One For You, Billy Adama!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Nov. 7, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]

The story convulsed me with quite a few guffaws and chuckles. But it was scarcely a laughing matter. It had to do with the wantonly predatory behavior of cattle herders and rustlers from Mali and Burkina Faso, where statutory edicts have been passed severely limiting, and some say even hindering, the almost invariably predatory activities of these at once seasonal and perennial agricultural menace and nuisances in the West African sub-region.

I guffawed and chuckled because this time it was the farms of Ghanaians resident in the Upper-East Region of the country whose produce was being callously and systematically laid to waste. And even worse, the women victims of these predatory cattle herders and rustlers were also, reportedly, being raped with impunity and reckless abandon. Why Ghana, which has no sizeable indigenous community of cattle herders and rustlers, has not passed any laws restricting the destructive activities of these nomadic "outsiders" boggles the imagination. For in recent years, Ghanaian farmers have been at the receiving end of the bulk of the economically destabilizing activities of these human predators.

The last time that I wrote about this seemingly intractable problem, a forum commentator suggested that there was evidence of the fact of these cattle herders and rustlers being staunchly backed by highly placed interests at the highest levels of government who may well be either conniving with or condoning such morally and economically depraved and regressive activities. Hitherto, most of the economically destabilizing and downright criminal activities of these largely Hausa-Fulani cattle herders and rustlers had occurred in the southern half of the country, especially in the Eastern and Asante regions.

Indeed, I decided to caption this article with the name of Mr. William Adama because a couple of years ago when I raised this very issue with him, my brother-in-law's fast buddy snorted it off as a fundamentally southern-Ghanaian problem. Billy is a native of Wa, capital of the Upper-West Region. Implicit in his snort was that, somehow, the Akans were either too soft or cowardly to effectively and decisively deal with this increasingly provocative Hausa-Fulani menace. In the north, Billy proudly retorted, "real" men got together, armed themselves and promptly vanquished these Hausa-Fulani vermin. I had called for either the swift and decisive intervention of the Ghana Armed Forces, or the imperative need for the government to militarily equip the victims of such criminal acts of predation to fiercely defend themselves.

Billy is a savvy Russian-trained mining engineer, just like his buddy and my brother-in-law, Mr. Frederick Kwadwo Henaku. Billy's quite affable and personable wife is also from Lithuania. He doesn't seem to particularly care for partisan politics, but now that he has become a quite successful professional and a remarkable businessman in his own right, Billy acknowledges, once awhile, that trucking with the Rawlings-Mahama posse has not been harmful at all. Not the least bit.

Presently, Billy sits on one of those "water boards" in Accra. I hope the crabby politics of "Dumsornomics" is not as "hydrologically" acute as it has been perennially so hydro-electrically. Whatever be the case, the government, particularly parliament, needs to step up to the plate and pass a Cattle-Ranching Law, as vehemently demanded by the Peasant Farmers' Association of Ghana (PFAG) and its local leader, Mr. John Akaribo. Else, the PFAG members would be left with no other viable or constructive alternative but to constitute themselves into the Ghana National Rifle Association for Self-Defense (GNRASD). How about that, Billy Adama?

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