Wa, July 26, GNA - The Ghana Enslavement Reparation and Repatriation Foundation (GERRF), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) operating in the northern regions, has appealed to President John Atta Mills to stop using the Osu castle as his residence and office accommodation.
The NGO noted that the castle has been identified as a slave camp and it was not good for "the number one man" of the country to have his residence at a slave camp.
"Slavery has been abolished long ago and Ghanaians must stop endorsing it by allowing our President to continue to stay in a slave camp," the NGO said.
Kuoro Kuri Buktie Limann, an executive member of the NGO, said this during an interaction with journalists in Wa in remembrance of this year's Emancipation Day. "It is highly obnoxious for presidents of this country to sit at a slave camp and govern the country and this must stop now".
He therefore appealed to Ghanaians to think about turning the castle and all other facilities that were used as slaves' camps to museums, to attract tourists rather than turning some of them into residential places for the president and for prisoners.
Kuoro Limann, who is also the Paramount Chief of the Gwollu Traditional Area in the Sissala West District of the Upper West Region, accused the Ghana Tourist Board for its deliberated attempt to exclude the north from the history of the slave trade.
"Very often, remembrance activities of the Slave Trade and slavery are limited to the south to the neglect of the north where most of the slaves were believed to have been catcher and marched down to Cape Coast in chains and shackles".
Kuoro Limann noted that there had also been some kind of attempt to distort the history of slave trade in the north and linking its dominance to chiefs who they accused as collaborators and connivers of the event.
He said there was no truth in the story that chiefs collaborated and sold their people to slave raiders in the north, rather, it was some ethnic groups in the south who waged wars on northern people and kept them under enemy control, and demanded for huge numbers of strong and able body persons every year as compensation to their chiefs.
The north at that time had no chiefs and nobody should try to link chiefs to the slave trade. The level of accusation that chiefs in the north help to sell their people can not be said to be true, Kuoro Limann lamented.
Kuoro Limann said the north had been devastated as a result of the slave trade and that had affected its development.
He called for compensation from the western countries, especially USA and Britain to develop the north.
He said government's attempt to use interventions such as the Savannah Accelerated Authority (SADA) as a tool to develop the north and bring it at par to the south, was a complete joke.
The SADA cannot make any difference because the development gap was huge and the government's finances would be minimal to undertake any meaningful development or create any positive impact on the lives of the people, Kuoro Limann said.
"The beginning of SADA ought to be the ending," he said, adding: "The NDC government promise more money during its campaign for votes from the people, but what have we seen, pettiness and lip-service.
"They promised tractors and fertilizers to farmers and asked where the tractors and fertilizers to increase food production were?"
Kuoro Limann called on the government to advocate for compensation from the western countries which benefited from the slave trade to develop the north, explaining that the resources of the country were limited for any meaningful development to the people. He lamented that except Dr Kwame Nkrumah all past presidents, including his late brother Dr Limann, were to be blamed for endorsing slavery by administering the country at the castle, which is considered a slave camp",
