Ghana’s Speaker of Parliament, Professor Aaron Mike Oquaye, will be the main Speaker at the Ghana@60 anniversary lecture on the 4th of August, 2017, in Accra.
The event themed ‘August 4, Ghana’s Day of Destiny’ forms part of the Ghana@60 anniversary celebrations this year. Chairman of the anniversary planning Committee, Mr. Ken Amankwah, who led a delegation to officially invite the Speaker for the lecture, said the Speaker was chosen to grace the event because of his wealth of knowledge and experience in the political history of the country.
Deputy Chief of Staff at the Office of the President, Mr. Abu Jinapor, who is also the Vice Chairman of the Committee, said that August 4 is momentous in Ghana’s political history, in that, it was when the Aborigines Rights Protection Society (ARPS), led by John Mensah Sarbah, was formed as a conglomerate of different groups of intellectuals in Cape Coast and Southern Ghana, to protect the traditional land tenure practices of the indigenous Gold Coast people from being appropriated by the colonial government of Britain.
Professor Oquaye, in accepting the invitation, praised Ghana’s ancestors for resisting attempts by the British to appropriate Ghana’s lands, as the former set out to apply land acquisition policies elsewhere in Africa to the then Gold Coast. He also said the people of the Gold Coast didn’t allow themselves to be taken advantage of easily. He further stated that John Mensah Sarbah was quick to protest that Ghana’s customary land was never waste, adding that no matter how bushy it was, it belonged to a family or an individual, of which the chief was a custodian. The Speaker also contended that any chief who sold land arbitrarily must be de-stooled.
The lecture, among other things, is expected to highlight the chronological events and struggles that led to Ghana attaining independence in 1957.
