Late last year, the Ghana Police Service issued a statement in which it warned those it referred to as “doomsday prophets” to desist from prophesying or face prosecution and a term of imprisonment of up to five years. It reminded the Ghanaian public that “it is a crime for a person to publish or reproduce a statement, rumor or report which is likely to cause fear and alarm to the public or disturb the public peace, where that person has no evidence to prove that the statement, rumor or report is true.”

Presidential candidate faces a dilemma as religious factor threatens to undo campaign. 

Within the space of a few months, fifty-five-year-old evangelist Olufunmilayo Adebayo, popularly known as Mummy G.O., has gone from the relative obscurity of downscale Iyana-Ipaja, Lagos, to the most discussed subject in contemporary Nigerian Pentecostalism. The target of a blizzard of savage internet memes and unrelenting mockery, the founder and leader of the self-styled Rapture Proclaimer Evangelical Church of God (RAPEC) has been getting all the attention in a context where the leading—and mostly male—clerical figures dominate the news as a matter of course.