A Professor of Peace and Conflict Resolution at the Simon Diedong Dombo University of Business and Integrated Development (SDD-UBIDS), Professor Samuel Marfo, has underscored the need for conflict mediators to properly understand conflicts before initiating any actions to resolve them.
According to Prof Marfo, who is also a Member of the Upper West Regional Peace Council, any wrong understanding of conflict would lead to the initiation of wrong actions that would rather escalate the conflict situation rather than resolving it.
Prof Marfo was facilitating a community sensitization programme at Kunchogu in the Sissala East Municipality of the Upper West Region titled the “Atlantic Corridor Project: Promoting community Dialogues and Community Peace Committees to Strengthen Social Cohesion and Reduce Vulnerabilities to Violent Extremism”.
The project is being sponsored by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and implemented by the National Peace Council.
The Prof. of Peace and Conflict Resolution said to properly understand a conflict, one must learn to see or view the situation from different angles and lenses.
“Different people observe things differently and that is why we have conflicts which is normal, but the fact we see things differently does not make us enemies”, he said.
“We may disagree but no matter our differences, if we really want peace, we can learn to view the issue from each other view point we can resolve our differences and that makes us human regardless of our diversity,” he added.
Prof. Marfo noted that diversity was not the problem but how they react to their differences was rather the problem and urged the people to try and overcome that to promote social cohesion.
The Executive Secretary of the Upper West Regional Peace Council, Mr Emmanuel Danyomah, urged the people to use the knowledge they acquired during the training to help build a peaceful community.
Pio Haruna Osman Awedaga, the Chief of Kunchogu, expressed gratitude to the Peace Council and its partners for bringing together all the communities in the area, saying it had been long they came together because of their differences.
According to him, they had learnt a lot which he believed could help them initiate processes to unite their communities to live in peace.
The Assembly Member for Butu Electoral Area, Mr. Sumani Seidu Butu, noted that the communities had lots of conflicts and the Chiefs were trying to find solutions but to no avail, expressing the hope that the knowledge acquired would be of great help to their efforts, to achieve peaceful coexistence among the communities.
A Leader of the Fulbey community in Kunchogu, Alhaji Ibrahim Darimani, called for more of such engagements to help restore peace to the area.
According to him, the Fulbey community had now agreed to participate in future meetings to help contribute to the restoration of peace to the area.
FROM RAFIA ABDUL RAZAK WA
