Promote national peace, Wangara chief urges

Nana Yusif Fanyinama III, President of the Council of Wangara Chiefs in Ghana has appealed to traditional authorities and tribal leaders to promote peace among their people.

He said as the Election 2016 event draws closer, “we must organise our subjects to preach peace and tranquility, adherence to law and order for them to also promote the same among themselves”.

Nana Fanyinama said this in an interview with the Ghana News Agency during the recent annual national Benkadi Kurubi festival of the Chiefs and people of the Wangara people held at Kintampo.

The theme for the event was: “Promoting Peaceful Co-existence for National Development”.

He said the essence of the four-day festival, which was climaxed with a grand durbar and attended by Wangaras from all parts of Ghana, was to help in creating and maintaining an atmosphere of peace as the nation prepares towards the presidential and parliamentary elections in November 2016.

Nana Fanyinama said usually the temperature of the political atmosphere increases as the date for the general election draws closer.

He said there was the need for traditional authorities to be proactive by prioritizing the propagation of peaceful messages, saying that would compel politicians at all levels to focus their campaign messages on issues for national cohesion and development.

Nana Fanyinama said the festival had made a lot of impact on the lives of the Wangaras in the country because hitherto to its revival in 1999, the illiteracy rate among them was very high.

But through the frequent admonitions during occasions of the festival, on the indigenes to see education as the key to human resource development, parents and guardians began supporting their wards in formal education and now the literacy rate has gone up, Nana Fanyinama said.

He said to promote the acquisition of formal education to the highest level among the Wangara youth, the national Council of Wangara Chiefs had since 2014 established the Wangara Education Fund to sponsor brilliant but needy pupils and students.

Nana Fanyinama said “as Kurubi in Arabic means get closer to Allah”, one cardinal objective of the festival is to promote and maintain moral uprightness, especially among the Wangara youth.

He said that would help in the reduction of the incidence of teenage pregnancy and also to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases among the youth.