<<Print>>

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has underlined the role of faith in his upbringing and his professional life as a lawyer and politician.

According to him, his Christian faith has largely police how he has acted in professional fields which has, in turn, influenced heavily his vision for Ghana and Africa’s transformation.

He shared the role of religion and church-going while he was growing up and how he applied religious values, especially in his politics.

“My own parents, as you can imagine, were staunch Presbyterians. I was baptised a Presbyterian, and became an Anglican, much to the vehement protests of my parents, as a result of the secondary school I attended in England.

“Let us say I became enamoured with the rituals, daily Matins and Evensong, and the additional Sunday Eucharist, which were constant features of my four-year stay at school in Lancing”, he narrated while delivering a lecture in the United States.

The specific event was the inaugural Africa lecture by the Museum of the Bible in Washington.

With respect to the role of religion in his legal practice, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo said: “often in law practice, things are not quite as cut and dried as they would seem or as one would wish.

"There would be times when no amount of experience or intellectual rigour would prepare you for the vicissitudes of the legal playground. On such occasions, it helps to be able to hark back to your faith and maybe the sound of your mother singing that ancient hymn: Who is on the Lord’s side? It helps to be on the Lord’s side when you purport to seek or arbitrate for justice among humans.”

On the political landscape, he recounted the role of faith in keeping him resolute in seeking the high office of the land at a time it had become cliché that he was never going to ascend to that office.

“It took three tries between 2008 and 2016 for me to get elected. By which time, the popular catchphrases of ‘Akufo-Addo cannot be President, God does not want Akufo-Addo to be President, Akufo-Addo is short, and does not have the stature to be President,’ had become so prevalent, you had to be firmly rooted in your faith to have had the courage to persist.”

He continued: “I committed that third election campaign to God, and indicated to the Ghanaian people that ‘The Battle is the Lord’s’. By God’s grace, I won a famous victory against an incumbent President by a gap of nearly a million votes.

"The largest margin of victory for two decades. And, by the same Grace, I won re-election in the December 2020 elections, and I am now in my second and last term as President.”

He added that his political struggles prior to 2016 were a testament to the Gospel according to St. Matthew, Chapter 19 verse 26 which says: “with man this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible.”