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In his column “Point of Order” under the piece “Where Is our God In Whom We Have So Much Faith? (2) published in The Spectator of September 27, 2008 Mr. Kwame Gyasi was at his pugnacious best when he roundly castigated and condemned the entire Northern leadership elite for failing to provide, in his view, a “dedicated and selfless leadership which can astutely advocate the concerns of the people (of the North), preach unity and bring the people together and create the necessary chemistry to ignite the path leading to development and enlightenment of the regions (of the North) and their people”.

Clearly Kwame Gyasi is either unaware of or he has deliberately closed his eyes to the considerable intellectual inputs made by the likes of Professors R. B. Bening, Jacob Songsore, Yakubu Saaka, John Nabila, Dr. Charles Jebuni and Dr. Sulley Gariba, Dr. Ramatu Alhassan, Mrs. Nabila Williams and countless others in their expositions on the dynamics of the Northern development situation especially its historical backdrop and modern dimensions and including blueprints for the transformation of the regions of the North. In his self-righteous and patronizing overzealousness to nail down scape-goats he also ignored or grossly undervalued the contribution of national politicians and sons and daughters of the North who have continuously advocated, campaigned and worked for an integrated, balanced and inclusive development of the country Ghana of which the North is part.

Indeed at the dawn of independence a powerful delegation of Northern politicians spearheaded by the late J. A. Braimah, Jatoe Kaloe, S. D. Dombo, Alhaji Yakubu Tali and sponsored by the chiefs of the then Northern Territories went to London and met the Queen and the Colonial Secretary to give vent to their petition to the British Colonial government about the deliberately skewed and discriminatory policies of the colonial administration throughout the colonial period and the contrived relative backwardness of the North and what the implications would be in an independent Ghana. They made a solid case for accelerated development for the north so as to bridge the developmental gap which was glaring.The concessions and overtures by the British Crown were later to be the basis of a limited policy of affirmative action for the north in the early days of independence.

From the benches in the National Assembly during the 1st Republic the late B. K. Adama made famous the quotation that northerners had been reduced by British official colonial policies and practices to “hewers of wood and drawers of water” and advocated a paradigm shift in the development trajectory of the north. This assertion echoed by the northern leaders in and outside the National Assembly drew some attention to the “Cinderella” situation of the north.

Indeed the 1st Republic out-doored a progressive policy of accelerated development in the north especially the institution of a Northern special educational scholarship under the auspices of which a number of Northerners achieved high levels of education to which they would otherwise have been denied. It was the Progress Party government of the 2nd Republic that dismantled the essential elements of this system to the great detriment of the North. In the Parliament of the Second Republic Alhaji Ibrahima Mahama then member for Tamale moved a substantive motion for the institution of an accelerated program for the development of the north but the motion was defeated.

It must nevertheless be said to the credit of Kwame Gyasi that he has exhibited some qualities of a patriotic Ghanaian who is apparently passionate about the equal development of the country and in particular the alleviation of the developmental plight of the three regions of the North. That is a commendable spirit but certainly he would have been a better and more effective advocate of this issue and an ally in northern development if he had but just taken a little time to educate himself from the abundant literature that exists on the subject. As has happened he has exhibited such charming innocence of the regional development process of the north from the pre-colonial, colonial and the post-independence periods. Regional development should properly be seen as a process by which the productive capacities of all regions are mobilized by linking them in both a structural and an organizational sense to the mainstream of the national economy. This process requires that the spatial, economic and institutional barriers that limit a society's capacity for growth and development as has been the situation in the North should be addressed dispassionately. The National Development Planning Commission has already recognized this as a national agenda and stipulated that the task of bridging the development gap between north and south is a national priority, while issues of spatial equity in development is a national task.

But if one might pardon Kwame Gyasi for being naively uncharitable or overly harsh on the Northern leadership elite his vitriolic venom directed at the architect of Ghana's independence Dr. Kwame Nkrumah are most unfortunate and un-pardonable. I thought Kwame Gyasi's concluding paragraph to his piece is an absolute shocker for it is unbelievable that in the 50 years of our existence as a sovereign independent republic there is still a Ghanaian adult, least of all an intellectual whose vocation is to nurture and tutor our young ones in our foremost university who still accepts without question the long exploded myth of colonialism's “civilizing mission” and will go to great lengths to extol the virtues of the colonial enterprise with so much nostalgia. Hear him:

“The five days I stayed at Johannesburg, South Africa, about a month ago, courtesy Transparency International, makes me believe that despite all the attributes of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, he did this nation of ours and the African continent a great disservice and unpardonable damage by engineering the kicking out of this country the white colonial masters at a time when black Africa was not equipped and prepared to take its destiny into its hands. The state of Johannesburg I saw and the state of the two northern regions I saw depict a clear manifestation as to the wide gap between the application of the white intellect brain and that of the black intellect brain in the developmental process”.

In short colonialism to Kwame Gyasi was good and would have transformed our country in such a way as to make it look like Johannesburg in South Africa whose development status he is so enamoured. That Kwame Nkrumah must be blamed for aborting the life of colonialism and bringing independence at the time he did, in March 1957. That the “white intellect brain” is superior to the “black intellect brain” and it shows in the way they differentially impact on the development process.

This, in short, is a hyper “colonial mentality” abundantly displayed by a classical house nigger, who, even in the midst of a mass of countervailing evidence is seduced by the illogic of racial profiling and negative stereotyping underlying white supremacist ideology.

 Continued    Source: ALHAJI MUHAMMAD MUMUNI

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