A former Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Martin Amidu, has expressed grave concern about the ongoing chieftaincy conflict at Bawku in the Upper East Region spreading to other parts of the North East Region, and other parts of the country.

According to Amidu, first-hand information he has from persons still at Bawku, which he says has become a ghost town, indicates that the conflict in the town has intensified, with people being killed virtually every day.

He said that Bawku has become a war zone with the two factions in the conflict engaging in shootouts in broad daylight for several hours.

He went on to give an account of an intense fight between the two factions on November 12, 2024, which lasted for nearly a day.

He indicated that it took the intervention of the security agencies, who shot and killed one of the active shooters, for the fight to stall for a few hours.

“The latest information I have received from those still living in the township has been that on or about November 12, 2024, fighting erupted in the Daduri area of Bawku at around 11:00 hours when an attempt was made to burn the former house of Mma Katango, which was sold to an Akan who now uses the place for baking bread.

“One person from one of the sides was killed in the process. Two other houses within the vicinity were also burnt. The security agencies intervened and in the process, sniped from a storey building opposite my former primary school, the St. Anthony’s Primary School, on which they are squatters (not renters), and killed another person from the other side,” he wrote in a write-up copied to GhanaWeb.

He added, “This resulted in a ceasefire that allowed the sides to beat a retreat with their dead at around 14:00 hours. The fighting, however, intensified throughout the night. The storey building is also on the way to the former Bawku Middle Boarding School that trained Alhaji Seidu Abagre, my two years senior there and where we both completed Middle School Form Four, after which he trained as a certificated teacher.”

Amidu, who was Ghana’s first Special Prosecutor, said that fighting continued the following day, November 13, 2024, which led to the killing of four people.

Read his full statement below:



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