First Ghanaian Leader to Visit the US?

The Daily Graphic Editorial of 20 March, 1995 states inter alia that "President Rawlings has been accorded the honour which none of their mentors in earlier times, for all their democratic pretensions, could achieve" This statement coming in the light of the "press wars" which followed the visit of the President to the US sought to say that no other Ghanaian leader apart from President has ever been invited to the US. Political observers however believe this statement to be completely untrue.

In an article titled "Busia's vision for Ghana", THE STATESMAN writes: "Certainly Kwame Nkrumah was the first to meet a US President. Mr K. A. Gbedema, Nkrumah's Finance Minister, who was neither nor Prime Minister, was in 1957, received in audience by President Eisenhower, who delivered a Presidential apology to him for a wrong perpetrated on him in the US by some racists". The statement went on to say that "During his short term in office, Prof. Busia visited the White house THREE TIMES!!! He addressed the U. S. Congress on Capitol Hill, a press conference at the famous National Press Club in Washington and the Silver Jubilee of the united Nations in New York." Prof. Busia in one of his visits in 1971 appeared on CBS TV's prime time interview programme with the celebrated Walter Cronkite.

Following Busia's visit, the First Lady of the US, Mrs Patricia Nixon paid a three-day visit to Ghana in 1972. Three days after she left Ghana, disaster struck - Colonel (later Gen. and Mr) I. K. Acheampong led the Military to overthrow Busia's Government.

With the private press in Ghana coming under a lot of criticism from the Government, most political observers are surprised by the Graphic's editorial. Is the Graphic deliberately lying or is the statement in the Statesman one of those "mischievous lies" the private press is daily accused of telling? Ghanaian historians, stand up for the truth and tell it out loud!