When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his colour or his belief or policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies.
We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancements in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children’s future cannot be built on the misfortune of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled nor enriched by hatred or revenge. (Robert F. Kennedy)
It is an undisputable fact in the politics of this country since 1992 that the National Democratic Congress (NDC) has always used divisive politics to hold on to power. In the heat of the 1992 general elections, it re-played the social class division between the rich and the poor to garner the votes of the poor and the vulnerable in society since this was the platform upon which the PNDC took power and sustained it. The P/NDC created and continues to create the impression in the minds of the poor and the downtrodden that they are where they are because of the rich in the society.
The rich became targets for destruction and total annihilation, physically, socially and emotionally. Local businesses were deliberately targeted for destruction, particularly those belonging to Akans. That is why the B. A. Mensahs, Siaws, Boakye Mattress, Apentengs, Kowus Motors, J.A. Addisons etc, cannot be found in our industrial and manufacturing sectors of the economy. This trend continued until the middle of the 1990s when the strategy lost steam because the poor and the under privileged saw their hitherto poor compatriots gallivanting around town in Pajeros and other flashy cars as well as occupying expensive mansions in areas reserved for the so-called rich and the affluent. Their next strategy was to play on ethnicity. Akans who make for the largest group of people in this country became targets.
The NDC since the 1990s has made Akans who are predominantly located in the South, enemies to the minority ethnic groups in this country, blaming them for the economic woes of the less endowed sections of this beautiful country. Even when a large population of our brothers and sisters from the north and other non-Akan areas have migrated from their areas to down south and are living harmoniously with their counterparts in the south and legitimately plying their vocations without let or hindrance, the NDC keeps on creating a wedge between them and their hosts. The NDC uses Dispatchers who never get to their destinations to further create hatred even among those of us from the south by creating non-existing feud between the Akyems and the Asantes just for political reasons. Newspapers are paid to do just that.
To its disgruntled followers, the NDC instills fears in them threatening them with imprisonment should the NPP be voted into power when these impoverished people have committed no crime against the NPP to warrant such persecutions and prosecutions. To foreigners, they are told that the NPP would drive them away should the party get to power. None of the above happened when the NPP under Kufuor ruled this country for eight years.
In the desperation of the party, it has begun this outmoded and nation wrecking ethnic based politics, a dangerous path which has seen many nations travelling into an abyss of social destruction and disintegration. Not too long ago, a former Minister of Transport, Miss Dzifa Attivor, caught in one of the most heinous acts of contract awards in the history of this country voluntarily resigned her position. Having been exposed hugely after other such pungent contract awards and fearful of her own safety into the future with the law, stood on a political platform in the Volta Region to ask her kith and kin to vote for the NDC if they do not want her and other NDC people to go to jail under the NPP.
She used former convicts from her area, the Volta Region, as an example of the NPPs hatred towards the people of that region. If my mind serves me right, Kwame Peprah, Victor Selormey and Moses Asaga were at the Ministry of Finance under Rawlings, Kwame Peprah an Akan and Victor Selormey, an Ewe were prosecuted for wrongdoing and jailed. Nobody touched Moses Asaga. Right thinking Ghanaians condemned her utterances. Not too long ago, another NDC Parliamentary Candidate for a constituency in Tamale urged all Northerners to vote for President John Mahama not because he has improved their lives, but because he is a northerner.
The public was not pleased with that too, one would have thought that the NDC was going to learn from this, nay. On Thursday July 28, 2016, just some two weeks back, Dzifa Attivor and John Kwadwo Gyapong, the Volta Regional Chairman of the NDC were in Takoradi to meet a supposed leadership of Ewe Caucus at the Animens Hotel, strictly by invitation with the political support of my friend and younger brother, the Deputy Western Regional Minister, Mr. Alfred Ekow Gyan.
Dear reader, the kinds of things Dzifa Attivor told her audience is better heard than told. She was in full flight playing Akans generally and Asantes in particular against Ewes. Some of them were dumbfounded because they have lived their lives mostly in the Western Region and had never been discriminated against by anybody on grounds that they are Ewes. Dzifa Attivor speaking impeccable Ewe virtually put fears into her audience that should they vote for the NPP, the party would descend on Ewes and treat them as second class citizens of this country. She went on to denigrate Akans and how they are disrespectful of other ethnic groups.
Her effusions were supported shamefully by Kwadwo Gyapong, the Volta Region chairman of the NDC. In fact they went on to suggest that it was the NPP who even poisoned the late Major Courage Quarshiga because the NPP did not see him as one of them even though he was a Minister in the administration of the NPP for the eight year period. I feel uncomfortable putting this information out but I am also sure that it is an agenda by the desperate NDC and some of its members whose own insatiable greed for materialism have soiled their hands and see the legal sword of Damocles hanging over their necks should power change hands.
A recent research by Prof. Stephen Adei, one time Rector of GIMPA that one out of every four appointees in the Mahama administration comes from the President’s area makes bare what every Ghanaian knows about this government. It is a trite knowledge that the NDC is very good at turning around the negative things it does on its opponents when it is the very architect of those evil things.
It is very disheartening to see educated people who hold public positions, whipping up ethnic sentiments which divide a nation, to achieve political objectives. Sadly, the very people they intend using against others do not benefit materially from their leadership when they are in power. Documentaries on various T. V networks about the Volta Region shows a people seriously neglected and in dire need of basic needs like water. Basic school infrastructure in that part of this country is among the worst nationwide, yet the P/NDC has governed this country for close to 27 years and throughout, Ewes have offered them their unalloyed support. What did they get in return?
As the Dzifa Attivors move around knocking the heads of Ewes against Akans, do they consider the fact that quite a sizeable number of them live in Akan areas, and that any negative response from their hosts can spell doom for them? There is something many of us Akans appreciate about Ewes, very hardworking and honest people, particularly in the artisanal scope. They work to improve their lives as well as develop where they reside in harmony with their hosts. Dzifa and her cohorts must stop this nonsense, it does not help anybody.