The Christian Council of Ghana has appealed to politicians to suspend their acts of reigning insults and encouraging attacks on each other and unite to mourn and honor the memory of the former President Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings.
The former President was reported to have passed on Thursday morning at the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital, after battling an illness.
Most Reverend Dr. Paul Kwabena Boafo, the Chairman of the Christian Council of Ghana, who made the appeal in an interview with the Ghana News Agency, said politicians ought to live life well bearing in mind the transitions of life.
“We must bear in mind the transitions of life as nobody ever saw that these things will come and the truth is they will always come when they have to come. That is why we should always be prepared for such eventualities.”
“Again, let us also come together as one people and give our former President a befitting burial as he goes to be with the fathers and mothers of this great nation,” he advised.
Most Rev. Boafo, who is also the Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church Ghana, said: “At this point, let us learn to bury the differences that bring sharp division amongst us such as reigning insults wielding cutlasses and guns against ourselves as they all come to nought.
“Life must be lived holy and that is why I would want us to learn our lesson that we are one people and should live as such to the growth of our nation Ghana.”
The Most Reverend on behalf of the Council expressed a deep condolence to the bereaved family of the late former President, and the entire country.
“The death has come so suddenly because when his mother died, he was strong and even shared a joke with the Council, when we paid him a visit. Little did we know that it will be so soon for him to go home. We are all saddled indeed as a nation,” he added.
Flt Lt. Rawlings, he said, left a legacy of the need to promote probity and accountability and frown on the looting of state resources by persons in authority.
“That idea would be in our people even as the nation now wallows in corruption,” he noted.
Most Rev. Boafo said other legacies the former president left was to move the country from a military regime to a constitutional rule.
As the President Nana Akufo-Addo and the NDC called off their campaign tours for days after the sudden news, he said, he believed it was going to help the citizenry to realise the sense of them being one community and one nation.
“When we are done with the elections too, all those divisions must go. I wondered why he had to pass on at this moment, when the nation is preparing towards an election and when tensions are rising. Now it is going to bring some calm and peaceful atmosphere,” he stated.
