A youth group with sympathies for the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Operation Build Ghana (OBG), has advocated the renaming of the Kumasi Airport after the late Baffour Osei Akoto, a lead member in the formation of the United Party (UP) now known as NPP.
The chairman of OBG, Mr. Prince Appiah Kubi, told the Daily Graphic that Baffour Akoto remained one of the key figures in the party that no national monument had been named after him.
He said Baffour Akoto, an agriculturist and the longest serving linguist in the Ashanti kingdom had been overlooked for a long while.
Baffour Akoto, who is the father of Ghana’s Minister of Food and Agriculture, Dr. Owusu Afriyie Akoto, is credited for organising the disillusioned Ashanti members of the Convention People’s Party (CPP) in 1954 to form the National Liberation Movement (NLM).
The party later became known as the United Party after a series of mergers with other political parties and now NPP.
Recently, the ruling party named some key national edifices after some of its towering figures including the late Appenteng Appiah-Menka.
Bigwigs
But Mr. Appiah said Baffour Akoto, who died in 2002, deserved a place among the bigwigs whose names needed to be immortalised so that their names were not wiped off from the history books.
He, therefore, appealed to President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo “to at least honour him posthumously so that his effort would not be in vain”.
“Remember that a nation that does not honour her heroes is not worth dying for,” he said.
Imprisonment
During the era of Ghana’s first President, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the late Baffour Akoto spoke against the one-party state system leading to his arrest and imprisonment for seven years.
“With all these sacrifices, it is only fair that at least the Kumasi Airport is named after him,” Mr. Appiah said.
