Editorial News of Friday, 4 August 2000

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All-Akan Presidential ticket not disastrous - Adu Boahen

Professor Albert Adu Boahen, the 1992 Presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party, has in a front-page story of the Crusading Guide, kicked against the claim by some people that an all-Akan presidency could be disastrous or suicidal.

Prof. Adu Boahen in reaction to a publication in the Dispatch, a bi-weekly newspaper, said "for all practical, geopolitical and ethnological purposes, the Akan as a single ethnic group, has ceased to exist, and the term is therefore totally and clearly anachronistic and wrong."

He said if realistically and in practice, then, the term Akan is clearly an anachronism, the question of "an all-Akan presidential ticket" does not surely exist, and that ticket cannot therefore be either disastrous or suicidal.

Prof. Adu Boahen, in reference to the 1992 and 1996 elections voting patterns, stated that they did not support the view of ethnic-based voting, with the exception of the "Volta Region and even there, it was only in its southern part."