Ban On Noise Did Not Stop June 4Th

The attempt being made by the Ga Traditional Council to stop the Yvonne Nelson-led quiet march and protest vigil against the unbearably prolonged inability of the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) to solving "Dumsor," the erratic supply of electricity across the nation, is rather laughable, to speak much less about the downright preposterous (See "Ga Traditional Council Petitions Police Over Dumsor Vigil" MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 5/9/15). Shortly after this writing the La Traditional Council, under whose landed-property jurisdiction the vigil was to be held, issued a progressive and democratic statement approving of the march.

Under the guise of the annual observation of a solemn moment with their "Maker," actually their ancestral spirits and the Earth-Goddess Mother, the leaders of the Ga Traditional Council appear dead-set to aborting the democratic rights of citizens concerned about the evidently irresponsive, incompetent and irresponsible appropriation of the people's mandate by President Mahama and his cronies and associates. We are also, of course, well aware of the fact that come the end of the ban on drumming and noise-making, the government will be presenting the Ga-Mantse and the Ga Traditional Council leaders with gallons of liquor, livestock and foodstuffs for their annual Homowo festivities.

I am not suggesting any complicit kowtowing to "ritual bribery" on the part of the leaders of the Ga Traditional Council. But I also wistfully recognize the glaring fact, as pointed out by one media critic, that the Ga Traditional Council has not gone after private homeowners with noisy generators on landed property under the jurisdiction of the same Ga Traditional Council. I must also hasten to add that I am, personally, a great lover of Kpokpoi (Kpekple), the main dietary dish or course of Homowo, traditionally eaten with palm-nut soup, little of whose ingredients are actually cultivated or farmed by the Ga people. The main soup ingredient of fish, of course, is almost wholly Ga-produced.

But what is significant for me to point out here is the fact I am also having a hard time categorizing the institutional status of the Ga Traditional Council, since the Council does not appear to directly fall under the auspices of any of the nationally recognized religious bodies or organizations, such as the Christian Council of Ghana, the Ghana Muslims' Council or the Catholic Secretariat. Instead, like all the other tradtional councils in the country, the Ga Traditional Council falls squarely under the authority of the Ghana National House of Chiefs which, in turn, falls under the Ministry of Chieftaincy Affairs and also the Ministry of Local Government, if my appreciation of the history and politics of postcolonial Ghana is still current and up-to-date.

What the preceding means, of course, is that the Ga Traditional Council is more of a political auxilliary institution to the local and national branches of the executive than it is a religious body, which would otherwise effectively make it an informal arm of the executive branch of the central government. (I, of course, fully recognize my circuitous or tortuous use of language here). Which may also clearly explain why the leaders of the Ga Traditional Council decided to appoint Nii Tackie Commey, the former Member of Parliament, as its Chief Spokesman. Which, in effect, also means that the Ga Traditional Council has a vested interest which is decidedly more political than it is purely cultural in the way that the leaders of the Council would have the rest of the nation believe.

I am here, of course, also thinking in terms of the constitutional separation of Church and State. Maybe somebody on the Council ought to have reminded then-Flt.-Lt. Jerry John Rawlings that the half-Scottish waif had absolutely no business picking up arms and flying taxpayer-underwritten jets owned by the Ghana Armed Forces that fateful June day in 1979, when the then-thirty-something-year-old mulatto decided to riotously and raucously and bloodily disturb the supposedly inviolable season of the peace and quiet of not only the Ga people but, indeed, the peace and quiet of the entire nation. And, by the way, I am personally a passionate partisan of our traditional Ghanaian and African cultural values. But this is the modern cosmopolitan era of the Global Village (apologies to Marshall McLuhan, the late great Canadian media theorist of genius) and we ought to move with both the inevitable and immutable tide of the times.

In other words, picking on the socially vulnerable to show off its "Mafiaesque" sense of turf domination is decidedly passe. Yes, our need to respect and even venerate our cultures and the very institutions organically established to preserve these cultural and moral values cannot be gainsaid. But it can also not be equally gainsaid that wherever and whenever these age-old values are envisaged to be regressive of our socio-economic, political and cultural development, the relevant needs of today's society ought to ceded priority. Besides, the decision to retain and maintain the Greater-Accra Region as the preeminent region and the nation's seat of governance, or Ghana's capital, means that some of the parochial ways of yesteryear ought to give way to the needs and values of our totally new era of multiethnic and multicultural modernism.

In other words, if the leaders of the Ga Traditional Council feel so strongly about the seemingly unhealthy atrophying of their old ways of conduct, then perhaps they ought to begin negotiating with the central government to have our nation's capital relocated to another region of the country.