The oil-rich Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago this past Thursday welcomed Ghana’s President John Agyekum Kufuor to an official State Visit with a breathtaking military ceremony, cultural event and a line-up of citizens across its national capital, Port of Spain.
Many of the 1.2 million indigenes of the bigger Island of Trinidad out of the estimated 1.3 million population of the twin-island turned up on the major streets of their national capital to give the Ghanaian leader a rousing welcome, despite later rains which some said they had feared could have marred the visit. By the end of the rains however, an appearance of a rainbow saw many interpreting the visit as a good omen and a good sign of the relations between the two countries.
President Kufuor, who had been invited by the twin-island as its special guest for the national Emancipation celebrations for this year, arrived at the Piarco International Airport in Port of Spain late Thursday afternoon and immediately received a 21-gun salute and inspected a full guard mounted in his honour.
The visiting Ghanaian Head of State and his entourage, which included Minister for Tourism and Diasporan Affairs Mrs. Oboshie Sai-Cofie, Secretary to the President Ambassador D. K. Osei, former Minister for Tourism and Diasporan Affairs Jake Obetsebi Lamptey, Ghana’s Ambassador to Cuba and High Commissioner to Barbados, Jamaica, Grenada and Trinidad and Tobago, Mrs Cecilia Gyan Amoah, and the President’s Press Secretary Andrew Awuni, were met on arrival by a Trinidadian and Tobagonian delegation led by Prime Minister Patrick Manning and his wife and senator, Mrs Hazel Manning.
The Trinidadian delegation also included the island’s Chief of Defence Staff Brigadier Edmund Dillon and other members of government, including Foreign Affairs Minister Paula Gopee-Scoon, Culture Minister Marlene McDonald, Education Minister Esther Le Gendre, and Works and Transport Minister Colm Imbert among other top technocrats.
The Ghanaian delegation was immediately treated to a series of cultural events on the tarmac of the Piarco International Airport after formal introduction by the Prime Minister.
President Kufuor and his entourage were then taken through the streets of the national capital, with thousands of people lined up to celebrate the arrival of the Ghanaian President, whom Prime Minister Patrick Manning later described as the “capo d tuti” of African leaders who had graced the Emancipation Day celebrations in recent times.
Recent African leaders invited by the Trinibagonians for their Emancipation Day celebrations are former Nigeria President Olusegun Obasanjo, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni and Ghana’s former President Jerry John Rawlings.
The twin-island State, regarded as one of the richest and most advanced nations in the Caribbean region, with a thriving economy and petro-chemical industry, left little room for anyone to doubt the seriousness it attaches to the third visit by a Ghanaian Head of State.
It unveiled a well-choreographed show of culture, featuring its various diversity of Indian, African, Spanish, Ameri-Indian, Chinese and mixed race ancestry of the cosmopolitan island, which is very famous for its world renowned colourful carnivals.
Men and women in colourful carnival costumes, with steel bands playing Soca tunes were on hand to make the visit exciting, even before the leaders of the two countries went into serious discussions and negotiations later on.
The first Ghanaian leader to visit the island was the nation’s iconic first Prime Minister and later President, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, who Trinibagonians remember fondly because of his works with some their founding fathers, including C. L. Smith and George Padmore. Another famous son of the twin island, the talented Tobagonian Soca legend, Lord Kitchener, gave Ghana its powerful independence Calyspo song, ‘Ghana, Free Forever’.
The second visit by a Ghanaian leader, a year before annual Emancipation Day celebrations was established in Ghana, was by the first President of the 4th Republic, Jerry John Rawlings, who paid a State visit to the island with a delegation in 1997.
President Kufuor who was the guest speaker at the Emancipation Day celebrations launched the Khambule Street Procession, a huge carnivalesque of Trinibagonians, together with the country’s Prime Minister at the Brian Lara Promenade Treasury Building, named after the islands’ most famous Cricketer.
President Kufuor later had close door bilateral economic discussions with both Prime Minister Manning and President of the twin island, Professor George Maxwell Richards, who urged him to ensure that his successors follow-up on key developmental issues of interest to the two countries after Ghana’s December 2008 election.
