No amount of money or resources will be too much for ensuring national cohesion, especially when motley of ethnic groupings make up a country.
Nigeria fought a costly civil war to keep the country intact, lessons from which experience should guide us in our utterances and inter-ethnic relationships.
Countries which have been unfortunate to be bedeviled with civil strife occasioned by ethnocentric underpinnings have long stories to tell about the security aftermaths of the anomaly.
A queen mother in the Assin South Constituency has gone gaga on the fast approaching New Patriotic Party (NPP) primary to elect a flagbearer, the bottom-line of which is that her people should vote for the candidature of a person who hails from their part of the country.
This certainly is not how to build a country. She deserves condemnation and not plaudits because Ghana has long past that notch of backwardness called tribalism.
Those who engage in such ethnocentric bigotry should be told in their faces that they do not belong here at all.
We recall the wonderful reception accorded the other candidates when they visited the northern parts of the country. Bryan Acheampong had a taste of northern hospitality when he was in Walewale and others, irrespective of the fact that he hails from the Eastern part of the country. We all saw the banner headlines which his visit to Mamprugu attracted; so positive and pointing to the oneness of Ghanaians.
We are all one people with a common national destiny, a fact which makes us spit at the backwardness of ethnocentric remarks such as the queen mother spewed.
The reward for receiving money and other goodies from a candidate should not threaten national security. If the queen mother was good enough, she should have rather expressed gratitude to the origin of the goodies and steered off the path of national destruction.
It has been a long time since the various ethnic groups in Ghana came together to constitute the Gold Coast and eventually Ghana. “I am a Ghanaian” sounds better than “I am a Dagomba or Fanti” we dare say.
Drivers’ mates graduate into drivers and therefore qualified to take over the steering wheels. It was disingenuous for the queen mother to, besides doing the unacceptable to openly support a candidate based on ethnocentric lines, claim that the driver’s mate should give way to a qualified person to drive.
She was quoted as saying, inter alia, that “Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia himself acknowledged he was only a mate (Vice President) and if his role is done, he should step aside for someone more competent to lead the country.”
That does not make sense at all if she cares to know. In any case, delegates are sensible enough to take decisions which serve best the interest of their political parties and the country as a whole.
It is heartbreaking when an internal election leads persons instrumental in the solidification of national cohesion to do otherwise.
We are disappointed in this woman and her ilk. Such persons should be called out for their unfitness to lead, their words disintegrating rather than unifying.
