The ’War’ That Killed Ya-Na

Some sections of the Ghanaian public believe Ya-Na, the King of the Dagbon area died as a casualty of war. They say a war was fought at the palace of the late King and as a result he and 29 others lost their lives.

This seemingly is a nice reason not to arrest anybody for the gruesome and heinous crime done against a respected King. With this excuse all the participants of the ‘war’ are guilty and as such everybody in that area must be responsible.

Interestingly, you would want to ask yourself if anybody ready for a war will allow the enemy to reach his compound before responding appropriately bearing in mind that women and children live in that compound. This compound turns out to be a palace where you don’t expect to have everything for war as is seen in the olden days.

To make the excuse more reasonable, the ‘it was a war’ preachers say the late king had armour in his palace. Yes you don’t expect a highly placed King to have only house knives and hoes in his house, even individuals have sophisticated guns they use to protect themselves. But as to whether the armour really existed or not, I think the security personnel can tell.

If really it was a war, there are still crimes committed in wars and those perpetrators of these war crimes must be brought to book. For it is in finding the killers of the Ya-Na that a lasting solution could be observed in the Dagbon area. Demonstrations against the court rulings that acquitted those alleged killers shows how deep the problem the killings have brought.

Qathafi of Libya is been threatened of war crimes though rebels are attacking his country and he is doing his best to prevent the rebels from taking over.
So the Ya-Na may have protected and defended his family from the hands of the ‘warers’ and we all know he died a brave King. So justice must be done for his people.

Kangmbuli Muslim Community: an Epitome of Islamic Excellence

Some people have said Islam is a religion of terrorists while others say a world dominated by Islam will spell doom for all humankind. Some even say when Islam takes over the world, one can no longer engage in alcoholism and fornication (funny right? you can watch this on a documentary ‘God’s Warriors’ broadcasted by CNN). Yet these critics who say all these do not know much about the most peaceful and noblest religion, Islam and how communities which have practiced what Islam preaches have achieved decency, peace and natural and everlasting love.

I want to hereby share with the public the ‘biography’ of one such community that has proven beyond doubts that Islam is the way for this troubled world. This community is the Kangmbuli Muslim Community. But before I continue I want to express my profound gratitude to GMSA-UCC for embarking on this knowledge seeking tour to this community.

The Kangmbuli Muslim Community is a town situated in Nzemaland in the Western Region of Ghana with a population of about 5000. As its name depicts, it is a community where every single inhabitant is a practiser of the Islamic faith. In other words, all the over 5000 people in the community are Muslims.

The town of Kangmbuli is over a century years old and is a product of the Trans-Saharan trade. The founder of this noble and progressive community is Abeka Ganga who was during his living years a trader and the King of the people of Ampain. King Abeka Ganga before his reversion to Islam though dressed as a Muslim was an idol worshipper with over 300 idols. His inspirations and motivations for starting the community came to him through his dreams as a form of revelation.

During his trading days when he traveled between Ivory Coast and Ghana, King Abeka had a dream. In the dream he heard someone call him by the name Thahir. Dumfounded the king never understood the message behind the dream. Subsequently, he had another dream and this time he was being called by the name Daud.

In 1901 when the king fell ill and traveled to Accra with his wives to seek treatment, he met the country’s first National Chief Imam, Mohammed Baako. As was common during those days, King Abeka confided in the Chief Imam for an interpretation of his dreams. It was during this time that King Abeka came to understand the meaning behind his dreams.

His first dream was a call for him to join the Islamic religion and the second a prescription of the name he should be called by should he heed to the former dream. In agreement and in total submission to his destiny, King Abeka Ganga reverted to Islam.

Haven become a Muslim, and returning to his kingdom, King Daud Abeka Ganga resorted to spread his new found religion. He preached to his people to join his new faith. While some accepted his call, others did not. So the new revert decided to start a new community at Kangmbuli while those who did not heed to his call remained at Ampain.

To establish his new town on the basic foundations of Islam, King Daud traveled to Sekondi and later to Axim to look for Islamic scholars as teachers. He later had a substantive teacher, Mallam Suleiman from Damong in the Northern Region who taught his two sons Nuhu and Abdulai.

Upon his death, Abdulai became the Imam of the community and Nuhu the propagator of Islam in Kangmbuli and the whole of Nzemaland. King Daud’s nephew Alhaji Issifu also supported his two sons in the running of affairs of the town. Descendants of these three personalities still remain in the helm of affairs of this unique community.

