TalkAfrique

Christians in Ghana gathered at the Dome of the Accra International Conference Centre on Sunday for the Jubilee 1st Oil Thanksgiving Service. The sermon follows. It’s long, but I hope the holidays will help. Enjoy.

Beloved in Christ, we have come here today to offer thanks to God for the discovery and first commercial pumping of oil in our country. Our oil is a resource created by God. He is the owner of the earth and it resources so it is right that we pause and offer thanks to Him for His goodness to us. Let us thank God in the words of Psalm 136:1–3 (NKJV) —
1 Oh, give thanks to the LORD, for He is good! For His mercy endures forever. 2 Oh, give thanks to the God of gods! For His mercy endures forever. 3 Oh, give thanks to the Lord of lords! For His mercy endures forever:

Beginning from 1896 we started the process of exploration for oil. After more than a hundred years of effort, on Wednesday the 15th of December 2010, we marked the formal start of oil production in commercial quantities from our Jubilee fields. We have named our oil, Jubilee Oil. Jubilee. That’s an interesting word. It is a loaded word. It means celebration. But not a careless celebration. In the scriptures it implies a celebration that comes from liberation. It is a celebration of new freedom and new responsibility. The Jubilee year was a year when old debts were cancelled and slaves were set free.
For a slave that was freed under the laws of Jubilee in the Old Testament, he had to face the reality of fending for himself and his family. To him jubilee was a time of Thanking God for his freedom and Thinking about how to not end up again in bondage. That is what I believe Ghana should do. We should thank God and think. Let us celebrate what God has blessed us with and think about the new responsibility He has entrusted to us. We can sing and dance today but after that, we must sit and think before we act.

When we recite our national pledge, we make a “promise to hold in high esteem our heritage won for us through the blood and toil of our fathers”. It is right that today as we celebrate the first pumping of oil of oil from our jubilee fields, we hold in high esteem those blood and toil brought us this heritage.

We thank God for our Nation Ghana and the resources he has given us particularly the ocean out of which our oil is drawn. We thank God for all our leaders under whose watch the prospecting, discovery and production of oil happened – beginning from various colonial Governors to President Kwame Nkrumah, Prime Minister Kofi Busia, General Kutu Acheampong, President Hilla Limann, President Jerry Rawlings, President John Kuffour and President John Mills. We thank God for our Jubilee Partners who executed much of what we celebrate today – Anadarko, E.O Group Ghana Ltd, GNPC, Kosmos Energy, Sabre Oil and Gas and Tullow Oil. We thank God for all public servants, technicians and labourers who devoted time and energy towards this resource. Each one of these many more played their part and pushed for us to get where we are today.

Now the long awaited oil is here.

I will paraphrase the lyrics of a popular 1970’s hit song and ask, ‘now that we’ve found oil what are we gonna do?’

First of all it is important to note that although there is reason to thank for our oil find, the reality is that Ghana’s oil find is currently quite small. The projected yield of what we’ve found so far is not sufficient by itself to create any dramatic change in our national economy. It is very obvious that the economic transformation we seek for will not come from oil. Oil is good but it is not the final answer to our challenges.

The future of Ghana will not be determined by our oil find. The future of Ghana will be determined by our foresight, wisdom and planning.

Ladies and gentlemen, the key to our development does not lie at the bottom of the Ocean; it lies in the center of our heads. The key to Ghana’s development is not black gold; it is gray matter. Our greatness lies in the wisdom we can harness as a people to turn this tiny oil resource into a huge industrial boom for our nation.

Our fourth scripture reading today from Proverbs 24:3 states, ‘through wisdom a house is built’. Isn’t that interesting? A house is material. Wisdom is immaterial. A house is visible. Wisdom is invisible. A house has components of cement, bricks, iron rods and fittings. But those materials cannot constitute themselves into a building. What puts the materials together is wisdom. Ideas. The value and beauty of a house is determined by the ideas of the architect. Through wisdom a house is built.

Your wisdom will determine whether you put up a cheap building that falls apart or an elegant building that stands the test of time. Wisdom is the builder. Similarly, oil cannot build Ghana. It is wisdom that will build our nation. What kind of wisdom will be build with?

The great Greek storyteller, Aesop, told a story about a farmer who found that his goose had laid a yellow egg. He picked it and realized it was as heavy as lead. He was going to throw it away, because he thought a trick had been played upon him. But he took it home on second thoughts, and soon found to his delight that it was an egg of pure gold. Every morning the same thing occurred, the goose laid a golden egg. Soon he became rich by selling his eggs. As he grew rich he grew greedy; and thinking to get at once all the gold the goose could give, he killed it and opened it only to find nothing. There was no egg and the goose was dead.

There are two kinds of wisdom at play in this story. First is the wisdom of patient and measured acquisition. Second is the wisdom of instant gratification. One kind of wisdom guaranteed sustained revenues whilst the other destroyed the source of revenue.

Can we learn some simple lessons about resource management from Aesop? I hope so.

