By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
March 27, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
I don’t know what Alhaji Said Sinare was thinking when he asserted that the National Democratic Congress (NDC) has a virtual monopoly over the votes of the residents of zongo communities throughout the country (See “ ‘NPP Can Never Win the Zongos’” Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 3/27/16). What is clear is that the Egytian-mothered Ghanaian Ambassador to the Islamic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is an integral part of the reason why zongos around the country continue to be so economically depressed. Essentially, filthy rich and exploitative corporate politicians like Alhaji Sinare have absolutely nothing to offer the overwhelming majority of the residents of our zongo communities.
Instead, they use religion, in this instance Islam, to prevent the smooth and healthy integration of Ghanaian Muslims into our larger national community. It is about time our zongo-resident brothers and sisters held unconscionably parasitic and rogue politicians like Alhaji Sinare to account. Indeed, about the only achievement of the National Democratic Congress over the past 30 years has been the cynical and expedient whipping up of the sentiments of zongo residents against the larger non-Muslim communities around the country. This Machiavellian political mischief-making gimmickry ought to be progressively brought to an immediate halt.
What our largely Muslim zongo-resident kinsmen and women ought to start doing is to take stock of the inescapably bleak nature and the grim level of their socioeconomic development, compared to that of their fellow citizens in the mainstream of Ghanaian society, and then seriously begin to ask themselves some pretty hard questions as to why they clearly appear to be living in a wholly different world and society from the rest of Ghanaians. I mean, it is quite obvious that zongo residents have benefited far less from taxpayer money and development assistance under the government, and governance, of the National Democratic Congress than they did under 8 years of the Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party.
In the area of education, for example, successive NDC governments have done little to absolutely nothing for members of our zongo communities, which is largely why Muslim students have crowded our Christian missionary academies and public schools and have been periodically experiencing religious and cultural problems with the Christian and non-religious majority of the Ghanaian populace. The present NDC government, as well as previous NDC governments, has done little towards forging healthy ecumenical and interreligious alliances among the various recognizable religious and multicultural communities in the country, besides cynically taking advantage of hajj-embarking Ghanaian Muslims seasonally and annually for cheap political point-scoring objectives. In essence, all that these “revolutionary” faux-social democratic NDC politicians voraciously thrive on is divide and conquer and then wantonly and cheaply exploit.
In the lead-up to the 2012 presidential election, for example, the northern-descended President John Dramani Mahama vitriolically tore into his most formidable political opponent, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, because the New Patriotic Party’s presidential candidate had dared to promise decent housing at affordable rental rates for female head porters, otherwise known as Kayayei, most of whom are migrants from the three northern regions desperate for survival who swarm many a southern Ghanaian city and town. Mr. Mahama’s reason, then, for caustically attacking Nana Akufo-Addo was that as a non-northern-descended Ghanaian by either ethnicity or birth, or both, the New Patriotic Party’s candidate had absolutely no right to presume to know what was good and sound for the northern poor and destitute who were being wantonly exploited and, often, sexually abused in southern cities and towns like Accra, Kumasi, Cape Coast, Tema, Sekondi-Takoradi and Koforidua, among a legion of others.
The problem here is that rather than vigorously and frontally take him on for such flagrant exhibition of constitutionally insufferable act of bigotry, mischievously disguised as invidious victimization of a civic underdog, Nana Akufo-Addo and his campaign handlers and managers sheepishly sidled away from this crucial national menace, almost as if to curiously acknowledge that, somehow, Mr. Mahama’s criminal neglect of “his own people,” as vice-president to then-President John Evans Atta-Mills, late, was somehow an enviable mark of gubernatorial distinction. It goes without saying that such decidedly lame approach to electioneering campaigning may well have cost the NPP leader the Flagstaff House. It is a clearly defeatist campaign strategy that ought to be promptly abandoned and refreshingly retooled, if Nana Akufo-Addo and the New Patriotic Party are to have a fighting chance in this year’s November 7 presidential election.
For the teeming residents and citizens of our zongo communities throughout the country, it is imperative that they not be taken for granted by self-serving rogue politicians like Alhaji Said Sinare. They need to vote primarily based on what benefits they have derived from the abjectly corrupt and hopelessly incompetent Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress, and not on whether they are northern-descended, Muslim by faith or they do not share the same native tongue as the leader of the party that Alhaji Sinare, who has spent most of the last four years enjoying his plum diplomatic appointment in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, would have them unwisely ignore.
Good leaders make all citizens, regardless of cultural differences, or ethnicity, feel happy, comfortable and proud to be a part of our one and only nation. If four years of having a northern-descended president at the Flagstaff House has done little to significantly improve their socioeconomic status, another four years of having President Mahama, the so-called Northern Hope, occupy the helm of Ghana’s affairs can only be expected to further compound the already complicated lives and problems of our zongo kinsmen and women.
*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs
