By Dr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo
Attorney and Counselor at Law
The importance of analyzing Nkrumah’s leadership is that it opens the Pandora box of our psychology as a people, our fate as a nation, and the whole of the African leadership conundrum as a whole.
As Ghanaians, we have come to admire the protagonist of our national folklore, Ananse, the cunning trickster who, in one instance, purchased a whole kingdom with a grain of corn. The story goes that Ananse was able to exchange a grain of corn with a cockerel and the cockerel with a goat and the goat with a human being and the human being with a whole kingdom. This, and many such stories capture the imagination of the typical Ghanaian growing up. Thus our philosophical purview is always positively disposed toward the evil genius, the person who can outwit his adversaries and sell all of them down the river. Our history of slavery also confirms this general psychology within the African continent, where the individual deserving of praise is the one behaving as a slave-master within the group. So our philosophical perspective as a people has not yet been properly aligned to the concept of the utmost good in political leadership: to the virtues like honesty, compassion, gratitude, fellow-feeling, kindness and so on. As far as we are concerned, our admiration is for the Ananse-like characters and the ruthless oppressors who will feed us with deception and sell both friends and foes down the river if his needs and predisposition so dictates. We are never a people in search of a wise and compassionate leader who would solve any problem for us. We always opt for a confident trickster or a slave-master to deceive or oppress us.
It is at the backdrop of this psychological disposition that Nkrumah appeared on the scene. Nkrumah was worse than Ananse, because whereas Ananse had a grain of corn to purchase a kingdom, Nkrumah came to Ghana barehanded, his passage paid for by the UGCC to help in the struggle for independence. And at first, he purchased the full trust of the UGCC, and then used it as a platform to form the CPP, and then used the CPP as a platform to purchase the presidency and then used the presidency as a platform to put the whole population in bondage. And indeed, he was going ahead to buy the whole of the continent and put it in bondage when the people said, “enough” and booted him out.
By the time he was booted out, he had prepared the grounds to out-Ananse Kwaku Ananse himself: he had managed to establish a race of sycophants who will white-wash his evils and sing his praises for two or more generations. He had managed to appropriate the people’s innocence and substituted it with his powerful trope of sanctifying wrong as good, and he had already established the concept of “the necessary evil” as a political philosophy: propaganda, sloganeering, whole-sale corruption and character assassination…... And so long after his overthrow, when the leadership again fell into the hands of these Nkrumaist ideologues, nation building devolved to the place where it had nothing to do with wisdom, honesty, compassion gratitude, fellow-feeling and kindness and so on. Rather, it had everything to do with the great moral turpitude as exemplified by the Ananse-like character of Kwame Nkrumah: Ingratitude, jealousy, betrayal, selfishness, megalomania, egomania and so on and so forth.
This toxic notion of leadership contaminated the whole of the African continent, because Nkrumah’s leadership was uniquely situated in the prosopographical context where the whole of the African continent looked up to him as the great example in exemplary leadership. Because of Nkrumah’s deep-seated character flaws and dictatorial tendency , democracy came to be misconstrued to mean one-party totalitarian regimes whereby leaders declared themselves life presidents with the automatic right to imprison without trial, to assassinate their opponents one way or the other, and to squelch competition and promote self-aggrandizement.
So an analysis of the wrong-headed leadership of Nkrumah should take us to the darker aspects of our fate as a people, as a nation and as a continent: it takes us to the reason why we are where we are today. In a sense, Nkrumah unified the whole of Africa all right, but under his evil aegis wherein the leader became akin to God. And if we want our nation to prosper, then we as a people must unravel this false system of leadership and substitute it with the noblest one that will purge our conscience of the false ideology propounded by Nkrumah and Nkrumaist buffs.
The purpose of discussing all these historical truths is for the guidance of the future. The lies will lead us to nowhere. Nkrumah’s great deception must be acknowledged if the future will see us decipher the truth from falsehood without fear and contradictions. For example, Nkrumaists turn on Danquah and berate him whenever Nkrumah’s brutal dictatorship is discussed. This will lead us to nowhere. J.B. Danquah was imprisoned without charge or trial and died in Nkrumah’s prison. Elsewhere, analytical minds will be questioning why a person could be imprisoned without trial at all, or why he should be allowed to die in prison and be insulted in death. Also, analytical minds will not form any correlation between Danquah’s incarceration and Nkrumah’s abolition of human rights and freedom of expression. But what do we hear: that Danquah was a terrorist or that Danquah was a CIA agent. But it should be easy to try a terrorist and a CIA agent and find him guilty. Yet, this never happened! Yet the chant has always been that Danquah was a terrorist, or that Danquah was a CIA agent.
This is notwithstanding the fact that the five alleged major culprits of the famous treason trial involving the bomb-throwing incident at Kulungugu were Hon. Tawiah Adamafio, Hon. Ako Adjei (who suggested Nkrumah for the post of Secretary of the UGCC), H.H. Kofi Crabbe ( all CPP ministers) and Yaw Okyere and Mr. Yaw Manu of the opposition UP. When the trial freed them for lack of evidence, Nkrumah sacked the Justices, reconstituted his own trial panel which handed him the decision he wanted, which was death sentence for the accused.
