Rawlings slams Kufuor for desecrating Nkrumah’s legacy

Former President Jerry John Rawlings has in a characteristic style attacked his successor, former President John Agyekum Kufuor, accusing him of demeaning the legacy of Ghana’s first President, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.

The former Military dictator also slammed the late President John Mills and former President John Mahama for allowing Nkrumah’s legacy to be desecrated.

According to Mr. Rawlings, the former NPP leader supervised the terrible handling of the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum in Accra which is a tourist attraction.

“…Many years later when Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s wife, Fathia Nkrumah also died former President Kufuor laid her coffin in the same dug out where Nkrumah had been buried and he feigned to have been mourning her and we all fell for it and joined in the mourning without handkerchiefs wiping our tears.

“From that moment, that National Monument to honour that man became a family graveyard. Do you see how his grave was desecrated?

Mr. Rawlings added “Ex-Presidents Mills and Mahama claim they’re Nkrumahists, you have chopped into the man’s name. All these were done before your eyes while in power and they didn’t see? The compound is big, you could have dug a hundred and one holes and put Madam Fathia also there.

“Build a three story building there, you did not have to do that under the same monument under which Dr Kwame Nkrumah was,” Mr. Rawlings said when the family of the late Multimedia Journalist Kwadwo Asare Baffour Acheampong popularly paid officially informed him of the Journalist’s death.

Fathia died on 31 May 2007, at Badrawy Hospital in Cairo, Egypt, due to a stroke after a period of illness.

Her remains was flown to Ghana for a funeral at the State House in June 2007 following her “lifelong request” that she be buried next to her husband.

The Kwame Nkrumah mausoleum designed by Don Aurthur, houses the body of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and his wife Fathia Nkrumah, it is meant to represent an upside down sword which in the Akan culture is a symbol of peace.