New Covid-19 Arrangements wouldn’t Favour Muslims – Sheik Aremeyaw
He said Muslim faithful will face major challenges with the time of worship and crowd management
Jonas Danquah 
The spokesperson for the National Chief Imam, Sheik Aremeyaw Shaibu, said the rules and regulations guiding the ease of restrictions on religious institutions in Ghana will not favour Muslims.
According to him, time of worship and crowd management may pose major challenges to Islamic faithful considering the new protocols giving by the authorities.
President Akufo-Addo’s on Sunday, May 31, 2020 eased the restrictions on religious institutions after having being closed down for over two months following the covid-19 outbreak in the country.
As part of the new directives guiding the reopening of religious institutions, churches and mosques should have a maximum of 100 worshipers and worship limited to an hour.
Although the Muslim community has welcomed the news of resuming services on June 5, Sheik Shaibu argued that the partial reopening may pose some difficulties.
“With 100 people in attendance, the regional mosques where we have the numbers exceeding 300, it will be difficult and we may have to look at it carefully.
“Assuming the Chief Imam comes to Abossoy Okai mosque, which is one of the regional mosques, who are you going to count as part of the 100,” he quizzed.
He also explained that Muslims were very particular about their prayer time” he said in an interview on Joynews
He added that, “for Muslims, the prayer time is fixed…prayers can be said at 5 am or 12 noon, and once a Muslim goes outside of that fixed time, it goes to test the validity of the prayer.
“Muslims have something we call the validity of prayer and that is determined by the time by the time allocated to pray. It will be difficult to do an hour prayer directive.”
Sheik Aremeyaw Shaibu therefore advised the government to revise the protocols by doing a risk assessment on the instructions given.
