Clash of past and future
It is common to hear of old cultural practices and traditions that often stand in the way of infrastructural projects, even in this 21st century.
Advertisement
I haven’t travelled through Nsawam by road for a while, but I do recall hearing a few years ago that the highway by-pass through the town to Suhum suffered a setback from local traditional authorities, because the project would pass through an old cemetery in the town.
As if hearing this in modern-day Ghana was not shocking enough, it came to my attention just last year that a similar challenge had come up in Europe of all places – a major motorway construction project in Serbia had stalled because of a dispute over a centuries-old oak tree.
In June 2013, construction of the highway Corridor XI under a public-private partnership arrangement reached a 600-year-old oak tree close to the village of Savinac.
The citizens of Savinac, environmental NGOs and the Green Party opposed cutting down the tree and gone on to organise local protests and a broader media campaign to pressure the company to modify its construction plans.
Once completed, the road was meant to connect Serbia's capital, Belgrade, with the Montenegrin coast. The local people were surprisingly unhappy about plans to chop the tree down.
Some considered it sacred and believed that anyone who tried to remove it would be cursed. "By God, I wouldn't dare get a digger anywhere near it," local resident Milan Petrovic told one reporter.
The land where the tree was located had been expropriated, with the owner receiving reimbursement of 2,000 EUR ($2,750) for 30m3 of wood.
Other Trending Stories
Even though the oak tree had a religious significance to the local people, it had never been put under state protection, paving the way for both the Serbian Institute of Nature Protection and the Institute for Protection of Cultural Monuments to issue the necessary permits to cut it down.
The campaign to protect the old oak managed to temporarily stop the highway construction and trigger the development of alternative proposals.
At one point, construction was now within sight of the tree, just 300m away, and although work had been halted, the government maintained that there was no money to alter the road's route.
"Serbia is not a rich country that can enjoy the luxury of changing a highway route because of a tree," said then Infrastructure Minister, Zorana Mihajlovic.
The minister agreed to a proposal from a local environmentalist who suggested grafting a piece of the old tree onto a new one so that it could live on in a new location. But local people weren't impressed with that idea, and went ahead to challenge Ms Mihajlovic to come and chop the tree down herself.
An elaborate plan was then mooted to save the tree by encasing its roots in a steel structure, and erecting glass to protect it from traffic fumes, but it came to nothing.
A year later, the Minister of Construction and Urbanism unveiled the final solution, which involved re-routing the highway and protecting the tree with metal armature construction and additional water supply.
The said ministry tactically postponed the implementation activities for the post winter-season, hoping that the tree would not survive it. On July 23, 2015, the oak tree was finally cut down, in the dead of night to prevent local resistance.
The highway project was finally completed without the need to re-route it as originally suggested by the protestors.
One can’t help but ask – that whether in Europe or in Africa, that for how long will we let our past stand in the path of our forward march of progress into the future?