Nkrumah was the founder of Ghana – KB Asante

Former diplomat and an appointee in the Kwame Nkrumah government, K.B. Asante, has stressed that Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah is the founder of Ghana.

The issue of who founded Ghana has been debated over the past couple of years, coming to a head in 2009, when then President John Evans Atta Mills directed that September 21 – the birth day of Dr Kwame Nkrumah – should be observed as a statutory public holiday.

The controversy bordered on the name of the holiday – Founders’ Day. While one school of thought held the opinion that Dr Nkrumah was the founder of Ghana and for that matter the holiday should be “Founder’s Day”, the other school maintained that Dr Nkrumah did not pioneer the founding of the West African country. Hence, they argued that the name of the holiday should be “Founders’ Day”.

“All the argument about where the apostrophe should be is an exercise in futility,” Mr Asante said on TV3’s Hot Issues on Saturday, September 21, 2013. ‘Nkrumah was the founder of Ghana,” he emphasized.

“It doesn’t mean nobody else helped in founding the country,” he chipped in. He explained that Ghana’s first president set out the agenda for Ghana.

“He wanted a model state for Ghana,” he said, adding that Dr Nkrumah invested in schools, roads and hospitals in order to make Ghana an envy of the Europeans, who had hesitated in granting independence.

Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah was born on September 21, 1909 and he died on April 27, 1972 in Romania.