A Security Analyst, Dr. Kwesi Aning, has described as xenophobic the massive public outcry against Fulanis in Agogo, a farming community in the Asante Akyem North municipality of the Ashanti Region.
According to him, the country’s leaders have failed woefully to curb the situation when it first erupted several years ago.
“Individuals who ought to have acted much earlier by using their logic approaches are now hiding behind their failure and now use xenophobic language against the Fulanis who were either invited to the area or found the place as fertile grounds for grazing.”
[contextly_sidebar id=”b8lQRIX1G8h6GRWjIPbMN86FAeTmHTc0″]“Where we have gotten to in the last couple of days also reflect a much larger set of institutional failures. We’ve gotten here because we can’t face the truth. We’ve gotten here because lies have triumphed over reality. We have allowed a simple solvable problem to become an intractable problem and an intractable potentially violent conflict. Where we have gotten to in the last couple of days also reflect a much larger set of institutional failures,” he argued.
Dr. Ening made the remarks on the Citi Breakfast Show on Thursday, when he sought to explain the rationale behind the recent impasse between Fulanis in Agogo and locals of the area.
The Fulani herdsmen have been consistently accused of engaging in violent crimes against the locals.
The Member of Parliament (MP) for the Asante Akyen North constituency, Kwadwo Baah Agyemang, recently rallied some residents of the area to protest against the Fulanis.
But according to Dr. Aning, the country’s intelligence and secret services Act 526 among other things, give direction on how such issues must be solved.
“In 1996, we enacted the Intelligence and Secret Services Act 526; we established a set of one of the most complex and widespread intelligence framework anywhere in this world, right from the community level, district level, municipal, metropolitan and to the national level.”
He explained that the Act created the “regional, district or community security council where they were to serve as an early warning framework and to propose a set of proactive preventive intervention measures so that what we are seeing spreading across the country, ought not to have happened at all so that if whatever Municipality Agogo comes under, those who sat on those council have consistently failed to first gather intelligence to interpret it and to provide options for interventions and resolutions.”
“It is that consistent failure of intelligence that has come all the way up to the ministerial level because if you are a substantive minister overseeing these challenges, even if they are mentioned tangentially in the news, you demand a report upon which you act. So it is this replication of failure masquerading as political correctness that has led us to where we are.”
The Security Analyst advised Ghanaians to stop using such “extenuatory xenophobic statements that Fulanis are non-Ghanaians, Fulanis are invasive, Fulanis must be driven away.”
–
By: Godwin A. Allotey/citifmonoline.com/Ghana