, should it surprise you that the country is being consumed by so much filth?”

WHAT IS ON OUR MINDS

“I will expose all the evil politicians in Ghana including those behind the MPs death,” Bishop J.Y. Adu prophetically threatened recently. “Already, the NPP has lost Joseph Boakye Danquah Adu and the NDC too lost their MP and now late NPP Chairman, Jake Otanka Obetsebi Lamptey. It will continue like that.”

Bishop Adu, founding overseer of New Jerusalem Chapel, concluded his prophetic threat thusly: “I do not find glee in people dying though most of my prophecies have to do with the bad things; rather, it’s God who reveals to me with solutions.”

Quite interesting! And quite predictable! Why New Jerusalem, and what happened to Old Jerusalem? What is so “new” about this seemingly anachronistic outré New Jerusalem? And yes, not even the State of Israel has bothered or managed to put up a “New Jerusalem” in the Holy Land, but one of our own evangelical and pastoral magicians, Bishop Adu, as probably expected, has managed to put up one right here deep in the soil of Ghana thereby outwitting and beating the Israelis and the Palestinians to it.

These magicians who together with their unconscionable corrupt political brothers and sisters, have succeeded in turning Kwame Nkrumah’s Holy Land into a desert of seamless unholiness, have no shame.

Apparently. All these anachronistic bodega and mom-and-pop New Jerusalems are colorful fronts for commercializing and dealing in evangelical and pastoral snake oil, this latter-day Pentecostal and Charismatic New Jerusalems. The “new” in New Jerusalem, we also believe, is nothing more than a mortal framology of Orwellian doublespeak and also of intellectual and spiritual thoughtcrime committed by these self-appointed bishopric gangsters, millenarists, and organized spiritual criminals against their gullible if mechanical and emotionalistic spiritual consumerists, of Orwellian-sanctioned experiment in concocted political theology and deliverance and miracle legerdemain, largely of the self-serving doctrine of Christianized dhimmitude.

These are essentially what the new proliferating Darwinian prophecy, miracle, and deliverance ministries are all about, with the leaderships of these evangelical and pastoral snake-oil industries taking advantage of the gullible mentalization of some persons and turning them into mystical zombies and unthinking robots and androids. What remains unresolved, however, after Bishop Adu’s interview is, why he did not reliably predict J.B. Danquah’s brutal murder before its happening but, as anyone should rather expect of these evangelical and pastoral charlatans, he only chose to come forward with a bold ostentatious claim to expose the latter’s alleged killers after details of the heinous death finally trickled and seeped into the gossipy cracks of the public domain.

And what is Bishop Adu actually waiting for before exposing the evil politicians, namely his evil politicians, in Ghana? The second coming of Christ? Or of the Comforter, as in John 15:26 (King James Version)? This evangelical and pastoral Nostradamus is a dangerous Machiavellian fraud, and a possible threat to national security. The question is, Are there non-evil politicians in Ghana, anywhere for that matter? If this evangelical and pastoral James Van Praagh, with his missing trademark Hitlerite moustache, has any reliable forensic evidential information on the high-profile murder of the parliamentarian, what is preventing him from turning it in to aid police investigation and that of the folks at that political institution, the National Bureau of Investigations (BNI)?

After all, this is what conscionable and patriotic citizens do. But certainly not the case of this fraudulent mitre-wearing papal psychic, a shady minister of spiritual psychiatry who calls himself “bishop.”

One wonders where this latter-day evangelical and pastoral clairvoyant has been all this while, while Ghanaian children are daily exposed to the elements leading to some of them developing life-threatening colds and pneumonia because they study under trees and lie on concrete floors in classrooms without furniture, and because these evil politicians, Bishop Adu’s secret friends and colleagues, could not care less about the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual development of the country’s future leaders even while they, the bastardized greedy politicians, imported furniture and computers for the largely non-functioning and non-functional Ghanaian parliament!

Where is Bishop Adu when some churches are wrecking some educational facilities across the country “during acts of religious observance” and not repairing them? The National Chairman of the Church of Pentecost, for instance, recently admitted in an interview when he spoke about classroom-based churches: “Sometimes in some places, chairs and tables are broken, some classrooms become dirty…”

And where is Bishop Adu when Ghanaians are building more faith-based churches than schools, cutting-edge laboratories, and scientific research institutions?

