Northern Partitioning and Political Expediency – Part 1

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

An October 28, 2009 Ghana News Agency (GNA) report indicated that the Atta-Mills government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) was intent on establishing a technical team/committee in order to facilitate the partitioning of the Northern Region into “at least” two administrative entities (See “Northern Region To Be Partitioned” Ghanaweb.com 10/28/09).

The basis for partitioning the Northern Region, readers were informed, closely followed on the heels of an ad hoc summit held by that region’s House of Chiefs which is headed by Prof. J. S. Nabila, who also doubles as president of the Ghana National House of Chiefs. It may also be relevantly recalled that Prof. Nabila is a retired faculty member of Ghana’s flagship academy, the University of Ghana, and a former protocol minister and senior cabinet member of the ill-fated Limann administration of the erstwhile People’s National Party (PNP).

In the afore-referenced GNA report, readers are also told that Prof. Nabila recently led a delegation of Northern Regional traditional rulers to the old European slave castle at Osu, otherwise known as Christiansborg, to press the matter further; and also, more significantly, that Vice-President John Dramani Mahama, who is a native of the region and has been an indefatigable champion of Northern Partitioning, had spiritedly assured the delegation that plans were afoot to engineer a regional referendum for this very purpose.

Then also, Ghanaians are further informed that the reason for demanding the partitioning of the Northern Region into “at least” two administrative entities is to “allow for grassroots participation in governance and [the] distribution of national resources more equitably.”

The preceding may aptly be envisaged to entail an unpardonably weird logic on two levels. One, while it is, in fact, true that the people of the Northern Region have been clamoring for the partitioning of their territory into “at least” two discrete administrative enclaves for quite awhile now, it also significant to observe that this is not the first time that the Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC) has embarked on the practically otiose and purely politically expedient balkanization of our country.

For instance, it was the same P/NDC, chaperoned by Flt-Lt. Jeremiah John Rawlings that split the former Upper Region into the Upper-East and Upper-West regions. Back then, the motive put forth was the “inexpedient location” of the then-Upper Regional capital, Bolgatanga, far-off east, rather than central, to the Upper Region. More than a decade later, the peoples of the Upper-West and Upper-East regions are, themselves, quick to point to the grim fact that the “tactical” balkanization of their region has yet to appreciably redound to the socioeconomic, cultural and political benefit of the citizens.

And here, also, we need to quickly and lucidly point out that about the only constituency in Ghana that has remarkably benefited from the largely gratuitous partitioning of the erstwhile Upper Region is the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC). Essentially, as this writer has had occasion to observe, time and time again, about the only benefit that accrued from divvying up the Upper Region into Upper-East and –West regions was a psychologically false sense of political empowerment. For even as of this writing (11/4/09), the Upper-East and –West regions remain, by almost all expert accounts, the most economically deprived of all ten regions of Ghana.

And so it could hardly be that Prof. Nabila is not grossly mistaken in believing that, indeed, the statutory partitioning of the Northern Region “would allow for grassroots participation in governance and distribution of national resources more equitably.”

Needless to say, one does not have to be a Professor Emeritus of the University of Ghana, or any other reputable Ghanaian academy, for that matter, in order to intelligently and empirically conclude that if no appreciable levels of “grassroots participation in governance” and an equitable distribution of national resources, or wealth, have occurred in the two Upper Regions, then, of course, it can only be rather foolhardy for any well-meaning Ghanaian citizen to anticipate that the “tactical” divvying up of the Northern Region is wont to accrue any salutary or substantial benefits for the denizens therein.

Two, it is also rather strange that the key petitioners of Northern partitioning appear to have, for whatever reasons, woefully failed to convince Ghana’s “Chief Divider,” Mr. Jeremiah John Rawlings, of the stark fact that the Northern Region, being far more massive in both land and population sizes (See Ghana’s 2000 Population Census) ought to have foremost merited the statutory exercise of “tactical” balkanization.

In other words, contrary to what the luminary likes of Messrs. Nabila and Mahama would have their countrymen and women believe, the raging clamor for Northern balkanization could, almost definitely, not be rooted in the seemingly apparent or even obvious.

It is also not quite clear precisely how an economically strapped government expedites the material development of its people by sophomorically and facilely proliferating the establishment of capital-intensive administrative structures.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is also a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI), the pro-democracy think-tank, and the author of 20 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected]. ###