Cut the Katanga Nonsense!

I could not agree more with the leaders of the University Teachers Association of Ghana (UTAG), that our politicians should steer clear of the raging impasse that seems to have taken grips of the Kumasi Main Campus of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) – (See “KNUST Vice-Chancellor Should Be Sacked – NPP Gurus” Modernghana.com 10/24/18). I have been fairly studiously following some of the events that precipitated the violence and mayhem that erupted on the KNUST campus a couple, or so, days ago. It is not a pretty sight, to be certain. But what is even more significant to underscore here is the fact that the crux of this problem, to wit, the integration of some residential halls of the University, is squarely to be placed at the feet of our self-absorbed career politicians, notably, politicians belonging to the present main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) whose leadership has dominated the country’s political landscape and culture for most of the last half-century.

In the main, the problem has to do with the extremely snail-paced construction of dormitories that has been outpaced by the admission of qualified women students onto the Kumasi campus of KNUST. This is the issue that politicians like Mr. Bernard Antwi-Boasiako, the Asante Regional Chairman of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) ought to be discussing and attempting to remedy, instead of taking pointless potshots at the administrators of KNUST. I have already pointed out the fact that the rampaging male KNUST students have absolutely no tangible reason on their side of the heated debate that has swirled around the imperative need for Ghana’s second largest public academy to reconfigure the allocation of accommodation facilities to its entrants or matriculants. No cabal of student thugs, ungodly supported by emotionally and intellectually stunted alumni must be allowed to hold the university hostage to their grossly misguided attachment to the faux-tradition of male chauvinism and dubious sense of entitlement, which make these very impressionable young male students falsely believe that they have an inalienable and an inviolable right to cannibalize accommodation facilities that were constructed or built with the Ghanaian taxpayer’s money.

We need to also underscore the fact that the “Katanga” nickname of KNUST’s University Hall, one of at least two recently integrated residential facilities in dispute, reminded me of that Tamale-based New Patriotic Party-affiliated vigilante group that goes by the equally woefully misguided name of “Kandahar Boys.” In both instances, the history behind the names of “Katanga” and “Kandahar” is one of mayhem, death and wanton destruction of barbaric proportions. The sort of gender harassment that met with the necessary, all-too-savvy and democratically righteous integration of both Unity and Continental halls has absolutely no place on the campus of the country’s foremost science and technology academy. It has absolutely no place, whatsoever, in any civilized society.

If, indeed, the male students of KNUST want to have a citadel or a sanctuary of their own, by all means, let these pathologically self-infatuated men reach deep into their own pockets and wallets and buy some real-estate properties off-campus and indulge their capricious whims. They have absolutely no right to unilaterally impose their will on public property. I hope equally self-infatuated politicians like Chairman Wontumi and Mr. Henry Nana Boakye, the ruling party’s newly elected National Organizer, get the preceding message loud and clear.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
October 24, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]