Don’t dare compare Nkrumah to JB Danquah, Obetsebi-Lamptey – Kwesi Pratt warns

Kwesi Pratt Jnr., Managing Editor of the Insight Newspaper, has warned those who have made it a duty to denigrate the legacy of Kwame Nkrumah to avoid the shoddy comparison of Nkrumah to the likes of Joseph Boakye Danquah and Emmanuel Odarkwei Obetsebi-Lamptey.

“How dare anybody try to denigrate Kwame Nkrumah? Kwame Nkrumah is not a Ghanaian icon, he’s a universal icon. Indeed, Kwame Nkrumah is in the category of Albert Einstein; he’s in the category of people who tried to change the world, world greatest visionaries,” Kwesi Pratt Jnr stated Alhaji and Alhaji on Pan African TV on Saturday, March 20, 2021.

According to Pratt, even though Nkrumah governed Ghana as Prime Minister and later President for a cumulative nine years - one year more than President Kufuor - his achievements and legacy transcend all other leaders of Ghana.

“Don’t dare compare Kwame Nkrumah to JB Danquah, Obetsebi-Lamptey and so on. Don’t you dare, don’t start it,” Pratt Jnr stressed, suggesting that the comparison is completely misplaced.

To Pratt, anyone who will start to compare Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah to any Ghanaian leader whether present or past and in the process attempt to equalise the other leaders’ achievements and vision to those of Nkrumah has completely missed the mark.

“It is this backwardness which has led to many attempts to distort our history,” he noted.

Kwesi Pratt’s argument was in the context of the trending matter of newly approved textbooks, some of which describe Nkrumah as a dictator.

“This whole fixation with Founder’s [Day] is part of the same purpose,” Pratt observed poignantly. “This whole fixation of reducing Republic Day to a commemorative day is part of that backwardness.”

The Akufo-Addo administration has through an act of Parliament revoked 1st July 1960 as a statutory public holiday.

Some critics have accused the NPP administration of aiming to throw into complete irrelevance that momentous occasion on 1 July 1960 when the Union Jack and Queen Elizabeth’s diadem which for three years since Independence in 1957 had continued to be a part of our national insignia.