Kumasi (Ashanti), 20 Nov. 1998 – Mr Daniel Ohene Agyekum, out-going Ashanti Regional Minister, has charged Africa’s youth to strive for spiritual emancipation in order to tackle social problems with courage and confidence. “Let us change the notions of black as sin; let us see God in terms of the African. We have had the political revolution, we need the religious revolution for Africans, like all other people, were created in the image of God”. Mr Agyekum said this in a speech read for him at the opening of a four-day West Africa Baptist Youth Leadership Conference by the Youth Department of the Ghana Baptist Convention in conjunction with the Baptist World Alliance and All Africa Baptist Fellowship in Kumasi last night. The conference with the 130 delegates from Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Togo, Benin, Senegal, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa and the United States has as its theme “The role of Baptist youth in contemporary Africa”. The participants will deliberate on how to develop meaningful workshops with limited resources, vocational counselling and self-confidence monitoring, developing leadership skills and how to have a devotional study. Mr Agyekum said the emotional and spiritual stresses that Africans are going through as a result of political, social and economic vices attest to the overriding need for concrete steps to liberate the continent. While African leaders struggle to devise an effective antidote to such social and national problems, the elderly in society must focus on assisting the youth to change their perspectives and moral values in accord with the higher expectations of right thinking, religious and social ethics. Reverend Emmett Dunn, director, Baptist World Alliance Youth Department, called on the participants to search for the truth and actively involve themselves in the socio-economic and religious development of their communities. Reverend Fred Deegbe, President of the Ghana Baptist Convention, observed that there is a fast erosion of African traditional values at homes, schools, in the society and even in the churches and hoped that the conference would deliberate on some of these issues and come out with some solutions.
