Even though Ghana has positioned itself to lead West Africa in tourism through the careful cultivation of a tourism-led socio-economic development, things may not be so because in the tourism generating market, potential visitors are increasingly seeing Ghana as a hotspot for bloody social conflicts.

Hitherto, we had been quiet capitalizing on tourist who visit this beautiful country of ours and return home to say nice and wonderful things about us and Ghana. Word-of-mouth advertising, or positive referrals are the most powerful tools for business promotion in a service-based industry, especially when viewed from the high cost of international advertising and promotion of tourism.

With this prerogative of generating positive referrals, we might have to look else where for an impossible budget to bring Ghana to the notice of the traveling world.

This article is long overdue, because our violent conflict situations have been expanding and increasing by the day, against the backdrop that we are positioning our tourism to become the number one generator of jobs and foreign exchange.

Over the past 15 years, it appears that every week brings a fresh conflict to some parts of Ghana, and finds it way onto the internet for the whole world to know that Ghanaians have once again raised weapons [guns, clubs and matches] against fellow Ghanaians.

It happened with the Konkomba-Nanumba tragic conflict, which some avid foreign news network enthusiastically described as having arisen from a ‘disagreement over a common guinea fowl’. Weighed against the massive loss of lives, properties, villages, houses and farmlands, it becomes most ridiculous to place a ‘common guinea fowl’ at the center of what even our media men called the Konkomba-Nanumba war.

Not long after this terrible tragedy, the Dagbon crises arose, with equally horror-filled consequences in which the foreign media once again led had a field day of gory descriptions of the cutting off of human limbs and even public decapitations! We are indeed not helping ourselves or tourism at all if we see weapons as the only alternative to peaceful arbitration and conflict resolution.

Tourism, simply put, is a phenomenon where people travel out of their own free will with pockets full of money, to have fun and excitement, and spend the money into the hands of local people who provides services. Tourism is therefore an activity of happy exchanges, a welcome redistribution of global incomes.

This means that nobody in his right frame of mind would like to travel to ‘have some fun’ in a country where the people are shooting at one another. You can go and ask Marslow. Self-preservation, personal physical safety is more important to every normal human being than even social recognition. Nobody wants to travel and die at the destination.

Since the devastating Konkomba-Nanumba “war”, and the very serious Dagbon crises, more conflicts have exploded around Ghana and found their way onto the internet. A couple of months before Bawku went up in flames; Bunkprugu Yunyoo had had its own, later to be over-shadowed by the more destructive one at Bawku between the Manprusis and Kusasis.

Anloga has burst into flames two times these past three months. Agbozume has just added its name to the list of violent conflict areas, while the Tsitso-Peki running battle over farmlands are still fresh in our minds. More than a decade ago, the very peaceful Akwapims also joined the fray when the Akropongs and Abiriws attacked each other over the use of the common cemetery!

Only recently, the Ga chieftaincy matters also took a violent turn, to the shock and embarrassment of all Ghanaians and international organizations in Ghana. Government was also embarrassed, because it is based in Accra, the stage for the Ga chieftaincy crisis.

The important facts are that lives and properties are lost in such conflicts, and worse for our tourism our bloody conflicts go directly to the internet and become part of our history and profile as a tourist destination.

Africa already has the very unenviable reputation as a homogenous unit permanently bedeviled by civil wars, terrorism, ethnic genocide, political violence, insurgencies and armed robberies. Africa is also always associated in the western media with running HIV/Aids, disease poverty and want.

In the face of all these, perhaps we should count ourselves lucky that as a continent, we receive paltry three per cent of global tourism. We only make our image worse for our tourism drive when we allow conflicts to explode in our faces.

Africa has hotspot for violence and we know them, because the whole world is on a common information super-highway. We know that no tourist would like to visit Eritrea, Somalia or Ethiopia today. They are almost permanently at war, and have been since the 1974 violent overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie and the later collapse of Somali after the ousting of General Mohammed Siad Barre.

A few years ago and even now, international travelers would be reluctant to visit Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast, even though their wars are technically over. They are yet to settle down after their own self-inflicted violent civil wars that caught the attention of the whole world. Only a few months ago, all the tourism of Kenya collapsed, because they started shooting at each other over election results.


Tourism is characterized by a highly elastic demand. This is firstly because the budget for leisure travel has alternative uses. A person may decide to forgo his holiday this year in order to buy a new car, or to complete a mortgage payment. Even more so, the number of destinations, places to visit for fun and leisure, competing destinations, are unlimited.

There is virtually no limit to the places that a person with money can travel to, to have his leisure. So why could a person decide to visit a place where bullets are flying all over the place? If we did not know before, let us now know that our conflicts set our Ghana apart as a dangerous place to visit, and when this word spreads around, our tourist arrivals will slide to a stop.

Conflicts like those we live with set backs our promotional efforts and result in loss of revenues.

When one country runs itself into violence, her neighbours make promotional efforts to tell the rest of the world how different they are with their peace, as Ghana has done before, and when promotes ourselves as an oasis of peace in West Africa in flames.

Years ago, Kenya was one of the very few privileged African countries that received Japanese tourist, known to be very high spenders, but demanding exceptionally high quality assurance. When a Japanese tourist got killed in the Masai-mara, that marked an abrupt end to Japanese tourist traffic to East Africa.

Whenever violent conflicts begin to simmer, let us spare some thoughts to our precious tourism. It has a huge future, I assure you. It is an economic activity that brings in foreign exchange without our having to extract and export commodities. The real ingredient for profitable and sustainable tourism is therefore socio-political peace.

Conflicts affect the old and weak, who can neither run nor fight. Conflicts destroy women and children, and further deprive Ghana of her human capital, since the end result of such violent event is the death of men folk and youth who engage in the violence.

So what next? Looking at their profile, it turns out that most of our violent conflicts have arisen over chieftaincy as the primary cause. Some of such conflicts are very recurrent, and the casual factors are in the history of the particular stool, family or skin,

Conflicts that arise out of chieftaincy disagreements are sometimes hard to grasp because the people who instigate them, the royal claimants, hardly die or get wounded in the conflicts that they themselves originate. Some people have generated bloody conflicts and gotten away with them before, we all know.

If we are to protect our tourism for the future, and into the future the efforts must be made to terminate the litany of violent conflicts that have littered our landscape and worldwide web. Stakeholders in our tourism must raise their voices to receive attention from the government and from all those with a role to play in the generation of conflicts and resolution of conflicts. In this way, our tourism may be saved to lead the Ghanaian economy.

I place emphasis on these facts and statements, because if we as a nation do not take immediate steps now to delimit our potential for violent conflicts, our tourism will die before it matures.