North-West Region or Western-North Region?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
January 11, 2017
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

I have absolutely no reason to doubt that there may be a necessity for the creation of more administrative regions in the country (See “Akufo-Addo to Create 4 More Regions” Classfmonline.com/Ghanaweb.com 1/11/17). I am simply not sure of whether we actually need to create four more regions and not just two more regions for the moment, at least until such time as the resources and the economic situation of the country has considerably improved to be able to sustain more administrative machines and ministerial salaries. For, make no mistake, the creation of additional regions, while it poignantly speaks to the imperative need for decentralizing the way government works, in order to speed up the development process in all sectors of our national economy, nevertheless, is a process that requires a huge capital outlay.

Couple the preceding with the government’s electioneering campaign agenda of creating one factory in each and every constituency in the country, and the enormity of such a multi-pronged approach towards the rapid development of the country becomes far more daunting than it may seem on the drawing board. President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo may also need to heed that ageless Greco-Roman adage that counsels the need to “hesitate slowly,” if both the desired and the necessary impact are to be auspiciously attained. During the 1990’s, for example, when I wrote a regular column for a biweekly newspaper called the Nigerian News Digest, later renamed the African News Weekly, I had occasion to caution Nigerians who were compulsively addicted to the creation of more states to be mindful of the deleterious impact that this may have on national cohesion. As was to be expected, I received quite my fair share of tirades, largely about my not having any right to butt into the internal affairs of other nations.

Indeed, it is for this reason why the deliberate referendum approach being championed by Nana Akufo-Addo ought to be applauded. Still, the question of precisely how one splits the former Western-Asante Region, which later became the Brong-Ahafo Region, into Brong and Ahafo regions is one that needs to be carefully examined, especially since most citizens and residents of the Ahafo portion of the Brong-Ahafo Region envisage themselves to be Ghanaians of bona fide Asante heritage. In other words, it may be as equally valid to reincorporate the Ahafo portion of the Brong-Ahafo Region into the present-day Asante Region, as it would be to split the region into Brong and Ahafo regions. More may not be necessarily good or better. In fact, it could well become a recipe for disaster down the pike, as it were. But I can equally fathom the validity of apportioning people of Brong/Bono descent their own organically discrete space, inasmuch as the danger of demarcating regional boundaries based on Identity Politics cannot be underestimated.

In the case of Nigeria, it is not clear to me whether increasing the number of states from the colonial-era 3 to 12 and 19 and then 21 to 36 states has necessarily strengthened the bonds of national cohesion or, even more significantly, speeded up the economic development of Africa’s most populous nation, rather than simply creating more avenues for cynical politicians to engage in massive theft of taxpayers’ money and rank corruption. And also, the question arises as to what a region’s population size ought to be in order to warrant the splitting up of that region into two or more additional regions. We may also need to ponder more creatively about the names we give these new regions to be created. For instance, there is something inescapably creative, or even poetic, about the name of “Oti Region,” which is being carved out of the present-day Volta Region. But how about “Eastern Corridor Region,” which is being created out of the present Northern Region?
In other words, more time and thought ought to be invested in this venture prior to its full implementation.

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