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The official announcement by Vice-President MahamuduBawumia that the Akufo-Addo government intends to recruit some 3,000 Arabic-language instructors as part of its education policy, ought to raise the hackles of all patriotic, peace- and democracy-loving Ghanaians (See “Government to Recruit 3,000 Arabic Instructors – Bawumia” Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 10/22/17).
I hope that Alhaji Bawumia, the apparent spearhead of this initiative, fully appreciates the constitutional concept and tenet of the Separation of Church, or Religion, and the State. Under absolutely no circumstances should taxpayer money be expended on the support of Islamic, or Christian, education in the country, no matter which part of the country such an initiative is being undertaken.
Ghana may indisputably be a predominantly Christian country, but it is decidedly secular in both political and cultural orientation, the inescapable religiosity of its citizenry notwithstanding. If the government wants to promote Islamic education, it must do so by encouraging the development of our indigenous languages and cultures as the vehicles for the propagation of Islam in the predominantly Muslim areas of the country.
Thus, one would rather have the Al-Quran, or The Holy Quran, translated into such major northern Ghanaian languages as Dagomba and Mamprugu or Mamprusi and Gonja (I, personally, own two copies of the Quran and have done the Juma several times). In other words, Islam must be adapted to suit the cultures of its local practitioners in Ghana. Nobody should use public funds to promote Arabic in this country, unless Akan and other major Ghanaian languages are also being promoted in the Arab world.
We also should not create a pernicious and tragic situation, whereby our indigenous languages and cultures are irresponsibly left to atrophy and vanish by the patently unhealthy acquisition of the Arabic language and culture.
It is an open secret that the Arabs continue to be among the most anti-African racist people around the globe. We all witnessed the apocalyptically massive and wanton destruction wreaked on the indigenous African population of the Sudan by the Arab terrorists called the Janjaweed.
Yes, unforgettable and unforgivable crimes against African humanity and our womanhood. In Darfur, in southwestern Sudan, for example, it did not matter that most of the Black-African population was Muslim and Islamic in religious and cultural orientation. Their jihadist rapists and butchers only saw the blackness of the skins of their victims; and the blackness of the latter as a quintessential symbol of evil to be exterminated and extirpated.
Don’t get me wrong, we are not averse to the study of the Arabic language as a course of study in our public schools and tertiary academies; however, the sort of cultural Arabization being systematically promoted by the likes of the Bambiwiya Institute ought not to be supported by the Government of Ghana with taxpayer funds. Rather, it ought to be parochially or privately promoted.
The knee-jerk argument that the government has been supporting Christocentric education in the country for decades now, does not hold water because it was a purely involuntary policy carried out by the Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP), because these Christocentric parochial institutions were already fiercely independent and the most successful of their kind in the country.
In other words, in nationalizing our “Mission Schools,” the CPP government intended to spread the great benefits of cutting-edge modern education and knowledge that these Christocentric institutions jealously represented and guarded. That situation is not nearly the same with these Islamic institutions.
What we need to be planning and talking about is how to effectively and successfully export our more ancient and humanistic traditional African values into the largely violent and benighted Arab world, as a means of civilizing these haughty Arabs and making them more culturally inclusive, accommodating and hospitable like us, the indescribably despised “Wretched of the Earth.”