Why Fulani Predators Will Not Be Compensated

I have known about the existence of the so-called Fulani Association of Ghana (FAG) for some time now. But until the deadly shootout between some Fulani herdsmen in Agogo, in the Asante-Akyem District of the Asante Region, I had never heard the name of Prof. Sheikh Osman Baro, who was recently described by the media as the Chairman of FAG (See “Pay for Killing Our Cattle – Fulani” Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 1/19/18). I also have no idea what academic and/or professional discipline in which Sheikh Osman Baro holds his professorship. Not that it would matter anyhow.

What matters to me, vis-à-vis the issue under discussion, is why highly educated men like the FAG Chairman have kept silent for so long. And I have a ready answer for my own question; and it is simply that as long as previous regimes, especially the Mahama government, kept a blind eye at the wanton atrocities perpetrated against native Ghanaian farmers by these nomadic predatory cowherds, it was all well and good. Now that the tables have deservedly turned against these notoriously insensitive and selfish nomadic predators, the rascally likes of Sheikh Osman Baro would have the key operatives of the Akufo-Addo Administration believe that it is all the fault of the indigenes of the Agogo township and elsewhere in the forest regions of the country the fruits of whose sweat and toil these Fulani cattle herders are running over reckless and rampant and ravaging. No such argument could be more preposterous.

Indeed, there have been legion instances in which these Fulani cattle herders have been reported to have brutally raped and even, in some heinous instances, raped and killed native Ghanaian women farmers whom they encountered on their farms or on their way to and from their farms. There was even one instance in which one of the leaders of the Fulani community was widely quoted to have sneered in retort, that “Negroid” Ghanaian women were too ugly and repulsively unattractive to be raped by any Fulani herdsman. And that in instances where they had been raped, indigenous Ghanaian women ought to be grateful for the possibility of giving birth to handsome and beautiful mixed-breed Fulani-fathered children.

We, of course, make clear distinctions between “Nomadic Fulanis” and “Settled” or “Sedentary Fulanis.” The former has absolutely no deep roots or temporally extensive provenance in the country. But what is also clear, as I have had occasion to point out in several previous articles, is the fact that it is largely the rich and settled or sedentary Fulani who have been mischievously using their nomadic kinsmen to lay waste to our cultivated farmlands, thus irresponsibly creating economic crises in the country. No appeals to the current Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr. Antonio Guterres, is going to alter the shape of matters on the ground. It is us, indigenous Ghanaians in the forest regions of the country, who have tolive and deal with the deleterious and economically devastating consequences of the wantonly predatory activities of the Fulani herdsmen in our towns and villages, and their equally callous and narcissistic paymasters and sponsors in our cities.

I never once saw anybody dispatched by the UN Secretary-General to halt the equally environmentally deadly Galamsey activities in the country. Then also, why are the likes of Prof. Baro, the FAG Chairman, not calling for the owners of these rampaging cattle herdsmen and their sponsors and paymasters to amicably settle accounts with the victims of their predatory activities? Or is it just that in the playbook of these Fulani denizens, indigenous Ghanaian food farmers have absolutely no human rights worthy of the respect of a Fulani man or woman? Then also, did the Government of Ghana invite these predatory Fulani herdsmen and their cattle into the country to engage in their anti-human and antisocial activities? Come again, Prof. Baro and his tribesmen and women.

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