What benefits, if any, has the Yamoussoukro-based Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, a humongous structure built by Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the late corrupt potentate of the Ivory Coast, done in terms of improving the human conditions of Ivoirians in particular and Africans in general? What peace did this Basilica bring to Ivoirians during their civil wars? And several other Christianized structures across Ghana and Africa? Lest we are not mistaken or misunderstood, we are not only dealing with these mushrooming church-based churches but also of mosques…Neither is it to say or imply that all religious structures or religious activities have corruptive influences on Ghana and Africa

Yet Bishop Adu is not the only Orwellian fraud in the cabal of latter-day evangelical magicians and of practitioners of postdiction. Another well-known fraudulent paranormalist and apocalyptic prophesier who also doubles as an unabashed theological entrepreneur of political and spiritual lies, a man who is always quick to make grandiose political capital out of postdiction is our Rev. Owusu Bempah, a frog-eyed post-exilic eschatologist with a funny murine bleached countenance and seemingly cowered physique. He too gave the following interview which we quote in part:

“I am not a prophet of doom, but if the NPP sit down and don’t pray harder, they will witness another death which is far greater than the death of Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey. This is what God revealed to me last year December 31, 2015…NPP will lose another great person in the party…I’ve finished my work as a servant of God…”

One would have thought Rev. Owusu Bempah was going to predict his own death just as Moses predictably did and even wrote about his own obituary even as he was still alive (see Deuteronomy 34: 1-12)! Could Moses have been a dead-man-walking then? And could we have expected Rev. Owusu Bempah to give us his dead-man-walking obituary while singing Bob Marley’s “Rasta Man Chant”: “And I hear the angel with the seven seals say…One bright morning when my work is over, man will fly away home…” A servant of God indeed, a prophet who at one point wanted to beat the hell and devil out of another fraudulent grotesque caricature, Bishop Obinim!

What a prophet of doom, Rev. Owusu Bempah! Why did Rev. Owusu Bempah use “will” rather than “must”? And which death is greater than the other death?

Is Jake Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey’s death greater than that of the homeless man, child, or woman living on the street corner, both of whom are naturally forced to obey the majestic autocracy of “six feet under”?

This is not a political question or statement, if we may add. Nor is it our intention to politicize Jake’s death by demeaning or making light of it in order to score cheap political points. Far from it.

Every death is death and a sad one at that, no matter the person who may have passed on. That is, death is no respecter of persons including the likes of Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Kwame Nkrumah, Mahatma Gandhi, Bob Marley, Adolf Hitler, Harriet Tubman, Mao Tse-Tung, Haile Selassie, the great mother of Nkrumah (Madam Nyaniba)…In fact death is the sole arbiter of human fate. Not even the chance of birth comes any close! In the final analysis, then, death speaks more truth and is even, arguably, truer than the chance of birth! We may even hazard that the accident of birth could be a phenomenological fake for an every single human being who has passed through this planet. .

Thus, the infamous NPP’s electioneering slogan “All-die-be-die” makes arrant nonsense of Rev. Owusu Bempah’s prophetic homeopathy. Put differently, Rev. Owusu Bempah’s prophetic homeopathy amounts to theological and doctrinal pseudoscience. The fact is, Where are these prophetic placebos coming from? These post-exilic eschatologists, who evidently lack a heightened sense of public diplomacy and of expertise in national security matters, behave like a casket- or coffin-maker.

The casket- or coffin-maker prays that someone dies hoping to cash in on that death. A doomsday prophet such as Rev. Owusu Bempah prefers “will” to “must” because, perhaps, he comes across as an uncertain prophesier who believes in and projects theological and doctrinal probabilism. Or perhaps still, he gullibly thinks his prayers and fasting could avert some of these probabilistic deaths?

Is it therefore not God who finally decides who should die and who should not die, rather than the elitist supplicatory intercessions of dangerous and Machiavellian frauds such as Rev. Owusu Bempah? In other words, who is the arbiter of life and death? Rev. Owusu Bempah’s Bible obviously has the answer (s). We say this because not all these Christian leaders supposedly use the same Bible. Yet in another contextual twist of irony, one Kofi Oduro, of Akim Tafo in the Eastern Region, seems to question the transcendental authority and integrity of the God of Rev. Owusu Bempah and Bishop Adu on the other question of his transcendental responsibility toward mortals, when he said:

“We are more grateful to the god of this town which is known as Agyampremu Kofi, for listening to our prayers. God has been too nonchalant for our liking. When this unfortunate incident happened, we bought drinks and poured libation asking our gods to expose whoever is behind this heinous crime. The way J.B. Danquah helps the various churches in this area, we were schooled how God looked on for such calamity to befall someone like J.B. Danquah. We had to fall on our gods in this matter to help us, and they did not fail us. We are extremely grateful to our god, Agyampremu Kofi for being good to us.”

First of all, Why did the god(s) of Akim Tafo fail to forestall Danquah’s heinous murder? Of course, it is possible we do not understand matters of spiritual psychiatry. But that is far from true. Namely, why did the henotheistic gods of Akim Tafo not prevent Danquah’s death? What does one expect of these gods who are mostly given imported Western bootleg alcoholic beverages, like Schnapps and whisky and gin and brandy, rather than say apketeshie, a locally minted product? Still, the God of Bishop Adu and Rev. Owusu Bempah and the henotheistic pantheon of gods both failed Danquah and the people of Ghana. This is as simple a matter as it gets.

We shall surely return with the concluding installment (Part 2)…