•People from the community have usually been associated with violence
•A resident from the community however says the contrary is true
It is an undisputed fact that some areas in Ghana have come to be associated with various tags. Such is the case for the Nima community which more often than not has been associated with hooliganism and violence.
In an attempt to find out why this has become so, Wonder Ami Hagan, on this editon of People & Places, had a conversation with a resident of the community, Abdul Fatahu Alhassan, who gave varied reasons to why the perception has remained for ages.
According to him, residents of Nima have over time, taken up a defensive posturing mostly towards outsiders because of the way they are treated and spoken to.
He noted that misconceptions about persons from the community has made it such that, many of them are looked down on and hence their disposition.
“We are not violent; we don’t like disrespect; we don’t like to be undermined. When a Nima person sees that you are trying to undermine them because you see they are coming from Nima, and they know that there’s a perception out there, that when you hear you are from Nima, they start looking down on you, some of them are aggressive for that.
“As soon as they see that because you realise you are from Nima, you want to talk to him anyhow or speak to him in the manner that is not good, unlike what you’ll do to someone from Airport residential area, that one, forget it, whether you are a president or whoever, he will go hard on you,” Fatahu said on the People & Places show.
He believes the people of Nima only try to stand their grounds and reject disrespectful behaviour when they are disregarded so that people accord them the respect they deserve.
“That’s why sometimes they paint us as violent people. Why should they in the first place act like that? Because there is a perception that Nima people are nobody so if you meet Nima boys somewhere and you want to engage them, you start engaging them with disrespect and all and you expect me to collect all these things and be nice to you? When you know the way you are speaking, if someone speaks to you like that, you wouldn’t like it?
“So Nima, you give them fire, they’ll give you fire, if you respect them, they’ll respect you,” he added.
Fatahu spoke during a tour of the Nima Community in this edition of People & Places on GhanaWeb TV:
Abdul Fatahu Alhassan was speaking on this edition of the People & Places show