It is that time of our election year when, once in four years, every Ghanaian is allowed to suspend their hypocritical attitude to spiritism: to pretend less and believe more.
There is a noticeable shift by people who were wont to make snide remarks about Christian prophets. Suddenly, getting close to December 7, the cynics now put a store by the “Thus sayeth the Lord” claims of our prophets.
In church, they actually call on prophets to stop wasting the congregants’ ears with Bible quotations and pious sermons. “Hye nkom”, they urge.
Can’t blame them; private fortunes are about to experience an about-turn. A few days after January 7, someone will, overnight, jump from tro-tro and AD 1-1 to, not Tico, but V-8.
In an election year, many a Christian or Muslim who have preached monotheism all their lives, suddenly look the other way when their preferred Christian and Islamic Presidential candidates visit shrines of “fetish priests”.
Mallams’ – an omnibus word to describe Muslim spiritists – get busier as candidates and their reps come seeking to know tomorrow.
As far back as May 2024, a popular Christian preacher invited anyone who was interested to “go and look at what is happening at the shrines. Human sacrifices be what!”
I believed him. Like Nigerians during the oil boom of the 1970s-‘80s, Ghanaians have now graduated past sacrifices with animal blood to human blood because the latter brings surer results; no one does the type of investments Ghanaian politicians make and leaves matters into the hands of fate.
If God, or the gods, have a word of assurance, they want to hear it from their earthly mediums, no matter how much it costs them.
There is a difference in approach, though. With the Mallams and the traditional priests, the unspoken language is “Lom Nava” – if you love me, seek me out.
And the politicians do so, secretly, except that ever since the invention of smartphones and tiktok, there are no secrets any more. All the secret deeds and promises are out on social media even before the candidates have left the shrine.
The way some of them prostrate before the gods, you’d not believe that only last Friday or Sunday, they were bowing and intoning praises to “the only true monotheistic God/Allah”. Remember Election 2016.
What men and women do when they get desperate!
But how do you know that the word of the prophet is from God?
Would Prophet Owusu Bempah have heard God declaring Mahama a winner if he (Bempah) were not at loggerheads with the NPP? Put another way:
If God knows the end from the beginning, can a prophet, Mallam or fetish priest intervene to change His mind about the outcome of an election or a football match?
I was calling into question the same man’s prophecy in December 2019 that “a former President belonging to the NDC will die”, but someone reminded me that within a year after that prophecy, on November 12, 2020, Rawlings died; that it took 25 years for God’s promise to Abraham to be fulfilled!
I am not deep into the prophetic but I know that when God decides, it is final; nothing anybody does or says before the deadline can change what God, seeing ahead of every human being, has pronounced.
Can one prophet nullify or overturn a colleague’s (or some other seer’s) prophecy? If that was possible, then God cannot be God. The Christian Bible says that God is not the son of man that He should change His mind.
The theology I have been brought up on, teaches that if God says I will win an election, I will, even if the prophet later becomes my enemy. Otherwise, God is not God.
So, naturally, I am curious:
What did the traditional priest at Nungua promise Bawumia? If the NPP flag bearer was told that he would win, then Owusu Bempah’s god could be a liar – and vice versa.
Like him or hate him, Nigeria’s late Prophet T.B. Joshua came out with some really amazing prophecies in his time.
Early in 2008 when Ghanaian Presidential Candidate John Evans Atta Mills visited him at his Synagogue in Nigeria, he told JEA that he would be the ultimate winner of the 2008 election “but the victory will come after three rounds of voting, and you will be declared winner not this year, 2008, but the next year”.
The live recording was played back on GTV when the prophecy came to pass – and I saw it, feelie-feelie.
Question: Has any prophet or Mallam or fetish priest ever told any politician that they would lose an election?
Hearts of Oak consulted a Mallam who told them that in their crucial African clubs match (forgot the country), the person who would score a goal for Hearts would die.
Hearts were awarded a penalty. Anas Seidu, being the captain, was elected to take it. In the resultant kick, Anas shot wide. Hearts lost.
