Abandon the use foreign names - Akunu Dake

Chief Executive Officer of Heritage Development, Co-convener of the Ghana culture forum, Mr. Akunu Dake have urged Ghanaians to abandon the use foreign names and stick to the local ones.

Delivering the keynote address at the annual general meeting of the Ghana book publishers association at the M plaza hotel in Accra, he stated that it’s about time Ghanaian parents abandoned the adopted culture of naming their children after foreigners because it’s gradually making us lose our identity as Ghanaians.

He said hardly would find a “white man” naming his child after names such as Kofi, pokua etc yet we take pride in naming our children after “whites” which is a great worry to us as a country and our culture. He also stated that the book publishing industry in Ghana has not grown to proportionately match the literate population with a growing literacy rate of over 60percent since the 1980s because of the ready educational market. He bemoaned that text book production has become the norm for publishing houses of Ghana with various cost and other reasons tend to print their books outside which is very bad.

Chairman of the AGM, Proff Atukwei Okai also advised Ghanaian writers and publishers to develop the habit of reading more because the public feed directly on the books they publish therefore if they wrong the public also goes astray.

Meanwhile Director of creative arts, responsible for programmes & projects at the Commission for National Culture, Socrate Sarfo appealed to writers, movie producers and the creative arts industry to document the achievements of our past heroes and also advised students in our various tertiary institutions to start writing articles about our leaders and heroes because that’s also a way of preserving our culture since the future generation will also have the opportunity to read about such heroes and learn something important from their achievements.