By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
When Mr. Rawlings’ chief of the prosecutorial death squad, otherwise known as the Public Tribunal, asserts that “It is time for [Ghanaians] to turn away from the old-time politics of personality cults and divisive tendencies, and rather turn to a ‘New Politics’ of consensus building and the creation of new ideas,” he shamelessly speaks with a forked tongue; more so even as he also, within the same breath, heartily congratulates President Atta-Mills for ahistorically declaring Sept. 21 as “Founder’s Day.”
Indeed, if mendaciously claiming Mr. Kwame Nkrumah to be the “founder” of modern Ghana is not tantamount to the divisive act of a personality cult, then what else is? (See “Turn Away From Politics of Personality Cults” MyJoyOnline.com 10/20/09). You see, the problem with Nkrumaist diehards like Mr. Addo-Aikins is that they facilely presume the bulk of the Ghanaian populace to be morbidly and mortally afflicted with an acute lack of critical-thinking faculties as well as a reliable memory bank. Which is exactly why the former Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) Chief Judge is able to cavalierly box the futuristic and more progressive and unquestionably democratic political ideology of Drs. Danquah and Busia with the indubitably regressive and untenably primitive politics of the one-party state, as fervidly and zealously championed by the founding life-chairman of the so-called Convention People’s Party (CPP).
Rather, were he an honest man of unassailable convictions and one capable of objective analysis, Mr. Addo-Aikins would have unreservedly apologized for untold Nkrumaist atrocities while at the same time healthily calling for our new Ghanaian political dispensation to be guided by the eudemonious spirit of the Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics.
Of course, it goes without saying that the African Show Boy (ASB) immensely contributed to the development of Ghana; but it also bears reminding ourselves and our children and grandchildren of the fact that Nkrumah also set back the salutary clock of Ghanaian democracy by at least some two generations, and uncontrovertibly guaranteed that the emergent African nations of the 1960s would blindly pursue the same regressive path of a one-party dictatorship. In this sense, therefore, Nkrumah could, for all intents and purposes, be aptly described as the “founder of the modern African neocolonialist state.”
Indeed, as other critics have highlighted time and again, it was the wise and progressive spirit of Dr. Danquah that Mr. Barack H. Obama invoked on his maiden and historic visit to Ghana this past July, when the first African-American president called for the forthwith abrogation of the politics of stratocratic “strongmanism,” and instead enjoined the salutary substitution of the latter with the dogged pursuit of a culture of “strong civic institutions.” For, needless to say, the latter is precisely what Dr. Danquah meant, in 1948, when the foremost Ghanaian constitutional scholar, lawyer and thinker called for the establishment of a property-owning democracy in which the creative and entrepreneurial genius of Ghanaians was allowed to flourish without let or hindrance.
It is also rather risibly revisionist for Mr. Addo-Aikins to facilely claim that Nkrumah’s “strategy, fortitude and commitment in the relentless fight he [supposedly] put up against internal and external forces to enable Ghana gain political independence are also unsurpassed and most commendable.”
To the foregoing, all that one can say is that Mr. Addo-Aikins clearly appears to have lived and grown up in a dramatically different Ghana than the one that most of us know of and were, in fact, born and raised in. For had he really cared for the truth, the former death-squad prelate would have honestly observed that on the eve of India-Pakistan independence, the British government was seriously mulling the imminent possibility of an independent Ghana, even as Mr. Joseph (Joe) Appiah eloquently details in his slim but pithy book “The Man J. B. Danquah,” as early as 1946 or 1948, the British government had plans afoot vis-à-vis the granting of sovereignty to the august Asante Federation. It would be through the deft and foresighted intervention of Dr. Danquah and the gracious understanding of the Asantehene, Otumfuo Sir Agyeman-Prempeh II, that would guarantee that Ghana, particularly the great Akan meta-nation, would not be balkanized (See also “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana’).
Historically speaking, no civilized, modern democracy with a creatively and progressively crafted constitution would so blindly empower its premier, rather than its electorate at large, as to unilaterally permit him/her to declare a national holiday in commemoration of any of its heroes or legends. Such declaration, as I noted earlier, ought to have been deferred to either the august Ghanaian parliament or a nationwide referendum. All the same, in a country still reeling from vestigial dictatorial political culture, the foregoing bizarre and unsavory conduct of national affairs is all the more to be expected.
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is a Governing Board Member of the pro-democracy think-tank the Danquah Institute (DI) and the author of 20 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com. ###
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