Stemming The Nightly Noises

The Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) is reported to have demolished a church building of the Fruits of Life Ministry at Bubiashie for noise-making.

Victims of sleep-robbing nightly church activities in various parts of Accra must have showed interest in this development, given what they have gone through over the years at the hands of pastors who run such churches.

The construction and operation of places of worship are regulated through well-defined by-laws enacted by local councils and assemblies to ensure sanity in our communities.

Unfortunately however, the by-laws are hardly enforced, thereby enabling businessmen/clergy to run churches during wee hours of the night when people require much-needed sleep.

Many of such sleep-deprived persons, some of them landlords, have made various efforts to reverse their awful situations to no avail and they eventually throw their hands in the air in despair.

When news of such rare action by the Assembly is given prominence as this one, we tend to read it with surprise and hope that perhaps things are going to change.

It is our prayer that the AMA would show verifiable commitment to the enforcement of the by-laws which regulate faith activities because many residents in the city are suffering unduly as a result of church-generated noise in the night.

We live in a country where persistent attempts at fighting anomalies such as noise from churches is met with not only irritating resistance from the managers of such places of worship but mind-boggling indifference from neighbours, whose participation in the crusade could make a difference.

We are longing for a situation where people would understand their rights and develop the habit of taking actions such as reporting by-law breaches to the appropriate quarters for redress.

Unfortunately, the actions which should follow such reports hardly take place anyway, rendering those who make them helpless.

Depriving others of sleep through nightly worships in our view is a selfish conduct, incompatible with the tenets of Christianity.

What aggravates the situation is the amplification of the activities in the places of worship which are mostly singing and verbal deliveries by the clergy.

Freedom of worship is a constitutional right and anybody who seeks to breach this would be acting in breach of this document, this we hold true. All we are pleading for is a situation whereby the activities which go with our faiths do not infringe upon the rights of others.