Sampson Boafo’s Chieftaincy Confusion

Ever since Ghana was created out of the 56 ethnic groups that form the nation-state 50 years ago, the issue of chieftaincy or traditional authority has been a thorny issue, sometimes spilling into deadly conflicts. The reasons are as ancient as they are contemporary. From first President Kwame Nkrumah to incumbent President John Kufour, Ghanaian leaders and elites have struggled with the chieftaincy institution. The picture reveals elites who have not had scrupulous grasp of one of the main cultural and development pillars upon which the Ghana nation-state start rests.

Perhaps with weak understanding of the Ghanaian culture or perhaps the heavily Western education he has had which has blinded him from deeper comprehending the Ghanaian culture, President Nkrumah had a constant clash with the chieftaincy institution, attempting to destroy the institution, and by this undermining a great deal of his great developmental enterprises. Richard Rathbone, a professor of Modern African History at University of London, U.K, says in “Nkrumah & the Chiefs: The Politics of Chieftaincy in Ghana, 1951-1960," that Nkrumah waged sustained campaign to bring down traditional rulers in the face of his "frustrated attempts to democratize local government and the long and bitter campaigns mounted by many southern chiefs to resist their political marginalization."

Other Heads of States that came after Nkrumah - military or civilian - were more or less not better than Nkrumah in tackling the chieftaincy issue critically as a national development challenge, and may explain Sampson Boafo, the Chieftaincy and Culture Minister's despair and call “for a national debate on chieftaincy as an institution to either scrape or keep it,” as Cynthia Boakye of the Accra-based “The Statesman” reports. Boafo, who has generally being doing well as the nation's key culture-development point-man, appears perplexed in the face of some mounting chieftaincy disputes and its entanglement of the development process.

Either confused or retreating in the face of some deadly chieftaincy clashes (most traditional jurisdictional areas do not have any chieftaincy troubles), as the main reference point of the culture for progress, Boafo's “either scrape or keep” the chieftaincy institution remarks contradicts his earlier remarks for the refinement of the chieftaincy institution. Boafo had also earlier argued that attempts should be made to weed out crook kingmakers that lead to numerous chieftaincy disputes and advises “kingmakers to prepare a list of royals who qualify to ascend thrones and skins” so as to avoid the perennial chieftaincy disputes. The indications here are that Boafo was seizing the moment to tackle the rot emanating from the chieftaincy institution.

But on the flip side, Boafo appears to be crumbling in the face of some these chieftaincy rows. In his lets “let's debate chieftaincy institution,” Boafo has to be rest secured that the chieftaincy institution cannot be scraped…Never. Contradictorily, Boafo himself acknowledges that the 1992 Constitution recognizes the chieftaincy institution and this "Chiefs cannot be ignored” in the deeper progress of Ghana.

As Boafo himself reported, Ghanaians have repeatedly told him, in his travels nation-wide, that they cherish the values of the chieftaincy institution, as part of their larger traditional norms and developmental ideals “but there has to be a way to alter it to conform to the modern society.” So what should Ghanaians do to modernize chieftaincy for progress as Botswana, Uganda and Mozambique have done? While Botswanan elites, since 1966, were able to weave their traditional institutions into their ex-colonial and the global development process, Uganda and Mozambique had at certain times thought, like Boafo, of scrapping their chieftaincy institution.

Harry G. West and Scott Kloeck-Jensen, in “Betwixt and Between: 'Traditional Authority' and Democratic Decentralization in Post-War Mozambique,” reports that the late Mozambican President Samora Michel and his FRELIMO associates held the idea of scrapping the Mozambican chieftaincy institution because the institution “were” thought to be “irrevocably corrupted by their involvement with the colonial administration.” Faced with acute challenges of democratic decentralization in their development process, wisdom and humility forced the much divided FRELIMO and the opposition RENAMO to “understanding the variegated and contentious history” of chieftaincy by transcending “existing political divides on issues of local governance.”

Boafo and his bureaucrats could not only draw notes from Mozambique, which had gone through devastating civil war (1975-1994), but learn from the fact that they revamped themselves and attempted to modernize their chieftaincy institution in their development process from rot of immense demoralization and destruction is a lesson for Boafo and his bureaucrats. This makes the over 80 percent of Ghanaians who want the chieftaincy institution “to stay because it plays an important part in national identity” and progress, as Boafo reports, a starting point in the modernization project.
This makes any thought of scrapping the chieftaincy institution not only out of the question in the first place but will have disturbing psychological implications in Ghana's progress since the soul of Ghana emanates from its traditional chieftaincy institution. And if there should be a debate about the chieftaincy institution at all, it is should be how to skillfully modernize it in relation to Ghana's democratization and development process so as minimize any potential conflicts. There are no contradictions in this. And so let the weaving of the chieftaincy institution into the on-going decentralization, democratization and development process continue as the Botswanans have done.