Managing conflict zones is an expensive financial endeavour. The Bawku conflict remains arguably the most challenging in recent times and it continues to drain the national kitty of resources which could have been used for productive ventures in the municipality.
Development under the circumstances is stalled as attention is riveted on security management to save lives and property.
The politicisation of the conflict has not helped matters. Recently, a group of National Democratic Congress (NDC) supporters in the municipality spotting NDC T-shirts expressed disappointment in the government for not walking its campaign time talk on doing their bidding when the party wins the 2024 polls.
Some promises were made by politicians, but upon assuming the leadership of the country, the reality dawns on them about the impossibility of making good those pledges.
The Bawku crisis has been unduly politicised by interest groups and, thus, making an already challenging situation a conundrum.
In recent times, the fallouts from the conflict have been felt outside the Bawku municipality, as targets are known to have been murdered in the outskirts of Bolgatanga, the Upper East Regional capital in cold blood. One of such victims was a senior officer of the National Health Insurance Authority, who was killed in a place not far from Bolgatanga.
On Tuesday, the Ashanti Regional Chief of the Kusasi Community, Abdul Malik Azenbe was shot dead in front of his residence in Asawase, Kumasi.
The conflict is spreading southwards and across the country to places where indigenes of Bawku live.
It means the Bawku scenario is about to be replicated outside the municipality, and that is serious. When members of the warring factions start attacking each other outside Bawku, the matter would have assumed another level.
This would certainly require that our security managers consider another template in addressing it.
One of the news stories in this publication is about how motorcyclists fired upon a group of persons at the livestock market at Turaku, Ashaiman, leaving one person dead and others injured.
Those attacked hailed from Bawku as those on the motorbike. The use of motorbikes is a telltale feature of how the combatants undertake their deadly operations in Bawku.
In both the Kumasi, Asawase incident and the Turaku, Ashaiman incident, motorbikes were used.
There is no doubt that retaliations would follow unless there is an effective intervention by opinion leaders and others to obviate it.
The Bawku restiveness should be confined to that part of the country as security personnel manage it. We should not allow the security contagion to spread across the country because the Bawku one is enough ado for us already as a nation.
Those found to be fanning the conflict outside Bawku should be fished out through effective intelligence and punished.
