President Akufo-Addo Must Drop The Dangerous Idea Of Creating New Regions

There are dangerous forces at work trying to revive a pre-independence idea roundly rejected by ordinary people in the Gold Coast - because they cottoned on to the fact that it was meant to entrench inherited privilege from the precolonial era after independence.

President Akufo-Addo, whose credentials as a democratic leader and believer in the manifest benefits of meritocracy are not in doubt, ought to rethink what clearly  constitutes a long-term threat to national cohesion.

We all want our country to become a prosperous society that is an African equivalent of the egaliterian societies of Scandinavia, do we not, I ask?

To achieve that desired end, our homeland Ghana now more than ever needs to unite and move forward together boldly to finally transform itself into a modern African society in which tribalism  does not factor in our national life whatsoever.

After all, regardless of which part of Ghana we call our hometown, we are all an aspirational people. And as we are all aware, in 21st century Africa, no tribe is inferior or superior to another.

Instead of harking back to past tribal glories, as aspirational Africans today, we must perforce focus instead on  leveraging the global digital economy to empower all our people - to bootstrap their own individual wealth-creation success-stories, through hard work and creativity.

That will only happen when we create the conditions that will result in pluralism and dynamism at the grassroots-level.

And pluralism and dynamism at the local level can only be possible  when the main benefit of all free and liberal societies, economic prosperity resulting from the competition of ideas that enable the best ideas to emerge to drive society forward, are created by freely and fairly electing candidates of all Ghana's political parties to  metropolitan, municipal and district assembly membership and as chief executives, in competitive local elections across Ghana every four years.

When the New Patriotic Party's (NPP) Hopeson Adorye once stated gleefuly on Kwame Sefa Kaye's Kokrokoo morning programme on Peace FM  (shortly after the funeral of his late mother) that the Asantes and Bonos would finally  have their own regions with the creation of same, he was unwittingly letting the cat out of the bag.

For the sake of the well-being of  Mother Ghana, the time has now come for the more  responsible sections of the Ghanaian media to call a spade a spade. The real reason driving the demand for the creation of new regions is to fulfil a longstanding dream held by today's relatively few tribal supremacists for a federation of the pre-colonial tribal entities that were permanently dominated by that dark-age-for-freedom's  ruling elites.

President Akufo-Addo must drop the dangerous  new regions creation idea and focus instead on bringing the many benefits of democracy to people at the grassroots-level by fulfilling his 2016 election campaign  promise to allow Ghanaians to elect  candidates of political parties to membership of metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies and as chief executives. That is what our nation desperately needs if it is to ever become a prosperous society. Haaba.