Busia wasn’t visionary; had no agenda for Ghana - Sekou

Dr. Sekou Nkrumah, last son of Ghana’s first president, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, has told XYZ News that his father’s achievements are incomparable to none other.

As far as he is concerned, anybody who opposed his father’s ideas and policies as far as the fight for Ghana’s independence and development of the nascent republic were concerned in the 50s and 60s, cannot be described as a “visionary” person with any “agenda for Ghana”.

The UP tradition and its exponents such as late Prime Minister Prof. Kofi Abrefa Busia and his contemporaries including J.B. Danquah, William Akufo- Addo, Obetsebi-Lamptey and a raft of others have always been accused by Nkrumah's Convention People's Party and other parties with leftist ideologies, of sabotaging Dr. Nkrumah's fight for Ghana's independence and subsequently, his leadership as prime minister and later, president.

Dr. Sekou Nkrumah's comments follow assertions by the 2012 presidential candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo that Ghana’s late Prime Minister of the second Republic, Prof. K. A. Busia, had a better alternative vision for Ghana.

The former Attorney General and Minister of Justice told an audience at a memorial lecture to mark Prof. Busia’s centenary anniversary in Accra that, the late prime minister and his ally, J. B Danquah had the moral courage, despite being tagged as “agents of imperialism and stooges of neo-colonialism,” to trumpet ideas of “free governments, representative governments, multiparty democracy, the rule of law [and] principles of democratic accountability” which, in his view, would have provided a “better context for the development of our nation”.

According to him, Busia’s ideas “ran counter to the prevailing orthodoxies” of his time, his critics rained “a great deal of invectives and abuse” on the UP tradition as “neo-colonialists” and puppets of Western “imperialism”.

However, Dr. Sekou Nkrumah says his father’s vision went far beyond the borders of Ghana and even the African Continent.

“…Everything was going for him as against people like Prof. Busia who stood against Nkrumah’s ideas,” he bewailed.

Dr. Nkrumah noted that there were very doubtful decisions made by Busia including his tacit support for apartheid in South Africa, as well as the expulsion of non-Ghanaians from Ghana, which Dr. Sekou Nkrumah said he found to be “unacceptable”.