EDITORIAL: New Approaches Needed for Community Celebration of Ghana’s National Days in Ontario
Celebrations of Ghana’s 57th Independence Anniversary have been held across many cities in Canada by Ghanaian-Canadian communities. The reports carried in this month’s edition of your versatile paper show enthusiastic community collaborative celebrations in Ghanaian communities across Canada. Reports from Montreal, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver, all show that the celebrations were collaborative events of youth and adults in the various communities.

The situation in Toronto, Canada’s largest City and home to the largest Ghanaian community in Canada was however appalling. We cannot raise our heads and say that the event in Toronto was a success. Neither can we say that there was any collaboration between the youth and the adults in the celebrations in Toronto. For three years in a roll, the youth in Toronto, for whatever reasons, have organized parallel celebrations commemorating Ghana’s Independence on the same day. The youth events have all been packed to capacity while the adult versions of the celebration in another location in the same city have been poorly attended. This year was no exception and one could count the number at the adult event in Toronto on the finger tips.

This situation cannot be allowed to continue. Something seems to be seriously wrong with the relationship between the adults and the youth in Toronto. There seems to be a real disconnect between these two groups of the same Ghanaian community family in Toronto. We have had cause to raise this issue before in this column. We then called for positive moves to be made by the executives of the Ghanaian Association of Ontario to reach out to the youth to find ways of celebrating at least this particular event, our national day, as one national community event instead of competitive parallel events. Our earlier admonition seems to have fallen on deaf ears.

This year’s celebration in Toronto should therefore be a wake-up call for the adults in the community. They should swallow whatever pride is keeping them from reaching out to the youth to discuss the issues and factors contributing to this disconnect. There are issues, we know, and no-one should pretend there are not. The youth can do their own things, as youth do, with various events during the year, but at least on our national day, every effort should be made to hold a common, united celebration of which we shall all feel proud as Canadians of Ghanaian origin, adults, youth and children.

This is absolutely important and we are counting on the executive of the Ghanaian Association of Ontario and the various groups and organizations in Toronto to come together to find a solution to this impasse before the next independence anniversary comes off , the 58th edition, in March 2015.