The Anlo Youth Council has described the Member of Parliament for Adansi Asokwa constituency as a dishonourable person in Ghanas’ Parliament for describing Ewes as “not Ghanaians”.
Mayor Agbleze, the President of the Council in press statement issued in Accra on Thursday, said “all the attempts to explain K. T. Hammond’s hate speech would not assuage our hurt and put us back to sleep any longer”.
According to him, “from today, in our very heart and mind, we are what K. T. Hammond and his ilk say we are, and truly so too.
We are the same tribe with our brothers and sisters in the Republic of Togo and beyond”.
Mr. Agblez submitted that, they would now rally resources for what they have denied them bitterly, “the Commonwealth of Togoland and its People. Today, we retrace our steps and begin the long way back home, the way we came”.
Below is the full statement:
ANLO YOUTH COUNCIL
PRESS STATEMENT: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
DATE: JULY 9, 2020
VENUE: GHANA INTERNATIONAL PRESS CENTRE
K.T. HAMMOND VOICES GOVERNMENT’S ETHNIC CLEANSING AGENDA AGAINST EWES.
Ladies and Gentlemen of the media, we welcome you all to this morning’s press conference to share our pain and disappointment at Government actions along Ghana’s Eastern border with the Republic of Togo.
We are under siege in many Towns and Villages, particularly Ketu South Municipality, where a military lockdown has been ordered in the name of COVID-19, quite in contrast to other parts of Ghana. This COVID force has now been augmented with a ‘Peace Force’ that is lethally armed including even Immigration Service personnel who are denying our villages access to livelihood under these trying circumstances.
Our people’s access to clean water, health care, markets, and cultural relations have been severely curtailed by the Ghana Armed Forces and the Immigration Service, all because we straddle the border with our neighbours to the East.
We take exception to the deployment of the military force in our communities that is simply brutalising and intimidating innocent and unarmed citizens whose only crime is to have been born Togolanders and in that part of Ghana called the Volta and Oti Regions.
We therefore join our Chiefs, traditional leaders and well-meaning Ghanaians to call for their immediate withdrawal from our communities and without pre-condition.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we appreciate your response to our call, as it is in times like this that your role as the Fourth Estate of the Realm is not just important but ever more crucial, given that all the other arms of government and, we mean, all other arms of government have reneged on their constitutional duty to do right by the people of Ghana, particularly those of us from that region which used to be part of the then Togoland.
Nothing can be clearer than the fact that the Ghana Armed Forces under the guise of Covid-19 and keeping ‘aliens’ from our elections, is being used to target the Volta and Oti Regions and Togolanders as a whole for as said by Baron de Montesquieu – There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of Law and in the name of Justice.
There is no other way to describe what is happening except to call it by its rightful epithet which is ethnic hatred. No mean a person than Kobina Tahiru Hammond, a member of the Legislature of the Fourth Republic of Ghana openly gave voice to his government’s ethnic cleansing agenda, when he said in a Joy News video that we are not Ghanaians. This open admission of ethnocentrism and bigotry has received not even a comment, much less, condemnation from our self-proclaimed Human Rights lawyer and President of the Republic much like many other such statements and actions in the recent past.
We also wish to remind you, most painfully, of the various unprintable words some political factions have actually uttered against the “Togoland People” incorporated in Ghana.
In this increasingly fractious Fourth Republic, we have taken these insults laid back, hoping the disrespect and hatred for our people in the Enterprise called Ghana would improve with time.
Sixty years down the line, however, we are sorely reminded that we are NOT GHANAIANS and should have belonged to and remained with our kith and kin in the Republic of Togo, Benin and Nigeria by a Member of Parliament of Ghana, Kobina Tahiru Hammond.
Now we have been rudely awakened, not only by K. T. Hammond, but more importantly by the terror unleashed upon us by the Apartheid Republic of Ghana in the, Volta and Oti Regions, and in particular, the Ketu South Municipality.
We do not blame the K. T. Hammond and those who think and act like him. We blame ourselves for being convinced that Enterprise Ghana will work much against the good counsel of our Fathers: Dr. Raphael Ernest Grail Armattoe, Hon. S. G. Antor, HE Papavi Hogbedetor Charles Kudzordzi and others. For emphasis we share with you the petition of Hon. S. G. Antor to the United Nations some sixty years ago. You will realise that our relationship with the rest of Ghana has only gotten worse with time.
They were right and we were wrong! The Majority Vote in the 1956 Plebiscite was wrong too.
We are not secessionists as some of the media would want the public to perceive us. None of the above personalities are secessionists and neither the institutions they represent. They were visionaries plain and simple. They saw before now the hell we will live in, in Ghana.
For over sixty years, Enterprise Ghana hasn’t worked. It is only fair to recognize that we have come to that thin line, a watershed between hate and love. If it didn’t work for sixty years, and the age and grey hair of K. T. Hammond could not convince him of the hope of a common future in this Enterprise, it is only fair that we MUST have the opportunity, now, to mismanage ourselves instead.
Why must armed Soldiers and Preventive Officers define our citizenship in Ghana?
Where else in the World are armed soldiers being used to enforce the protocols of the COVID-19 Pandemic?
We came into Enterprise Ghana with our own land, its resources and people. We would go with that, and ONLY that and none of the assets or resources of their Gold Coast.
All the attempts to explain K. T. Hammond’s hate speech would not assuage our hurt and put us back to sleep any longer.
From today, in our very heart and mind, we are what K. T. Hammond and his ilk say we are, and truly so too. We are the same tribe with our brothers and sisters in the Republic of Togo and beyond.
We would now rally resources for what we have denied ourselves bitterly, the Commonwealth of Togoland and its People.
Today, we retrace our steps and begin the long way back home, the way we came.
Thank you, Dishonourable K. T. Hammond.
Thank you, the Apartheid Republic of Ghana.
Long Live the Togoland.
Mayor Agbleze
President
024 458 4835
By Edzorna Francis Mensah