Members of the Ghana Catholic Bishops’ Conference (GCBC) have added their voice to the bizarre and shocking news of the alleged murder of Ishmael Mensah Abdallah by two teenagers, during the peak of the Easter celebrations.

A statement issued by the Conference and signed by the President of the Conference, Most Rev. Philip Naameh, the Metropolitan Archbishop of Tamale in the northern region of Ghana, noted that this sad and gruesome incident, which took place at a suburb in Kasoa in the Central Region has exposed us as a people and as a nation, and calls for the need for an urgent intervention to avert further occurrences in the future.

The statement said that we live in a country where wealth is celebrated and elevated above everything, where the rich are worshipped without questioning the source of their wealth, where good leadership qualities are equated to donations.

The Catholic Bishops said that the horrid action of these teenagers should serve as a wake-up call for us to find out what has gone wrong with us as individuals, as a people, as a nation and why we are where we are today. They called on all major stakeholders, especially the Regulators of our media space, to clamp down on activities of these fraudulent spiritualists, mallams, pastors and others who, through their audio-visual content, continue to propagate evils and their ‘get-rich-quick’ activities on our television stations and social media platforms.

The statement said that it was sad to hear that the decision of these teenagers was to kidnap their victim for a ransom and then present the victim to a spiritualist for rituals, adding that these thoughts must have been derived from watching some of the audio-visual content on television with the promise to make people wealthy within a short period of time.

The Ghana Catholic Bishops’ Conference advised that it was important for us to begin to chart a new path for ourselves as individuals, as a people and as a nation, if we intended to build a country with people who appreciated the need for hard work, honesty, values, integrity and the desire for genuine acquisition of wealth as opposed to the current situation of thirsting for quick wealth by hook or by crook.