Anlo-Ewes Have An Unparalleled History Of Political Tribalism In Ghana

For twenty years, the Rawlings-Tsikata Cabal slaughtered Akan-descended Ghanaian Supreme Court Judges, military rulers and officers and ordinary civilians in the dubious name of revolutionary “Accountability, Transparency, Probity and Justice.” And so one is both at great pains and loss as to what to make of the patently primitive and inexcusable accusation of ethnic chauvinism and justicial selectiveness against President Addo DankwaAkufo-Addo by Mr. Del Bright, the leader-convener of a group calling itself Volta Patriotic Forum (VPF); on the inescapably laughable grounds that Nana Akufo-Addo would suspend Mr. Pius EnamHadzide, the Deputy Sports Minister, who is also in charge of the International Games Committee (IGC) of the country’s Sports Ministry (See “Don’t Play Tribal Cards in Corruption Fight – Volta Patriotic Forum to President Akufo-Addo” Ghanaweb.com 4/13/18).

The suspension of Mr. Hadzide, as those of our readers who have been paying sedulous attention to major events on the ground may already know, has to do with the acquisition of visas by some 60 Ghanaians who fraudulently posed as reporters for various news institutions and organizations in the country to the Commonwealth Games being presently hosted by Australia. The suspension of the Deputy Sports Minister is to enable our state security agencies to thoroughly investigate precisely how these fraudsters secured their visas and ended up being turned away by Australian immigration authorities. But even more significant is the utter embarrassment and indelibly bad light in which the image and reputation of Ghana have sunk or suffered as a result. What makes the Volta Patriotic Forum’s accusation immitigably offensive is the fact that it noetically or thoughtlessly ignores the fact that the Deputy Sports Minister, as the substantive Director in Charge of the International Games Committee at the Ministry of Sports, is squarely responsible to have ensured that the image and reputation of the country was not brought into such abject disrepute.

Instead, the leader-convener of the so-called Volta Patriotic Forum has decided to take gratuitous shots at the substantive Sports Minister, Mr. Isaac Asiamah, merely because of him being of Akan descent, and not logically because he has either been found to have shirked his primary responsibility or been suspected of any such wrongdoing. If this vacuous and scandalous trend of logic is not peculiar or pathologically exclusive of Anlo-Ewe thinking, I don’t know what else it is. But what fascinated me more than everything else, was Mr. Del Bright’s rather fatuous and absurd observation that the all-too-logical and incontrovertible suspension of Mr. Hadzide was “a clear manifestation of the UP [United Party] tradition’s attitude towards non-Akan [government] appointees.”

I am quite certain, at least at this juncture, that Mr. Del Bright clinically suffers from an acute bout of dementia. First of all, it is inescapably oxymoronic for the critic to accuse leaders of the so-called UP Tradition of anti-non-Akan sentiments and at the same time claim that these same anti-non-Akan movers-and-shakers of the ruling New Patriotic Party are, somehow, objective and/or fair-minded enough to be capable of appointing some of the same people that they so viscerally resent into sensitive and powerful positions of public trust. Now, it begins to make perfect sense why Dr. J. B. Danquah, the celebrated Doyen of Gold Coast and Modern Ghanaian Politics and the single most significant ideological inspiration of the UP Tradition, fiercely but unsuccessfully fought for the Anlo-Ewes, in particular, to be allowed to join their Togolese clansmen and women in the wake of the unmistakably telling results of the 1956 UN-sponsored Plebiscite.

The irony here, though, is that the leader-convener of the so-called Volta Patriotic Forum clearly lacks an adequate knowledge and sense of history to have realized that in the widely referenced 1960 Presidential Election between then-incumbent Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah and the pinch-hitting Dr. Danquah – the future Prime Minister Dr. Kofi Abrefa Busia had fled the country in fear of his life – won over 90-percent of the Volta Vote, in particular the Anlo-Ewe Vote. Needless to say, all the “equalizational” comparative cases, such as that involving Mr. Ken Ofori-Atta, the Finance Minister, cited by Mr. Del Bright, have absolutely no relevance here, whatsoever, simply because in the incident involving Mr. Hadzide, there exists internationally corroborative and forensically sustainable evidence indicating the fact that, indeed, some highly placed operatives in Ghana’s Sports Ministry aided and abetted in the fraudulent and criminal acquisition of visas.

But, of course, we must also significantly point out the fact that the suspended Sports Minister has vehemently denied any wrongdoing and is hopeful that he would shortly be cleared of any wrongdoing and be promptly returned to his post. We must equally and promptly highlight the fact that the Volta Region contains a critical mass of ethnic Akans, indeed, large enough to constitute a separate region in the country, for Mr. Del Bright and his goon-squad associates to cavalierly presume the citizens and residents of the Volta Region to be composed exclusively of non-Akan people.

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