Tamale residents hit the streets against politics of ethnicity

By Philip Otuo,

 

Residents of Tamale led by the Forum for Accountable Leadership, a pressure group, on Thursday morning took to the streets to protest what they say is a growing trend of ethnocentric pronouncements from some politicians in the country.

The protestors say recent ethnocentric comments by Yaw Osafo Marfo, a former Minister of State and member of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) could plunge the nation in to confusion.

Protestors include members of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the Peoples National Congress (PNC) among other political parties carried placards some of which read 'Equal Rights for All', 'One People', 'One Nation', and 'Ghana Belongs to All of Us'.

Osafo Marfo is alleged to have made comments in a leaked tape which suggested that other tribes were inferior to his in terms of natural resource endowment, an  allegation he has vehemently denied.

The residents matched through the principal streets of Tamale and finally gathered at the Tamale Jubilee park where they were address by the spokesperson of the group Saani Mohammed Lukman.

Lukman said over the last four years, “we have heard derogatory comments about the Northern Ghanaian suggesting that but for the free education policy introduced by the Nkrumah government, Northerners will have been rearing cattle”.

According to him, the peace of the country should not be “compromised on the altar of political gamesmanship".

In a related development the NDC in the Northern Region in a statement has called on the leadership of the party to compel Osafo Marfo to unreservedly withdraw or retract and apologize to the good people of the country.

In a press statement issued and signed by the Communication Manager of the party in the region, Abdul