“Hypocritical” NPP Condemns Ethnocentric Ewe-Bashing History Textbook of GES

The governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) in what critics describe as hypocritical, has condemned the ethnocentric contents of a Ghana Education Service (GES) textbooks for basic schools that is full of denigrating narrative about the Ewe people in the Volta Region.

The NPP today, March 18, 2021, issued a statement condemning the “incompetent and inept” textbooks published by one Badu Nkansah Publishing firm.

The books, which had gone through the first round of approvals by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA), contain a distorted political history of Ghana, as well as an anger-inducing stereotype of Ewes as being fixated on voodoo.

Chiefs in the Volta Region and a wide cross-section of the Ghanaian general public have strongly condemned the poorly-written and bigoted textbooks.

In its statement against the content of the book, the NPP wrote: “Distortions of history and bigoted stereotyping of ethnic groups cannot be the basis upon which the social identity of our children is nurtured and established. In our world today, there is no profit in ethnic dominance or subjugation considering the universal values that globalisation imposes on us.”

The statement was signed by the governing party’s Communications Director, Yaw Boaben Asamoa.

However, critics have dismissed the NPP’s statement as merely playing eye-service to the situation which was exacerbated by the party whose top executives have launched their own ethnocentric diatribes against people from the Volta Region.

KT Hammond, a parliamentarian and a senior member of the NPP last year described Ewes as not being part of Ghana. His statement was re-echoed in the actions of the Akufo Addo administration during the controversial new voters register in mid-2020.

The government virtually turned the region into a war zone by deploying fully armed battalions of soldiers to the region, claiming that Togolese are prone to breach the national borders and mix with Ewes to register for Ghana voters’ ID cards.

The high-handed surveillance mounted in the Volta Region was roundly condemned.

“Sheer Hypocrisy-the NPP has released a statement today pretending to condemn the bigoted textbooks that are in circulation…Regrettably, where we are today is as a result of a grand agenda by President Akufo Addo and his NPP to distort our history,” said Edem Agbana, a communications executive for the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC).

The statement comes in the wake of the emergence that pre-tertiary students are being fed with pure disinformation courtesy textbooks that are supposed to have been supplied to schools for pedagogical application.

The book described Ewes as juju-loving and inward looking. Another one also described Ghana’s first president, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah as a dictator who squandered the countries resources in his six-year rule.

Angry Chiefs and people from the Volta Region of the Volta Region also ordered the publishers of a history textbook to withdraw it.

At a press conference, the Volta Regional House of Chiefs warned that if the publishers of the controversial ‘History of Ghana’ textbooks do not withdraw that they will take them on in court.

“Some of the contents of the said book, which cast derogatory allusions and innuendos at Ewes, are, to say the least, distasteful and a disgrace to the authors and publishers of the said materials intended to educate the younger generation of this country,” the Chiefs fired.