Founder and General Overseer of the International Central Gospel Church (ICGC) has lamented how Ghanaians and Africans, in general, fail to identify problems they cause for themselves and go ahead to assign unrelated reasons for their woes.
According to the ICGC General Overseer who was adjudged the Most Influential Ghanaian Pastor on social media in 2016 by Cliqmedia, a clear example of such instance is fufu, the delicacy of the Akan-speaking people of Ghana.Â
Fufu is basically got from the pounding of cooked cassava and plantain or cocoyam into a paste-like in a wooden mortar with a pestle after which one's preferred choice of soup is added and it is regarded as one of the favourite Ghanaian dishes.
But speaking at this year's edition of the Springboard Roadshow on the topic, the State of Africa's Development, Pastor Otabil argued that though the processes for preparing fufu is tedious and somehow unhygienic, we still eat it just as it is and turn around to blame witches when we get sick.
"Any food that if you have to eat you'll have to punish yourself like this, what's the sense in it? And the annoying thing is when you're pounding, the sweat will be going in and will be mixed, and even in the mortar, there are all kinds of bacteria in the corners, this is an ecosystem for bacteria, 5 years and we are still pounding and people will say, that's what we like. It's killing us; because you know Africans we don't know what kills us, the thing is killing us but you say it's a witch because we never identify objectively the cause of the problem.....Come to think of it, this fufu in this mortar is not sanitised, what impact does it have on our lives?â€Â