Three key pillars that have sustained this community are knowledge, inter-marriages and unity. Two of these pillars are very obvious when one enters the town the first time. It is common to meet a child in his/her teens who has completely memorized the whole of the Qur’an and has therefore earned the title of Hafiz. Also are signs of unity that are very conspicuous.

Today, this community that started humbly is a beacon of example to the rest of the Muslim communities. For their love of unity and labour, Kangmbuli is very revered in the Western Region. The Government of Ghana also recognizes this and is always willing to lend a hand of support to the community whenever they needed it.

Through their hard work, the Muslims of Kangmbuli have the social amenities that they readily need. They have a Senior High School that run all courses except science, health centre and a large mosque among others. Their mosque is so large a row in the mosque can take 75 persons. For Friday’s congregational prayer, the mosque accommodates over a thousand Muslims.

The people of Kangmbuli whose clan name is Ezenwule indeed are practisers of the Islamic religion. They have adopted their own way of maintaining sanity, peace, security and cohesion through the use of Shariah. Anyone who engages in social vices such as fornication and stealing is publicly rebuked to deter others from committing such offences that Islam strongly prohibits. It is therefore not surprising that one feels a sense of peace and goodwill when entering this religious town.

One thing that is worth mentioning is how neat and groomed the surroundings of this town are. It is almost impossible to see filth scattered around as it is the case in other parts of the country. Their main mosque is well kept with nicely laid prayer mats. Also is the good sight of children as young as 4years willingly rushing to the mosque whenever the call for prayer was said. I had an experience when a little boy walked up to me to ask for the ablution pot. I was amazed because in my community, a boy that age will walk straight into the mosque without bothering whether he had performed ablution or not.

Undoubtedly, Kangmbuli remains a role model to other Muslim communities and the country at large. And for those who think a world dominated by Islam will be a catastrophic one should pay a visit to this inspiring town of Allah. The indigenes of Kangmbuli deserve commendation for keeping the fire of hope for Islam burning and for having a society that is peaceful, neat, devoid of negative western influences and progressive. For this reason, I want to ask the blessings of Allah on the following people of the community.

Imam: Alhaji Zakaria Abdulai
Leader: Alhaji Musah Abeka
Islamic teacher: Sheikh Ustaz Harun
Clan leader: Mahama Abdulai
Founder: King Daud Abeka Ganga

Long live Islam

8 Benefits of Blogging to the Blogger

This post is the remaining part of my earlier post, 8 Benefits of Blogging to the Blogger.

5. Blogging gives you new contacts
Blogging opens the door to new friends who come to you through the internet. I have friends from India, Phillipines, South Africa, US, UK, Nigeria just to mention a few.

6. Blogging makes you healthy
Are you wondering how?
Well, expressive writing like blogging produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients and even speeds healing after surgery.
A study in the February 2008 issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing like blogging just before treatment felt markedly better mentally and physically as compared with patients who did not.

7. Blogging will enhance your CV and get you a job
Simply having a blog that you spend time on shows positive aspects of your personal character.
Employers want to see that you are motivated and have some degree of intelligence. Regardless of your blog’s contents, a blog shows you have some degree of intelligence.
Just write blogging and the address of your blog at the hobby side of your CV. Also mention your blog in the interview to get the employer to read your blog. If it is a good blog with good grammar and clearly articulated views, be rest assured you are one leg through.

8. You become an entrepreneur and make money from blogging
Someone there will ask how, well this is how
Some people blog to make money. This implies they are entrepreneurs because they have a venture or an enterprise and this venture is the blog which is to make money for them.
Maintaining a money making blog is like maintaining a business. You require innovation, hard work, discipline, perseverance etc.
This is how they make the money. You have a blog say about religion and you have many readers i.e people who read the blog so you advertise the sale of religious wears for a company and the company pays you money for the advertisement. Do you see the trick?
Google also offers a service where you can sign up for free. After that any person who visits you blog and clicks and I mean just click the advertisement, they pay you some few cents. The more people click on the advertisements, the more money you make. You need to have many visitors to your blog in order to get a reasonable amount of money.


I have a compilation of some blogs and how much they make. By the way not Ghanaian blogs.
Perezhilton.com makes $111,000 a month
Techcrunch.com makes $240,000 a month
Boingboing.net makes $ 1 million a year
So you too can make it.

