Editorial Thursday, November 3, 2022
The Chief of Yawhima, a suburb of Sunyani in the Sunyani East Municipality of the Bono Region, Nana Ansu Ababio II has made a passionate appeal to President Akufo-Addo as a matter of urgency to facilitate the process for payment of compensation due those whose lands were acquired as Shooting Range for the military in Sunyani.
In 1982, the then government acquired a seven mile square piece of land (seven miles square!) belonging to some individuals in Yawhima as a Shooting Range for the military personnel after a military barracks was built in Sunyani, the then Brong Ahafo capital.
Upon acquisition, the State agreed to compensate the chiefs and individuals who have cultivated some food and cash crops on the said lands but that promise is yet to be fulfilled.
Out of the seventy-five farmers who were affected at the time, only three are still alive.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with Daily Searchlight’s Collins Fosu Appiah, Nana Ababio II observed that his people have suffered a lot and out of the seventy-five farmers whose farm land w ceased, seventy-two have died of grief leaving three.
He revealed that several efforts have been made to successive governments to give the people what they deserve but have not yielded any positive result.
“Government has paid the chiefs what is due them, but my problem is that individuals whose farm lands were acquired have not been paid since 1982. They have all died of grief leaving three who are still alive and anytime I go to them, they keep complaining about how the state has treated them”.
“After government acquired the land for the military, one farmer who went there to harvest his cocoa was arrested and detained several days by the military for stepping his foot on his own farm. The painful aspect is that they followed him to his house and collected all the cocoa beans he has harvested and drying”.
“This man is old in the house now and anytime I go to him he talks about how his cocoa farm that could have changed his life was ceased and government’s inability to pay the agreed compensation to him”.
The Daily Searchlight is of the belief that this is a historical wrong, one of the countless wrongs that litter Ghana’s history like rotting corpses.
We believe that at the time, the government had the responsibility to pay those who happened to have property on the land.
We do not believe, in any case, then and now, that government needed as much as seven square miles to put up a shooting range. Even if it did, it had a responsibility to do justice by the occupants of the land.
We believe, even at present, that we still have an opportunity as a nation to do right by these people.
It is why we have joined the call by the Chief of Yawhima for government to give consideration to this festering issue.
Ghana really cannot take meaningful steps going forward, without reviewing and correcting the many historical wrongs we have committed as a people, over the years.
(This article was first published in the column EDITORIAL of the Daily Searchlight of Thursday, November 3, 2022. The Daily Searchlight appears on the newsstands of Ghana every working day and PDF versions are available for sale online twenty-four hours a day all day throughout the world on www.ghananewsstand.com)
