A gathering of people is not usually seen inside the Anateem forest. But the habitually calm jungle, found in the west of Bolgatanga, the cosmopolitan capital of Ghana’s Upper East region, came to life with sights and sounds last Saturday as it turned into a venue for a massive rally.
In the beginning, forestry officials were wary of trespass as they mistook those preparing the rally ground for unauthorised loggers. But they drove away, unperturbed, when they realised that the purpose had nothing to do with the trees but the central government.
The rally, which saw traditional authorities as well as natives and residents of the region from home and overseas come together to throw their individual weights behind a shared goal, was organised for the people of the region to renew their long-standing demand on government to revisit an abandoned “Bolgatanga Airport Project” at Anateem and complete it without further foot-dragging.
The demand has been around for more than three decades, older than many of those who attended the meeting at the 7,051-acre forested site proposed in the late 1970s and approved by government for the construction of the airport.
The Assembly Member for Kulbia, an electoral area in the capital, told Media Without Borders he was about five years of age and was on his mother’s back when he attended a similar gathering at the same venue for the same cause in 1992.
“I was around five years when a durbar of this kind was held here for the airport project to commence,” said Richard Akampie, now 38. “I couldn’t even walk from my village to this place. My mother had to back me.”
“I remember former President Rawlings came to the ceremony at that time. The blame would go to government for abandoning it,” he added, hoping that the children spotted at the Saturday’s rally would tell a different about the project in the future.
Observers like Akampie said the gathering was unique not just because of its massive turnout and the presence of traditional figures from several parts of the region but also because of an unusual interest shown in the activity by extremely aged people and persons with disabilities who travelled many kilometres on foot to the rally venue.
“I walked to this place and I will walk back to Sumbrungu,” Abobiya Atibire, an old woman whose house is a long driving distance away, said in the locally spoken Gurune. “I took the pain to come here to add my voice to what everybody is saying because an airport will bring jobs to the people of this region, particularly the youths.”
The losses associated with the region’s lack of airport
Before the airport project was abandoned, a runway, 3.5 kilometres long and 120 metres wide, had been marked out at the proposed site and the construction of a control tower was underway at Sumbrungu.
Following the abandonment, the site only exists today as an ‘airbush’ where birds are the only flying bodies sighted in the air, grazing cattle the only regular faces found on the ground and foraging termites the common users of the proposed tarmac.
There are flight ticket booking agencies in Bolgatanga. But the nearest airport today is in Tamale, the capital city of the Northern region. After securing their air tickets in Bolgatanga, passengers then travel on the road for about two hours to Tamale to board airplanes to their destinations.
Similarly, people travelling on a commercial flight straight from Accra, the national capital, to Bolgatanga arrive in Tamale within an average one hour and disembark there. Then, they spend about two hours on the road from Tamale to complete the journey from Accra to Bolgatanga.
When presidents, vice-presidents and other top state officials are heading from Accra to Bolgatanga by flight, they disembark likewise in Tamale and continue the journey from the airport to Bolgatanga with long motorcades.
The state draws thousands of Ghana cedis from the public purse regularly to fuel the motorcades for a two-hour road journey taxpayers say would have been needless had the Bolgatanga Airport Project been completed.
There was a time development watchers counted 45 vehicles in a presidential motorcade moving from the Tamale International Airport to Bolgatanga.
Besides, justice has remained a high-priced commodity for some residents who need the services of lawyers based in southern Ghana because Bolgatanga lacks an airport.
While it takes an already-high amount of money to fly lawyers from Accra or Kumasi to Tamale, transporting them from Tamale to courtrooms in Bolgatanga by road takes an extra— and avoidable— cash. Some lawyers, who must avoid sitting for long hours on the road, even decline to take cases filed in the region, leaving prospective clients stranded and frustrated, because there is no direct flight to Bolgatanga from their locations.
There have also been reports of some individuals and companies who reconsidered their decisions to visit the region’s several tourist sites and to invest in its trade and industry sector because they felt a two-hour journey by road between Bolgatanga and Tamale could expose them and their associates to unexpected armed attacks.
Silence of Upper East MPs blamed for stalled airport project
Some believe that if airplanes were flying out of the region, a number of people who need emergency medical attention would survive.
The death of Adams Mahama in 2015 after an acid attack is one of the major cases often used to prove a point that the region’s health referral system itself needs referral.
While the former regional chairman of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) was dying at the Upper East Regional Hospital in Bolgatanga, an arrangement was made for him to be helicoptered to Accra.
He died before a helicopter arrived. Many believe if the region had got an airport at the time, he would have been enplaned in no time and he could have survived.
The convener of the Bolgatanga Airport Project (BAP) campaign, Gabriel Agambila, told Media Without Borders after the Anateem forest rally (which he sponsored) that he became a voice for the project, writing articles on the project and having them published on news websites, because the region was losing its people to auto-crashes and armed robbery attacks on the Bolgatanga-Tamale Road.
Some of the losses, he stressed, could have been avoided had government not abandoned the airport project.
The hunger to see the project executed quickly, he said, grew considerably after some foreign business partners, who travelled from overseas with him to Ghana some years ago, opted to remain in Accra because they felt travelling by road from Tamale to Bolgatanga was too risky.
“It looks like people who come from our region, when they get to the top there, they don’t even think about the region. They just think about themselves. I’m sure if they had put pressure like we are doing, we should have the airport by now. We have 15 MPs (Members of Parliament) from the region here, but yet they can’t champion our cause.
“We don’t know what they’re doing up there when they get there. Fact is that it’s the region that sends them to parliament and you have to fight the cause of the region. You don’t have to focus all your energies on national issues. It’s not the national issues that send you there; it’s the constituency issues that send you there,” Agambila said.