8 Benefits of Blogging to the Blogger

The following post is work I have researched into and will be giving a lecture on at the 11th Annual Islam Propagation Week of the Ghana Muslim Students' Association(GMSA)-University of Cape Coast Branch.

Blogging offers a lot of benefits to individuals who engage in it. Some of these benefits are:

1. Writing habit improves

Blogging involves writing, then you edit, then you proofread and then you post or publish on the net.

Writing for blogs on a regular basis therefore enhances writing skills and encourages other things like critical thinking, communication and how to defend a point. These attributes coincidentally turn out to be what a university student should possess.

For this reason in some parts of the world, submitting essays on papers to lecturers are becoming out of date. Students are rather mandated to write for their own created blogs.


2. Acquisition of more knowledge

Blogging helps you acquire more knowledge since you regularly research for your blog posts. For instance, if your hobby is mathematics and you blog about it, you will be forced to look for new things in maths to publish and in doing so you are keeping the stuff yourself.

And that is one thing about blogging. When you write a post or call it article for your blog and you come later to realize some people from TUNISIA,US, INDIA, NIGERIA, CUBA or anywhere else have read it, I can assure you you will be forced to write more articles and that is where the acquisition of knowledge starts.

Also, wouldn’t you like to be referenced when say a friend of yours writes an assignment for his/her lecturer because that friend got the required information from your blog? Who here wouldn’t like to see the name of his/her blog on my assignment papers?

It means you are also adding more information to the worldwide bank of knowledge


3. You get exposure

What you blog about can easily be accessed by a lot of people all around the world. For this reason blogging is another way to get famous not only locally but internationally.

TV shows, radio programs, newspapers and even other blogs will grant you interviews when your blog starts to get readership.

Just recently, a woman blogger was granted interview on The One Show on Viasat 1. So you see blogging can give you the exposure you want. Just be good at what you blog about and you will get exposed.

Some bloggers have been given mouth watering job offers because they discuss sports, science, politics, mention them very well on their blogs. Others have become writers and written books because people from elsewhere who read their blogs are happy with their articles and are ready to publish books for them.

In particular those of you who like sports, just get a blog and start to write your side of the stories of the matches you watch. Be good at it and I wouldn’t be surprised to see you on TV stations discussing sports.


4. It’s training to become a journalist

Blogging is journalism and it is a step along the road to becoming a journalist.
Many journalists are bloggers and many bloggers are journalists. An example is Ato Kwamena Dadzie formerly with Joy Fm morning show. He has a blog and is a blogger.

For those of you who want to become journalists, I can promise you having a good blog will make getting a journalist job easier for you. Because only a few Ghanaians blog and at the interview I can assure you you will be happy to have started a blog. Just tell the interviewer you have a blog with about 50 readers and you are unique from the other people at the interview session.

A deputy editor at goal.com by name Share Evans said and I quote “blogging is a step along the road to becoming a journalist. By cutting your teeth writing on things that you are passionate about, a blogger can gain the tools to operate in a newsroom environment effectively.”

Europeans are aware of this and so some schools in Europe make it mandatory for journalism students to maintain a blog as a requirement for their journalism program.

I will make available the rest of this presentation in my next post so watch out.

The Army Worm Politics

I recently visited atokd.com (Ato Kwamena Dadzie’s blog) and read an article concerning governments handling of the army worm threat in parts of the Volta Region. As usual, the article was anti-government and this is to be expected since the author of this blog has a philosophy of attacking governments hoping that this will change the leadership style in our country.

His concern was that the government should have used civilians rather than the military to kill and prevent the further spread of the army worms. He thought the worms were just butterflies in the making and hence just the use of chemicals could get rid of them.

So I took his concerns up and researched further into the matter. Getting to know more, I realized an ex-NADMO official Ken Nuworsu, in the erstwhile Kuffuor administration had also publicly criticized the government for using the military instead of officials from NADMO, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Ministry of Health (MOH) and some trained foot soldiers.

This revelation stunned me because I couldn’t understand where the criticisms were coming from. We live in a country where our military is not engaged in any war and so they are peace keepers in other countries.

For this reason, our men are readily available for any kind of service in the country. Be it construction works, giving out relief services to disaster victims or anything the commander-in-chief tells them to do. So nothing was wrong with the Ghana Air Force flying helicopters to get the army worms infested areas sprayed.

