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15.09.2021 Feature Article

Oti Region Residents Afflicted by Stockholm Syndrome

Oti Region Residents Afflicted by Stockholm Syndrome
15.09.2021 LISTEN

Welcoming the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, to the newly created Oti Region where he recently officially toured to inspect, as well as commission, some government-initiated development projects and programs, Nana Besemuna, III, the President of Oti Region’s House of Chiefs, was widely reported to have pleaded with Nana Akufo-Addo to forgive the citizens and voters of Oti for not casting their ballots in the 2020 General Election to ensure that the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) won at least one parliamentary seat or constituency in the region in a show of gratitude for facilitating the equitable spread of the country’s wealth and resources to the Oti Region which, until the latter’s creation by “The Little Man from Kyebi,” was literally at the proverbial short end of the stick, with the region’s lion share of our national development budget routinely channeled towards the Anlo-Ewe-dominated southern Volta Region (See “We’re Sorry NPP Didn’t Win Any Seat in Oti Region, It’s Sad – Chief Begs Akufo-Addo” Modernghana.com 9/10/21).

As I highlighted in the leadup to the referendum that ratified the regional status of Oti, in particular the fierce battle to push back this very modern and progressive policy initiative by some Anlo-Ewe Trokosi Nationalists, led by Mr. Franklin Cudjoe and his IMANI-Africa Institute – some critics call IMANI-Africa the “Stink-Tank” – the former Oti Enclave of the Old Volta Region had scandalously come to be perceived and envisaged by the Anlo-Ewe Trokosi Nationalists as a veritable imperialist territorial booty bequeathed their kind and ilk by the invading British colonialists under whose command these extant Anlo-Ewe Recruits had fiercely fought to dislodge its “pioneering” German occupants.

In effect, the Anlo-Ewe Nationalists had at least for three or four generations come to envisage the inhabitants and citizens of the present Oti Region as their bona fide legatees or British-bequeathed properties. It is within this opprobrious psycho-pathological context that the salutary and opportune creation of the most multilingual and multicultural region of Ghana is to be perceived. But that the overwhelming majority of voters of the Akufo-Addo-created Oti Region would vote against the retention of Nana Akufo-Addo and the New Patriotic Party at Jubilee House and in the Legislature, pretty much echoes what has been clinically established by high-end, cutting-edge or crackerjack psychologists and psychiatrists as the “Stockholm Syndrome,” a mental disorder that causes the victim of captivity and/or virtual enslavement to suppose her/his victimizer or oppressor to be much more attuned to and protective of his/her interests than their liberator or would-be liberator of the victimized and oppressed.

This paradoxical state of affairs was widely recognized to be typical of the newly manumitted hitherto enslaved Africans in the Immediate Post-Slavery Era in the United States. It could also be aptly characterized as the Pro-Ancient Egyptian Counter-Mosaic Syndrome, primarily found to be rife and riotously rampant among the newly liberated Jewish slaves during the Exodus from Ancient Egypt. What, of course, is even more significant to observe here is Nana Besemuna’s rather poignant and incontrovertibly insightful observation that the beauty of democracy is that genuine winners are not the least bit fazed or bothered by those who had fiercely and vehemently opposed their glorious ride into the bosom of victory and freedom, thus the all too mature and progressive decision by President Akufo-Addo not to let the seeming ungratefulness of the Oti Region’s electorate, by their conspicuously negative and morally and materially nihilistic voting trend in the 2020 General Election, taint his good intentions and massive development projects for the region.

Ultimately, one hopes the infamously vindictive leadership of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress paid sedulous attention to this morally instructive observation and admonishment by Nana Besemuna, III.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

Sept. 12, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]

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