Posting to Tamale or transfer to Enchi?

My April 2021 article “13-hours from Enchi to Accra, and No Show” was about parents driving their child from Enchi, Western-North-Region to Labone SHS, Accra in a 13-hour journey, only to be told to go back, and bring the student in five weeks.

On February 3, 2022, a Metropolitan Chief Executive (MCE) was arrested by the police and charged for allegedly recklessly and dangerously driving his V8 Toyota Land Cruiser, after refusing to stop at a police snap roadblock.

In the ensuing altercation between him and a Police Inspector widely heard or seen on radio and TV, the MCE angrily, verbally assaulted and threatened to have the police officer transferred to Enchi!

What did he mean by “I will transfer you to Enchi?”

The MCE’s threat reminded me of an article I wrote in the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) Quarterly, the AFNEWS in the 1980s titled “Post him to Tamale!”

Tamale

Part of it read:

“As young officers in the good old days, we did all that young men our age were capable of doing – good and bad, right and wrong, allowed and disallowed…

“Experience has taught us that as young officers in those days, we stepped on toes. In the process, we got on the nerves of some senior ones, though not deliberately…

“It was during a drinking session in the Mess one afternoon that commenting on a young officer’s conduct, a senior officer fired rather impatiently, ‘if the young man is creating confusion, post him to Tamale’

“The immediate question is, why Tamale?”

In the 1970s, facilities like electricity, telephony and water-supply in Tamale were rudimentary.

Daily Graphic and Ghanaian Times arrived in Tamale a day after publication. Living there was, therefore, difficult.

Tamale thus gained the unfortunate reputation as Ghana’s “Siberia”, where perceived “troublemakers” were posted or transferred, hence the big man’s outburst in the 1970s, “post him to Tamale!”

Could this same “1970s thinking” have informed the MCE’s outburst in 2022?

Exchange

Listening to the heated exchanges between the MCE and the Inspector, I bowed my head in shame at what Shakespeare would have described as “heathen filth” words that got thrown at the Inspector.

How could the State’s representative attack the very state he was supposed to represent, by not only attacking the person of the Inspector, but adding “I will send you to Enchi?”

The Inspector responded maturely and professionally that he would go to Enchi or any part of Ghana he was posted to, as many of his colleagues were serving Ghana in those areas!

Threat

Unfortunately, the MCE’s threat lays bare an age-old mentality in Ghana where people in authority, arbitrarily post or transfer subordinates they consider “troublemakers,” in some cases simply because they will not toe the corrupt and immoral line they want them to, to rural areas considered “Siberia!”

In his book “Gulag Archipelago,” Russian author and 1970 Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature Alexandr Solzhenitsyn described his experience of Siberia as a cold, desolate place in Soviet times difficult for human habitation, where perceived dissidents like him, were sent to work in forced labour camps between 1923-1961!

“Siberia” thus became synonymous with any remote or outlandish place far from civilisation!

Probably, apart from our regional or district capitals, many places in rural Ghana do not have pipe-borne water, electricity, good schools, etc.

A TV documentary on February 15, 2022 on the basic school at Sefanu-Kope, North Afram Plains in 21st Century Ghana was a sad spectacle.

So, punitive postings to such areas were or are meant to disrupt family life of some upright subordinates, who big men see as a threat.

Sixty-five years after independence, why should development be so unequal that posting to parts of Ghana is a weapon to silence legitimate dissent?

This entrenched culture of punitive posting or transfer to Ghana’s “Siberias” must stop! It detracts from us as a civilised nation where democracy and the rule of law operate.

‘V8 culture of impunity’

Why should any state official or non-state person in V8 Land Cruisers be a special breed of some Ghanaian that the rest of us must give way to in traffic in what has become a V8 culture of impunity?

When I wrote about a Warrant Officer in military uniform being manhandled and handcuffed at Ashaiman in a December 2020 article titled “Sirens, slaps and handcuffs vrs rice, oil and drinks?” by national-security operatives for allegedly not giving way to a V8 escorting a pastor, it was not taken kindly.

Indeed, an e-mail asked me: “If a Head of State is coming, won’t you give way?” Did that mean some pastors enjoy the status of Presidents?

Observations

The professional handling of the situation by the Inspector in the face of insults and provocation is commendable.

Similarly, the speedy arraigning of the MCE is positive. Unless proved innocent, being stripped of his appointment is correct education against impunity/disrespect by some politicians!

The Omanhene of Aowin-traditional-area where Enchi is the municipal capital, has demanded an apology from the MCE for his unsavoury Enchi comment!

Leadership, lead! Fellow Ghanaians, wake up!

The writer is Former CEO, African Peace Support Trainers Association, Nairobi, Kenya & Council Chairman, Family Health University College, Accra
E-mail: dkfrimpong@yahoo.com