News that a group calling itself the “Osu Traditional Council” had ‘banned’ former President Kufuor from the area comprising lands traditionally occupied by the Osu people, is one of the most outrageous news items, ever put out into the public domain, in recent times. It also illustrates perfectly the absurdity of the delusions of grandeur that afflicts so many traditional rulers (and their acolytes), up and down our homeland Ghana.
Yet, the plain truth, is that “traditional authorities” do not wield the same powers that their pre-colonial predecessors had in the past – although so many of them like to delude themselves into thinking that they are just as powerful as some of their feudal forebears were. Today, the Ghanaian nation-state is a Leviathan that has the power of life and death over all who reside within the landmass encompassed by its borders – and it exercises powers clearly spelt out in our constitution: including the power to compulsorily acquire land in any part of our Republic.
The time has come to make it plain to so-called “traditional authorities” across our homeland Ghana, that many ordinary Ghanaians mainly tolerate their continued existence for purely sentimental reasons – and that as an institution, if they are to become a source of continued tension that threatens the cohesion of our united nation of ethnic-diversity and its very survival, we will gladly get rid of them quickly: in order to save the enterprise Ghana from disintegrating. India, after all, more or less got rid of its Maharajas successfully, without breaking up, did it not?
Although some of us may loathe all that he stands for politically, it is important that his critics come to the defence of our former president in this instance. The gross disrespect shown to former President Kufuor, by those unpleasant tribal-supremacists masquerading as Ga Dangbe patriots, ought to be condemned by all decent-minded people in the strongest possible terms. No “traditional council” can ban former President Kufuor, or any other Ghanaian, from any part of our country.
The “Osu Traditional Council” does its cause, whatever it is, no good at all, by resorting to crude tactics reminiscent of the authoritarian rulers of our pre-colonial feudal past. It is important that all the arrogant tribal-supremacists in our midst countrywide, understand clearly that in the final analysis, all land in Ghana ultimately comes under the control of the Ghanaian nation-state – whose sovereign territory includes all the lands traditionally occupied by the indigenes of Osu, as well as lands elsewhere traditionally occupied by Ghanaians of other ethnic extraction.
Ultimately, they all occupy those lands on sufferance – as the government can acquire any of those lands compulsorily at any given point in time, for the benefit of our Republic and the generality of its people. Throughout our history, Chiefs have been notorious for selling lands they hold in trust for their people in opaque transaction after opaque transaction, and have shared the proceeds between themselves and their sycophantic palace acolytes – and they have been at it for hundreds of years.
Greed for money is what lies behind the mad scramble by “traditional authorities” across Ghana, for the return of lands acquired by the state, before and after independence, to facilitate our nation’s developmental agenda. Many of those past land acquisitions by the state were made by Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s regime because he was a leader who wanted our nation’s resources to benefit all Ghanaians (not just a powerful few with greedy ambitions, to paraphrase Nkrumah).
Nkrumah would never have countenanced any part of the portfolio of land acquired by the Ghanaian nation-state, being returned to their original owners, simply because specific projects they had been earmarked for had not yet seen the light of day. Sadly, some of our post-Nkrumah leaders adopted the rather shortsighted policy of ‘returning’ state-owned land to their original owners – because it suited them personally to do so.
Unfortunately, that shortsighted policy will continue to be carried out whenever our nation has the misfortune of falling into the hands of powerful and greedy people, for whom good governance principles (such as always avoiding conflict of interest situations) do not matter. It is precisely when such tragedy befalls our nation that there is the scramble by politically well-connected individuals to acquire government-owned land.
As far as many of Ghana’s patriots and nationalists are concerned, the state acquired all those lands in good faith and paid fair compensation for them – and in their view it can be argued that since they were acquired for national development, that overall public-good objective holds true for all time, in perpetuity. Consequently, once those lands have been acquired, it is not necessarily the “project-status”, in terms of the non-completion of the particular individual projects such lands were originally acquired for, that should determine their continued retention by the state.
The justification for their continued retention is that they are intrinsically valuable national assets in themselves. All the parcels of land in the government’s portfolio of land must be regarded as a store of value for the enterprise Ghana – and ought to be considered tangible parts of the diversified investment portfolio held by the Republic of Ghana, on behalf of all Ghanaians. They are there to be utilized for future national development projects for which land will be required, but the nature of which cannot possibly be foreseen now.
Today, for example, we are blessed to have the Kofi Annan Information Technology Centre located bang opposite the Council of State’s offices – yet, when that area was originally acquired in the colonial era to build houses for public officials, no one could have foreseen, then, that one day there would be a need to allocate a plot there to house that vital national institution, and facilitate the important work done there to secure our country’s digital future in the 21st century ICT age.
As regards the rumpus caused by the activities of the so-called “Osu Traditional Council,” it can be said that in a sense President Kufuor has been hoisted on his own petard – and is paying personally for his ruthless pursuit of Kokofu-football politricks, during his tenure. The irony in all this, is that at the beginning of their tenure, the Kufuor regime’s Akan tribal-supremacists (who constituted the small but powerful cabal at the heart of the presidency), felt that returning state-acquired lands in Kumasi to their original owners, was urgent business that in their view had to be seen to quickly.
Their hidden agenda at the time was to give their favourite tribal Chiefs the opportunity to enrich themselves – by making as much state-owned land in Kumasi available to them as was possible, to sell. As a consequence, throughout President Kufuor’s tenure, scores of parcels of land still owned by the state in Kumasi, for example, ended up being sold illegally, with total impunity, by some of the greediest of traditional rulers that Ghanaians have ever known.
At one stage, even land at Kwadaso (my birthplace), on which important crop trials by one of the research institutes of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) were being held, was suddenly grabbed by some of those greedy philistines, and promptly sold to developers. They did not care one jot that the results of those crop trials could eventually help provide food security for our nation.
Having opened the floodgates and finally succeeded in suitably empowering their favourite tribal Chiefs, that unfortunate and negative character-trait so typical of Kufuor and Co., avarice, rose to the fore again – and made them focus their attention on state-owned lands in Accra. One of the unfortunate results of the Kufuor regime’s land-grab-mania is that even land earmarked for a new office building for the ministry of foreign affairs has now ended up in private hands.
As we all now know, choice government land on which houses for government officials were built decades ago (some as far back as the colonial era), were also parceled out amongst some of the members of the Kufuor regime, their relations, and cronies. Another casualty of the greed of some of our previous leaders, has been the military – which has had large chunks of its land portfolio taken away and sold to private developers.
In fairness to him, it is important to point out that that disgraceful practice did not start with the regime that President Kufuor led. It began shortly after the Nkrumah regime was overthrown in 1966 – and a number of the free-market conservative stooges for imperialism and neocolonialism in our country, who have held power at various periods in the post-Nkrumah era, have all been guilty of this shameful practice.
One hopes that the current tribulations of former President Kufuor and his acolytes will be a lesson for members of the present regime – and prevent them from continuing with the nonsensical policy of selling state-owned land. We must start seeing state-owned land for what they actually are: valuable national assets that need to be guarded jealously by all of us – for future generations of Ghanaians to use for their collective benefit. A word to the wise…
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