Dr Joseph Obeng – GUTA President
The President could not have said it any better than he did when he reacted to the Ghana Union Traders’ Association (GUTA) crude action of padlocking the shops of Nigerians in some parts of the country.
Their wish that the President would have said otherwise was a tall demand and, of course, incommensurate with civility and diplomacy.
Although a law exists that restricts certain aspects of business to Ghanaians, the authority to enforce laws is not for an individual or a group of non-state actors outside law enforcement to undertake that mission. Such action as GUTA undertook was consistent with crudeness and primitiveness.
Were citizens allowed to take the law into their own hands as the GUTA members have decided to do of late, the country would have been reduced to the animal kingdom or a rebel-run country which Ghana is not.
If there are countries which quality for this discredited description, Ghana is not one of them, and so when some of us throw discipline to the wind the way GUTA did, they must be to review their conduct. The President did just that and we are with him.
Ours as we have always said is a country of laws. GUTA executives can go to court when they are aggrieved but not do what they are now synonymous with of late ? taking the law into their own hands.
It is mind-boggling when a grouping like GUTA which is managed by highly educated persons attracts the kind of negative headlines they are doing in recent times.
As we stated in an earlier commentary, the issue of Nigerians engaged in retail trading in the country is not one which GUTA can handle.
If it had been as simple as some of us are erroneously thinking, government would have long waded into it with a whip.
Diplomacy demands of us to conduct matters in a way that would not incur opprobrium of other countries. Since no country can operate as an island, without belonging to recognized blocs and whose protocols, she must abide by the GUTA standard cannot be acceptable.
No matter how seemingly intractable challenges are, there would always be ways out of them when cool heads are allowed to rule.
South Africa is still reeling from the fallouts of the xenophobic attacks her people visited on foreigners in their country. It took the intervention of President Cyril Ramaphosa to calm down his incensed counterparts from other African countries whose nationals were subjected to the brutish and unnecessary reaction by his compatriots.
The repercussions of the manner in which GUTA is going about this subject are far-reaching and so heeding the President’s counsel is an unrivalled option and we must as a country maintain our respect in the comity of civilized nations.