They are British with Ghanaian Names
Contrary to Citifmonline Nana Asante aged 19, James Antwi and David Attoh both aged 18 and Ohene Bamfo aged 20 arrested over riots in England are all BRITISH.
In the General News of Wednesday, 10 August 2011, Citifmonline run a story titled ?England riots: 4 Ghanaians arrested, 3 charged?in which it claimed that four young men identified as Nana Asante aged 19, James Antwi and David Attoh both aged 18 and Ohene Bamfo aged 20 arrested over riots in England were Ghanaians.
Citifmonline claimed that the Ghanaian James Antwi was part of a group of men on bicycles that surrounded a police car in Horseford Road, Brixton and used his pedal to smash against the car, went to the driver’s side and attempted to pull open the door of the vehicle.
Citifmonline also claimed the Ghanaian Ohene Bamfo was hauled before a Croydon Magistrate Court on Wednesday on charges of theft and rioting.
Citifmonline furthermore claimed that the Ghanaian Attoh, of Hackney was caught with Burberry T-shirts.
Citifmonline finally claimed that the Ghanaian Nana Asante looted a supermarket in the capital.
It is not true they are Ghanaians. Citifmonline is misleading Ghana with these claims.
These young men are British Citizens and not Ghanaian Citizens. Even if these young men were dual citizens of both Ghana and UK, it is erroneous in the story to refer to them as Ghanaians. Having Ghanaian sounding names is not evidence one is a Ghanaian. Indeed even having a Ghanaian passport is not conclusive proof one is a Ghanaian.
I urge Citifmonline and Africans generally in the UK and elsewhere to stop copying this White racist stereotypical practice of referring to people of African descent as Ghanaians or Nigerians or Pakistanis or in short foreigners when they do something wrong; but refer to them as British when they do something great like winning an Olympic medal.
I also urge Citifmonline when reporting such stories not to mislead readers and to go beyond the banal and to the heart of the matter by telling its readers for example why such a riot took place without necessarily justifying it.
Background to Riots
It is yet to be proved that true Ghanaians with Ghanaian passports were involved in the riots. Let us all be clear that the riots had nothing to do with Ghanaians but started because the London Metropolitan Police Service which is an institutionally racist organisation according The Macpherson Report shot and killed a young black man called Mark Duggan. They claimed he was shot as a result of an exchange of gun fire. But this has proven to be false. No other than the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) has confirmed that Mark did not shoot at the police. It is believed by members of the London Black community in Tottenham that he was killed in a shoot-to-kill policy; in other words he was executed. Under British law this is unlawful killing. But in Britain the police can and do get away with unlawful killing because all they have to do is claim there was a threat or danger to life. Contrary evidence to prove there was no threat to life is very hard and almost unprovable because it is like proving witchcraft in a court of law. This has generally left the Black community, where firearms are involved, powerless against an ?institutionally racist? police force meant to protect ?life? above all else.
The shooting of black men under the circumstances in which Mark Duggan was killed is not new. What is astonishing and shocking is that a riot followed by widespread criminal damage and loss of life ensued. Britain is a sad place to be in these last few days. And many are angry.
It is remarkable that it is the Acting Police Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police who gave a Press Conference in which he spoke conciliatorily and called on parents to ensure that their children were at home. This is contrasted with the Press Conference of Theresa May the Home Secretary who was talking tough about how the children are criminals, how they will be dealt with robustly and how the full force of the law will be brought against them. The former is a man and the latter is a woman. The reversal of roles both in gender and profession was not lost on viewers.
In the meantime, the Coalition Government is at pains to stress that the riots have nothing to do with the policies of Her Majesty?s Coalition Government and the previous Labour Government. All these assertions despite the fact that the current Government was warned over and over again that current policies would lead to social unrest. But that is precisely what the Government has found it fashionable to deny. And because the failure of the British Education system to equip British Children with skills in a modern economy, and many are neither in education, employment or training, the Secretary of State of Education is the one doing the rounds trumpeting the official denials and leading the recasting of the debate as a moral failure rather than the failure of Government policy.
On Thursday 11th August 2011 the great British Parliament is reconvening to debate the riot. It is boringly predictable that all we shall hear is a choral refrain about how bad British citizens ? children – are, how criminally insane they are; how much of feral rats they are and how the British justice system must firmly deal with them. Can we imagine that the Prime Minister David Cameron MP even dismissed human rights law and talked of fighting back? Fighting children! But this is the sad state of affairs when a nation begins to fight its own children ? perhaps shoot them. But Britain itself is arming rebels in another country in Africa without an elected Head of State claiming that leader has lost all legitimacy. While Britain?s own Head of State is unelected, how will it feel if a foreign power, perhaps Libya, was arming the children on the streets of London to overthrow the British Government? The political role models clearly for British Children are not encouraging and are at best depressing. We hear that Grant Auto Theft is the game different gangs were playing out on the streets. It has not escaped some that British Children were not long ago killing one another in violent shootings and knife crimes and yet in all these riots not a single child was killed by another child with a knife or a gun even though they had them. These are indeed remarkable and troubling times.
It remains to be seen whether the British Parliament can rise to the challenge to help the children crying out in riots that they also can legitimately be part of the modern idiotic greedy individualistic materialistic British society that dates to Margaret Thatcher and beyond. The way some see it, the damage done by Greedy Bankers, doing in some cases socially useless jobs as Lord Turner put it, in the City of London, was a form of greedy riotous behaviour that wrecked lives and property and therefore is no different from what their children are doing albeit physically. If society can bail out the Banks why can it also not bail out its children? How many Bankers went to prison for the lives and property they wrecked?
In all these the least anyone can do is not to mislead Ghana by stating that British Citizens in far away England failed by a society that tells them that there is no such thing as a society, that greed is good, that it is good to invade another country using a tissue of lies, that it is good to arm rioters and rebels in another country against their own unelected government yet none elected the current British Government, that it is good to bomb another country and make their life hell, are Ghanaians when they are not.
Writer: This article is written by: Christian Agbodza, Chief Executive Officer, World Governance International. Mobile: 0044-759-102-4436; Email: [email protected]; Website: www.worldgovernanceinternational.com