Our oil find is relatively small compared with what other nations in Africa have. Currently Ghana has identified seven major offshore oil fields believed to contain reserves of over 1.8 barrels of oil and gas. That is not very large. Currently expected production rate of 120,000 barrels per day, we are ranked about beyond the 11th in Africa. It is clear that our oil resource by itself cannot provide the needed capital to appreciably grow our economy. Yet, although what we have is small, it can be significant if we manage it wisely. So what can we do with our oil?

We can either ingest it or invest it.

What does it mean to ‘Ingest it’? In colloquial Ghanaian English, we would say, ‘chop it’. We can decide to spend it to achieve immediate satisfaction. I am not implying corruption here. I am referring to the kind of spending that is similar to what happens when a starving man finds food or a dehydrated man comes upon water. We’ve all seen that before. A starved person finds food and hurriedly gorges himself on the food till he chokes on it or vomits it out or worse still dies. The reason is simple. After going without food for so long, your digestive system is unable to process a lot of food at a time. The wise thing to do is to have a graduated intake as you rebuild your systems to properly use what you’re feeding it.

Proverbs 21:20 (NKJV) reads, ‘There is desirable treasure, And oil in the dwelling of the wise, But a foolish man squanders it.

The alternative to ingesting or squandering our oil resource is investing it.

Investing our oil money requires that we think about sustained long-term returns. Our third reading today was from the Gospel of St Luke Chapter 19:12-26. Jesus told the parable of the minas. In the parable, ten servants were given ten minas each. A mina in the days of Jesus was about three months wages. The instruction the noble man gave to his servants was, ‘do business till I come’. The servants were expected to work profitably with the minas they had been given. Those who increased the value of their minas, received additional resources. Those who failed to use their minas profitably were deprived of their minas altogether. I believe Ghana can apply the lessons of this parable to the way we manage our natural resources. Let’s do what Jesus recommended – Do business till I come.

We must not ingest our resources; we must invest our resources for profit. We must carefully weight the return on investments on every venture we commit any of our natural resources to.

I am aware that after years of economic difficulties, almost all sectors of our nation’s economy have been starved of sufficient resources, making it extremely difficult for our national planners to prioritize. As a result every sector of our economy has become a priority. However, in the midst of all of these pressing national demands, we must identify the sector from which a chain reaction of development can grow and impact the whole.

It is my considered view that education must be seen as the crucial sector that propels the engine of growth for an improved Ghana. Through wisdom a house is built.

If we continue to provide mediocre education, we will continue to have mediocre citizens who are incapable of delivering the human resource capacity for real social change. To build a modern industrial society, we must emphasize on the appropriate subjects and courses. Mathematics. Chemistry. Physics. These are the subjects needed for manufacturing and industrialization.

Over 2,000 years ago a young Greek artist named Timanthes studied under a respected tutor. After several years the teacher’s efforts seemed to have paid off when Timanthes painted an exquisite work of art. Unfortunately, he became so enraptured with the painting that he spent days gazing at it. One morning when he arrived to admire his work, he was shocked to find it blotted out with paint. Angry, Timanthes ran to his teacher, who admitted he had destroyed the painting. “I did it for your own good. That painting was retarding your progress. Start again and see if you can do better.” Timanthes took his teacher’s advice and produced Sacrifice of Iphigenia, which is regarded as one of the finest paintings of antiquity.

Like Timanthes, we can also do better if we put our minds to it. We can do better if we shift our focus from what is already there to what can be there. Many times the good is the enemy of better; comfort is the enemy of innovation. For Ghana to be innovative it must shift. It must do things differently. Our old model of hasty, unplanted and untested development has retarded our progress for too long. Let us start afresh and create a new masterpiece.

Ladies and Gentlemen, current picture of Africa is not a good one. The original joy and hope that the founding fathers of Africa’s emancipation announced after the attainment of independence appears shipwrecked by our own acts of irresponsibility. In the place of hope and happiness has arisen a spirit of self-doubt and passivity.

In a sense, it is understandable that our politicians bear the brunt of our national frustrations. In addition to politicians, our religious leaders and institutions have also had to respond to the society’s disillusionment with the moral and ethical failures of the clergy.

It seems obvious that the general citizenry of our Continent hold political and religious leaders in high regard. They expect us to lead the way.

When the church stands in its prophetic role and leads the way in calling the nation to righteousness, the nation is exalted from reproach to nobility.

Any society does not have a principled reference for the ethical and moral conduct of its citizens, succumbs to the base desires of its people. It is our lack of adherence to clear moral imperatives that has led to the increasing promiscuity, viciousness, crime, unemployment, social insecurity, hardship and family breakup around us today. If the leadership of the church leads in righteousness, the citizens will commit themselves to goodness.

Those of us, who are followers of Christ Jesus, cannot run away from the responsibility of challenging our nation to live up to its potential instead of its lowest common denominator.

Experts have predicted that unless some very radical changes occur in the way our continent responds to its challenges, we shall continue to witness an ever-widening gap between the standard of living in Africa and the rest of the industrialized world.

Political and Religious leaders are uniquelly …