BAWKU CELEBRATES SAMANPIID IN PEACE (D/G, Tuesday April 14, 2009. Front Page)

A CRITICAL test of the peace in Bawku was surmounted over the weekend when thousands of visitors joined the chiefs and people of the Kusasi Traditional Area to celebrate their annual Samanpiid Festival.
The grand occasion was celebrated in an atmosphere of peace, erasing earlier fears that some trouble makers would take advantage of the celebration to cause mischief.
The heavy deployment of police and military personnel throughout the Bawku municipality to avert any clashes did not deter the people from engaging in an all-day celebration to give thanks to God and the ancestral spirits for a successful farming season.
The grand durbar organised to climax the festival also provided the platform for the discussion of social and development issues affecting the people.
In an address read on his behalf, President John Atta Mills urged the people to re-dedicate themselves to the cause of peace and unity.
“It is my hope and prayer that you the people of Bawku will give peace a chance so that you can benefit from the development that the present government has planned for you,” he said in his address read by Mr Mark Woyongo, the Upper East Regional Minister.
The President observed that the incessant conflicts in Bawku and its surroundings had retarded the development of the area and, therefore, appealed to the chiefs to use this year’s celebration to mend broken relationships with their neighbours for peaceful and harmonious co-existence in Bawku and its environs.
He assured the people that the government would not renege on efforts at ensuring that peace was maintained in Bawku and challenged the parties in the conflict to recognise each other as brothers and sisters who needed each other for mutual development.
“The Upper East Region, to which Bawku belongs, is the poorest in the country. Therefore, our common enemy is poverty, which we must fight, but not to take arms against ourselves because there shall be no winner or loser in such a fight,” the President said.
Touching on the government’s development plans for the area, the President said his administration would focus on agriculture, stressing that in that light more irrigation dams would be constructed, while old and silted ones would be rehabilitated to promote dry season farming, especially in the northern parts of Ghana.
The festival was put on hold last year due to the absence of peace in the Bawku Traditional Area. The last time it was held was on December 31, 2007, but immediately after it ended conflict erupted between the Kusasis and Mamprusis and since then the security situation in Bawku had not been the best.
The Minister of the Interior, Mr Cletus Avoka, said the celebration of the festival was testimony of the return to peace in the hitherto conflict-prone area and encouraged the people to maintain the peace for wealth creation for the welfare of the people.
He reminded all and sundry that the era of the culture of impunity must be a thing of the past, warning that the years when people committed arson and other crimes because of their party, ethnic or religious affiliations were gone.
The Paramount Chief of the Bawku Traditional Area, Naba Asigri Abugrago Azoka II, expressed concern over the long period of conflict and violence in his traditional area, emphasising that the people had become poorer as a result.
He said now no one needed to tell the people of Bawku to stop what he termed “a senseless conflict” and rather seek unity among the various tribes for meaningful development.
The Northern Regional Minister, Mr S.S Nayina, who was in the entourage of the government team at the festival, challenged the people of Bawku to see themselves as one common people and get united to collectively eradicate their problems of poverty, ignorance and disease for the common good of the area.
The Presidential Spokesperson, Mr Mahama Ayariga, dismissed assertions in sections of the media that the President was “slow” in the discharge of his duty, stressing that he was rather being meticulous to avoid mistakes.
He urged all to support the President’s nominees for the positions of metropolitan, municipal and district chief executives so that, together with the President, they could begin the implementation of the agenda for a better Ghana.