Alhaji Grusah Must Wake Up!

Alhaji Grusah

First of all, and I have to be frank and upfront on this count, I resent any attempt to Arabize whatever vestiges of cultural indigeneity may be left in our country. Don’t get me wrong, this has absolutely nothing to do with the healthy pursuit of religious beliefs, including Islam and Christianity. I am personally a Christian by faith and confession and see absolutely no contradiction in not sporting a Christian name. For, I fervently believe that at the end of your life, or mine, for that matter, it is not your name but your deeds that will recommend you the peaceful glory of Heaven, if that is where you are truly bound. I, of course, believe that the same logic goes for Muslims, including the sizable percentage of my Asante-Dwaben relatives.

But even more importantly, I believe that our names and cultures and native languages were given us by Divine Providence and ought not to be desecrated or erased from the face of this Earth without devastating consequences. Which is why I rigidly stand opposed to Vice-President Alhaji Mahamudu Bawumia’s decision to use taxpayer money to recruit some 3,000 Arabic-language instructors in the dubious name of globalization. Is the government also going to recruit 12,000 Hebrew-language instructors for the predominantly Christian southern-half of the country? We shall make time to dispassionately discuss the foregoing subject in due course. In the past, I have wondered aloud on these very pages why the Ghana Football Association would allow a soccer team to register and play in our football leagues with the name of an Arabian king on our soils.

My qualms are well founded and pertain to cultural self-worth and collective self-esteem. And, of course, the general lack of respect for Black-Africans, if one would pardon such nomenclatural tautology, on the part of Arab-descended people. The wanton atrocities visited on Darfur and other parts of the present-day South Sudan are highly unlikely to be forgotten anytime soon by those of us avowed preservers and keepers of our African memory and heritage. Alhaji Karin Grusah’s name appears in the caption of this column because the man is guilty on two fronts – namely, the undue Arabization of our culture, and the depraved use of his cattle to rape, maim and kill, as well as destroy cultivated farmlands in largely the southern-half of the country. He is also the owner of a soccer club called King Faisal. In both enterprises, the man has demonstrated himself to be an employer and an important Ghanaian citizen.

But, of course, whether he is a responsible citizen where the grazing of his cattle in the food-farming areas of the country is concerned is moot. It is moot because Alhaji Grusah is wealthy enough to buy or create a ranch somewhere on the Accra Plains or anywhere on the Northern Plains to keep his herds securely restricted and well-supplied with fodder. He does not need to have his livestock roaming rampant and riotously destroying the farms of other citizens who are no less Ghanaian than Alhaji Grusah claims to be. I also resent the idea that taxpayer-sponsored police and military personnel should be used to prevent the cattle of wealthy Ghanaians like Alhaji Grusah from destroying human lives and properties in the country. After all, the government is not in the business of paying rents and salaries for citizens who do not work directly for it. And it ought to be the same for citizens like Mr. Grusah. Anybody who allows his cattle or livestock to roam our forests and arable lands recklessly, must be made to pay for the full cost of protecting defenseless citizens against the same, if this is not already the case.

This is a veritable form of terrorism, which is why I wasn’t the least bit saddened when some 40 cows belonging to a Fulani nomad were reported to have been slaughtered by some security personnel in the Asante-Akyem Agogo area of the Asante Region recently. And then just 24 hours later, in what clearly appeared to have been a revenge or retaliatory attack, three soldiers and one police officer who are members of the Operation Cow-Leg Taskforce, aimed at arresting the predatory activities of these Fulani herdsmen, were shot and seriously wounded in the same vicinity under discussion. Now is the time for the Akufo-Addo Administration to put its feet down and make these Fulani marauders and, some say rapists, fully appreciate the need to respect the integrity and territorial spaces of sedentary indigenous Ghanaian citizens. We already have enough problems without the extra-burden of Fulbe/Fula Terrorism.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
January 9, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]