Dzi wo fie Asem goes to the Academy - A Preliminary, Kwatriotic Salute via Vancouver

It is obvious that the British Council Hall in Accra would be packed beyond its thoughtful Kente wall decoration as Professor Kwesi Yankah, Pro Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana delivers a Ghana Academy

lecture on Dzi wo Fie Asem today.
I got to know about this lecture at a most unexpected location - an electrician's shop. The electricians had proudly put up a Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences poster announcement next to a bank of power generating sets. In conversation they explained that "as for Professor Yankah, he is different". Different indeed, a unique Kwatriotism. I may have known Professor Yankah before I went Down Under but I got to know him well on my return to Ghana in 1989. We worked quite intensively on the mould-breaking (phrase used by a female letter writer to the

magazine) Uhuru magazine which he put out with his brothers. I am still looking for an issue of Uhuru which had a twin-headed drawing of Nana S.K.B. Asante, Chairman of the Committee of Experts which gave us our present, now beloved Constitution, on the cover. Very distrubingly, Uhuru magazine is not covered in the library system of the University of Ghana. It is well protected in the library at Nortwestern University.

I have shared many Bubras with Professor Yankah at the Loggia of Mensah Sarbah Hall. President Mills was a not infrequent visitor especially interested in the reconstruction of the nearby soccer field given his longstanding association with the Amalgamated Sports clubs of the University of Ghana.

I believe the President's Dzi wo fie Asem has been significantly misunderstood. The Foreign Minister does not do him much good with his argument that the President's Fie extends to Ivory Coast. The President may have been born in the Western Region but no where near the border.

He hails not too far from my Ekumfi Etwa. An impressive article in the equally impressive Oil City Magazine, published out of Takoradi, by an Ivorian clearly points up the efficacy of the arbitrary colonial border in dividing us. When my people say Adze wo Fie aa, oye, their sense of geography may be occasionally contextual but never clouded and never extends to Ivory Coast. I think the President has been misunderstood because I know very firmly that he is no narrow-minded isolationist. In Political Science terms, the balance he sought to draw between our hard security endowment and our responsibility to protect in Ivory Coast is perfectly understandable. The ECOWAS decision argument falls completely on a reasonable balancing of the creation of international norms by states as active subjects. I had the privilege of working briefly but intensely with the President in late 2001 at the Liu Centre for Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia in the beautiful city of Vancouver. The President spent about a year working with Lloyd Axworthy, previous Foreign Minister of Canada, in developing the idea of Human Security as a more effective organisational resource in international relations. A reading of the President's Liu publication on Africa in the World gives a good handle on the President's view at that time, including on the currently topical issue of our fisheries and the tragedy of the commons. I was in Montreal when the Canadian government enabled Africans, perhaps five hundred of us, to take over the Marriot Hotel, in any case the hotel with the round tower in the city centre, in

2002 with the President as keynote speaker. The complexities of the new intervention was a major part of this people's summit on NEPAD. In his dicey keynote address, the President set out the tensions very clearly and settled for a bais for intervention. I study politicians. The President could have moved significantly away from these views. I do not think he has.

This is a salute. I cannot prefigure what Professor Yankah would say today. He is an expert in linguistics who brings its potentially technical and dry concerns home. I expect a full treatment of Dzi wo fie Asem. Busia's Ka fo di di would have benefitted from similar analysis. I would end with a dimension I am slightly more at home with. The use of new, social media in promoting this event must give us hope. Over a hundred people have confirmed attendance on a Facebook event link created for the session. Dzi wo fie Asem returned over 47,300 hits on Google yesterday. It has not yet hit Twitter the way MTN's alleged poor service in Ghana is taking it over. Today, in the Washington Post, we are told about Vice President Mahama's blogging and Web 2.0 suaveness.

We have not even mentioned the true social media in Ghana - vernacular talk radio which our speaker this evening has explained very fully to the Academy in a previous lecture. Meet you at the British, not the one in Adelaide which African students took over in the 1980s.