This old Fadama bloody interethnic clashes between the Dagombas and the Konkombas at the Agbogbloshie Yam Market in our nation’s capital must be stopped immediately (See “Moving Us Won’t Solve Tensions – Old Fadama Residents Fume” Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 4/13/17). As a practical solution, Mr. David Asante Apeatu has suggested that these two longtime enemy-tribe residents of Old Fadama need to be relocated as a matter of urgency, in order to guarantee effective policing of that most troubled enclave of Accra. Mr. Apeatu is, of course, the newly appointed Inspector-General of the Ghana Police Service (IGP). This fine gentleman must know what he is talking about, because Mr. Apeatu is a career peace officer who has been with what used to be known as the Ghana Police Force for quite a long time.
Conversely, Mr. Fredrick Opoku, who is described by the media as the Secretary of the Old Fadama Development Association, vehemently begs to differ. He thinks that the best way to solving this seemingly intractable internecine conflict raging between these two belligerent northern-originated ethnic groups is to sit their leaders at a conference or roundtable and let them jaw out their grievances. I am quite sure that this is not the very first time that such a suggestion has been made. I am also very certain that a lot of such conferences and discussions have been held between these two enemy tribes and government authorities in the recent past. Well, as the great German physicist and immortalized thinker Prof. Albert Einstein once observed, you cannot expect to do the same thing, or conduct the same scientific experiment over and over again and come up with a different result every time. It just doesn’t happen like that in real life and human experience; and you bet your bottom-dollar, it is not going to happen in this case as well.
In other words, whether Mr. Opoku and his associates of the ironically named Old Fadama Development Association like it or not, the die is already cast and the Rubicon has since long been crossed. There ought to be no turning back. The Agbogbloshie interethnic and internecine blood-letting feud has been raging now for years, if not decades. It also well appears to have become intractable and practically irresolvable like the Galamsey menace which has gripped the nation, literally, by the throttle, which ought to be promptly and radically extirpated, as well, or it is going to hang uncomfortably around our necks like the proverbial albatross impeding the country’s general progress and development. These apparent children and grandchildren of Dracula ought to take their damn bloody business elsewhere. We are a civilized democracy which cannot abide such immitigable culture of wanton savagery.
Indeed, in the lead-up to the 2012 general election, as I vividly remember, several residents in this part of Accra were widely reported by the media to have been horrifically decapitated in another bout of interethnic animosity. And yet, back then, I didn’t hear about any talk of human rights violations from Mr. Opoku, the so-called Secretary of the Old Fadama Development Association. And so why would Mr. Opoku now be bitterly bickering about human rights violations, should the two enemy tribes be separated and/or relocated, as is being wisely suggested by the IGP? Annoyingly, Mr. Opoku also wants to know what would happen to the rest of the non-Konkomba and non-Dagomba residents of Old Fadama, which has been described as the largest urban residential slum in the country. Well, my simple riposte is that whatever happens, once the trouble-making tribes in the Agbogbloshie Yam Market hostilities are strategically removed and sanity restored to the vicinity, is none of anybody’s damn business. As the tired, old Akan maxim goes: “We have to fight and move forward, not backwards.”
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