Could the trained foot soldiers, EPA or workers at the MOH have flown helicopters in a matter of days? Or probably they should have been given months of flight lessons while the indigens of the army worm infested areas continue to suffer from these creatures.

The ex-NADMO official on the contrary cited mass transfers of NADMO officials in the Volta Region to the Ashanti Region. Clearly, this shows in an emergency like this, NADMO was under resourced in terms of personnel to carry out the spraying exercise.

You should also know that, though the army worms are just worms they have killed at least six people in the past in the same areas and also what a soldier can do five civilians cannot.

God Bless Our Homeland Ghana.

Lucky Mensah’s New Song a Message?

Lucky Mensah is the only musician to have publicly supported the then candidate John Evans Atta-Mills in his presidential bid in the 2008 general elections by composing a campaign song for the National Democratic Congress (NDC).

True to Lucky Mensah’s luck John Atta-Mills won the elections by a slim margin and eventually became the President of this great Republic.

Two years gone and it seems the Lucky singer has lost hope in the man he helped win the 2008 elections.

His new album ‘Nkratuor’ has a song titled ‘Enkoyie’ which has gotten much airplay both on TV and the radio/fm stations. This song which is rather controversial has sparked public debate as to whether Lucky Mensah is having a change in mind on whether to continue composing songs for the NDC in future elections.

The song sung in Twi has lyrics with meaning in English as ‘Tawiah, take this letter to your brother Atta and tell him things are not going well’. Though it will be wrong for one to conclude he is referring to Atta our president, aspects of the song shows he may be referring to Uncle Atta (our president).

Scenes in the video of the song show a man been portrayed as a politician with pot-bellied stomach and a bodyguard. Things seem to be going well with the politician whereas the video also shows men laboring to make ends meet.

With a video and lyrics such as this and some public outcries ‘enko yie’ as used in the song, and a 95% confidence interval (as used in statistics), the song could be nothing else than a message to our President John Fiifi Evans Atta-Mills.

However, this musician Lucky Mensah has refuted allegations that the song is intended for President Mills when he was interviewed on the Delay show on TV Africa. He further said he could not have this motive since he was a helper to President Mills’ victory.

Well, it is left for you to come to a decision who the song is intended for.

BBC Betrays President Mills

Two days ago on Joy Evening News it was reported that some people across the continent have reacted rather negatively to President Mills’ statement at the Editor’s Forum held at the Castle on the 7^th of January this year, that he is guided by a popular saying in Fante ‘Dzi wo fie asem’ meaning ‘mind your own business’ in dealing with the political impasse in Ivory Coast.

The reactions came as a result of BBC’s broadcast of President Mills’ stance on the Ivory Coast political crisis. This is not the first broadcast the BBC has done on Mills’ stance after the President publicly made the comments some two weeks ago.

This time around the broadcast did not dwell on the President’s call for a diplomatic peaceful resolution to the crisis instead of the legitimate force proposed by the ECOWAS to get Laurent Gbagbo out but the part of the statement which saw Mills make the ‘Dzi wo fie asem’ remark.

The BBC in my opinion took President Mills’ statement out of context and put it out there.

Clearly, what the President meant is that in dealing with other nations on matters as delicate as this, he is guided to tread cautiously and also he is not to meddle so much into the issue but to mind his own business of ensuring the territorial integrity of his country.

What is worth noting also is that, if President Mills had wanted to mind his own business, he would not have been at the ECOWAS meeting which saw Ouattara declared as the winner of the Ivorian elections. He was at the meetings on the two occasions that the leaders of African states met. He did not delegate anybody to represent him as some African leaders did. He was there in person and signed the communique that recognised Ouattara as the president-elect.

Reacting to BBC Network Africa’s comment of the day (which is mind your own business) Ghana’s Foreign Minister, Alhaji Mohammed Mumuni said “I am shocked at the quotation that was taken completely out of context and put out there. Clearly when you hear what was said out of context, really, the reaction is bound to be what it was”.

As a citizen of Ghana, I am totally against the way BBC put the comment out there. I know the ‘mind your own business’ comment made by the President really got some world leaders who are noted for interference in other nations’ affairs uneasy and this maybe a knee jerk reaction to get the world thinking minding your own business is not an option after all.

If you are a Ghanaian who loves live and complaining of economic hardships then I think your advice to President Mills will be for him to mind his own business in other to save the lives of over a million Ghanaians living in Ivory Coast and also to forestall the consequences of refugees trooping into the country if military force is used.

God bless our homeland Ghana.