Elmina climaxes Bakatue with grand durbar

The chiefs and people of Elmina held a grand durbar last Saturday to climax the celebration of this year’s Bakatue Festival, with a call on them to encourage the youth to acquire formal education without doing away with their traditional values.

The festival, which signalled the beginning of the fishing season, was also used to pray to the ancestors for a good fishing season.
Citizens of the area and other patrons used the occasion to exhibit their rich culture and values. In attendance were many dignitaries, including chiefs and government officials.

The one-week festival was on the theme: “Cleanliness is life, so let’s help clean our environment”.

Bakatue is a Fante word which literally means ‘draining of a lagoon’.

The celebration of the festival was instituted to commemorate the founding of Elmina in the early days of the colonisation of the then Gold Coast.

In a speech read on his behalf, President John Dramani Mahama said formal education and traditional values were needed to strengthen the human resource base and the survival of future generations.

He said the survival of the nation depended on its ability to acquire the requisite skills and knowledge for its people to keep pace with the rest of the world and, therefore, entreated opinion leaders to focus on encouraging the youth in that direction.

The President said the government was putting in place the necessary structures to create a congenial socio-economic environment for individuals to develop their potential and also increase private sector participation in job creation and economic development.

Unity

He said all those dreams could be realised only in an atmosphere of peace and togetherness and, therefore, encouraged the people of Elmina to maintain the peaceful and congenial atmosphere that they were noted for.

“We, the major stakeholders in the development of Elmina Traditional Area, including Nananom, religious leaders, opinion leaders and indeed all of us gathered here are charged with the responsibility to jealously protect, guard and promote the sanctity of the Bakatue Afahye in honour of our forebears.”

On sanitation, the President said the issue of keeping a clean environment had become a serious national concern and expressed grave concern about the carelessness with which people dumped waste in the communities.

“We litter our streets, drains and the seashore with all sorts of garbage and filth, without giving any serious attention to its consequences. Some people do this with the negative perception of making the work of garbage collectors more difficult”, he said.

He commended the President and Chairman of Groupe Nduom, Dr Paa Kwesi Nduom, in particular, for his sterling effort to provide jobs for a lot of Ghanaians.

National Sanitation Day

A deputy Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Nii Lampte Vanderpuye, announced that the next National Sanitation Exercise would be held in the Central Region on August 1.

He said a new legislation to make it punitive for those who failed to participate in the National Sanitation Exercise was before Parliament, adding that “it will be an offence for those who willingly refuse to partake in the exercise”.

In a message, the President and Chairman of Groupe Nduom, Dr Paa Kwesi Nduom, who was also the sole sponsor of this year’s Bakatue Festival, announced that a new university, known as the Nduom University College, would be open at Edina Aboabo with plans to make it become one of the best tertiary educational facilities in the country.

The Chief of Elmina, Nana Kwadwo Conduah VI, called on the district assembly to provide the town with a truck to support the national sanitation programme.