By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Feb. 16, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

I have stopped taking Dr. Kwesi Aning seriously, and I hope that the so-called security expert at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Center does not take himself that much seriously either. In this column, our focus is not on Dr. Aning’s widely reported chiding of the Eastern Regional Police Commander, Mr. Angwubutoge Awuni, for giving strict and professionally savvy and precise self-defensive instructions to law-enforcement agents engaged in flushing out the Fulani Menace from the Eastern Region.

We need to also quickly note, for the significant and morally edifying benefit of the reading public, that Dr. Aning is widely known to be an Akan of Fante descent from the Central Region. This teasing out of his sub-ethnicity and region of provenance, or origin, is very important because on the whole, the Central Region has suffered a diddly little from the predatory and wantonly destructive activities of the Fulani herdsmen, including the bestial and brutal rape of Ghanaian women (See “DCOP Awuni Dares Aning Over Fulani Menace” Kasapafmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 2/16/18).

Indeed, it is a pity and a shame that it took so unbearably long for “Operation Cow Leg” to be strategized and implemented by the top-brass of the Ghana Police Service (GPS). According to news reports, Dr. Aning’s basis for admonishing Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCOP) Awuni to be lax with the marauding Fulani herdsmen is that the latter contribute hugely towards the development of the country’s economy. If he were really worth his designation as a security expert and a sectional leader at the Kofi Annan Center, Dr. Aning would have published his economic and statistical breakdown of the purportedly enormous contribution made annually by predatory Fulani herdsmen to the development of Ghana.

Then, also, for the sake of justice and fair play, Dr. Aning would have researched and published the statistical breakdown of the incalculable loss callously wreaked by these same Fulani herdsmen, in terms of the wanton destruction of cultivated farmlands, the massacre and rape of the residents of the areas where their vicious and primitive predatory activities have been most intense. The fact of the matter is that nobody with an adequately informed understanding of the major threat posed by the Fulani herdsmen, in both the long and short term, would grandstand or pontificate so cavalierly and imperiously the way Dr. Aning has been doing these past several months.

Maybe it is about time Mr. Kofi Annan took the biggest-mouthed – and I mean it in both the literal and figurative senses of the term – faculty member of his otherwise globally renowned and respected institute and pumped some common sense into his head. That Dr. Aning has increasingly been making a laughing stock of both himself and the institution of which he is one of the most visible leaders and most vocal spokespersons can scarcely be gainsaid.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs