How Would A Rawlings-like Leader Deal With Terrorism In Ghana?
The Oasis Reporters
April 8, 2022
Looking hypothetically at what a leader like late John Jerry Rawlings would have done to deal with terrorism and terrorists tormenting the Ghanaian people, hypothetically speaking again, by his Ewe tribesmen, here are some scenarios.
Here are his antecedents.
John Jerry Rawlings was fathered by a Scotsman and an Ewe woman. His maternal region straddles between Ghana and Togo. So you’d find some Togolese people who speak Ewe and French.
On the Ghanaian side of the border, the Ewe people there speak their native language and English.
Ordinarily, one would be unable to tell the difference between the Ewe in Togo, from the Ewe in Ghana, until you spoke either English or French.
With a Ghanaian mother, Rawlings would be exceedingly qualified to be a full fledged Ghanaian, because Ghanaian patrimony is matrilineal. It means that if one’s mother is a Ghanaian, the son of that Ghanaian woman can even be a King there. Or be anything.
Quite unlike in Nigeria where inheritance is patrilineal. Nigerians follow the paternal lineage.
Thus a man like Jerry Rawlings was fully qualified to be the president of Ghana. He was president and Military head of State for a cumulative period of twenty years or thereabouts.
Rawlings presided over Ghana fairly to the best of his abilities.
One thing stands Rawlings out fairly in my subconscious. At one time, Ewe people had some airs… you know that kind of feeling when the head of State is a kinsman or a brother.
Like it happened when an alleged Agbor man in government under Governor Ifeanyi Okowa who’s from Agbor kingdom (call it Ika) caused a woman to be beaten and stripped naked by the official in question because he felt he was above the law, being a kinsman of the state governor.
Governor Okowa was said to have heard. Not only did he ensure that the offending official was summarily dismissed from office, the humiliated woman received a huge apology. That incident made many Deltans love their governor more.
During the regime of Jerry Rawlings in Ghana. An Ewe relation of his, committed murder. The matter was taken to court. The trial judge knew that Rawlings’ relation was guilty. But he found a technicality and freed the murderer.
President Rawlings somehow heard. He was furious. Then ordered for a retrial in another court. The relation was found guilty of murder and he was executed.
Rawlings hated impunity and he was not nepotistic. Hence Ghanaians showered love and encomiums on him.
If he were a Fulani Nigerian leader, banditry by Fulani militia would have ended long ago. Perhaps much faster than the colonial masters ended the Fulani kidnapping and the sale of captives into slavery that they carried out before the British put an end to slave trade. The British colonial masters also captured and jailed Fulani emirs that persisted in banditry and slave trade. Some of the emirs were captured and exiled to Lokoja where they lived and died in prison.
Bandits in Nigeria have been kidnapping school children, killing some, collecting huge ransoms from others and feeling very free, like untouchable peacocks.
So the family of the abducted Bank of Agric boss paid N100m ransom for his release ?
Really bad optics.
And what was it that Prof. Yusuf say ?
The bandits are young children who spend all that ransom payments they receive on drugs and more guns. Yusuf may have had an intention in mind to spread the tale.
Perhaps he was warning Nigerians of the enormity of the problem, or to warn people that the bandits are invincible.
One unintended effect is that people have become angry and if it runs off on other Fulani politicians, that would be unfair because the tar can taint the decent ones as well.
Leaving this problem unsolved by the government would amount to bad optics for the government.