Where was Danquah in all this? Yet the Nkrumaists always shout, “Danquah was a terrorist”. And this is what should bother right thinking people. If we can go to this great extent to build up a body armor of lies in order to protect a dictator’s image, then what sort of people are we? J.B. Danquah was a great adversary of Kwame Nkrumah who saw the plain acts of dictatorship being perpetrated against the people of Ghana and wanted to do something about it. He would be justified if he had solicited the help of a foreign government to overthrow the tyranny of Nkrumah; but he did not. The extent of the allegations which Nkrumaists incessantly quote to accuse him is an account given by one Mahoney. This account is a hearsay account since this man claims to have heard it from his father. Elsewhere, analytical minds will be looking for more corroborative facts to substantiate this allegation. But to the Nkrumaists, this simply offers them the chance to vilify a martyr who died for the cause of our freedom. And that is the extent these people have gone to corrupt their souls, that they fail to honor the innocents who stood against the oppressor’s rule, in order that they will instead honor the oppressor’s name.
But this is not the only extent they will go to turn history on its head; for the Nkrumaist lies and desembling have no scope or sense of proportion. To illustrate the extent of the prevailing evil, here is a comment by a highly educated Nkrumaist denying that Nkrumah was a brutal dictator. Andy Kwawukume (Andy-K) wrote in reaction to some statements I made describing Nkrumah as a brutal dictator:
SAS, a pity you didn't read any theory of political science to guide you in these things. What you are saying has no truth value, and therefore hollow, as no leader in newly independent African countries had the capability and capacity to be a dictator, talk less of brutal dictator. Nkrumah was therefore no dictator. What did he ever dictate?
Comment: Note that this writer is in intellectual self-denial if his political science theory enables him to conclude that in the world of the newly independent African countries, none of the leaders “had the capability and capacity to be a dictator”! Having noxiously exculpated all African leaders, he exonerates Nkrumah and asks us the interesting question “what did he dictate?
The writer continues:
Fact is, Nkrumah secured his decisions through popular and parliamentary approval. He held a referendum to decide if Ghana should become a republic, even if it was a foregone conclusion he'd popular support at the polls. Dictators don't do that.
To turn Ghana into a one party state, he held another referendum and got a resounding approval. As Fitch and Oppenheimer wrote, the opposition members crossed to the majority side amidst loud cheering and slapping of backs, showing that even the opposition accepted it. And as they pointed out too, the Hansards did not show a subdued parliament but a very robust one. Yes, even Gbedemah went to Parliament to denounce Nkrumah before slipping into exile. In a dictatorship, he'd be picked up from the grounds of Parliament to jail!
You see, in Africa of the '60s where most areas and peoples are not touched by the presence of central govt (painfully it is the case for just too many areas and people), the most a leader could be is autocratic and authoritarian.
Comment: To him, all that it takes is for a leader to hold a referendum in his transformation into a dictator, and all is good with him. So today, if the NDC government were to hold such a referendum and win, we can say goodbye to democracy as we know it.
But a leader’s actions are not quantified by the prism of referenda in order for it to be certified as democratic or even legal. The test of any leader’s action is in its intrinsic morality for all places and time. If we say Nkrumah was a brutal dictator, his actions ought to be gauged in terms of its abstract goodness and general acceptance. Is it right for a leader to take the sovereignty away from the people, to abolish the freedoms which he promised to the people, to imprison without trial…..? The test again is how a leader’s actions cohere with the universal principles of human rights and freedoms. When judged in these terms, Nkrumah fails miserably because his actions are those that are contrary to any political theory regarding human freedoms, justice, and independence. That is why he was a brutal dictator.
This writer continues:
Was Nkrumah autocratic? Not much more than the colonial governor, whose
roles he simply assumed. I presume you don't also naively believe that Nkrumah inherited a functioning democracy from the British with the lowering of the Union Jack and the hoisting of the new Ghana flag on 6 March 1957! Democracy comes from years of political socialisation and acculturation.
Btw, when it comes to analysis of issues, you right-wing blokes cannot trump we pro-Nkrumaists. I wrote a rather very late comment to your previous article in an attempt to enlighten you, but it appears you haven't read it. Hence, this brutal dictator nonsense again. When even the coup makers never claimed Ghana was under a dictator but they staged the coup in order to stop a "creeping dictatorship"? Maybe you should call Nkrumah a "creeping dictator".
Comment: So here, he debunks the allegation that Nkrumah was a brutal dictator by stating categorically that he was no different from the governor whose role he assumed. Thus he inadvertently admits that nothing really changed after our independence; he calls me naïve that I believed there was indeed independence after the lowering of the union Jack and the hoisting of the new Ghana flag. He also explains that Ghana was then not mature for democracy/independence, echoing Nkrumah’s own assertion elsewhere that Ghanaians were not mature for independence/democracy hence his institution of dictatorship. Granted that this is the case, what did Independence, freedom and justice then mean to Nkrumah when he promised it to the people of Ghana? And when Nkrumah and Nkrumaists say that they achieved these for Ghanaians on March 6, 1957, what exactly do they mean? Was it all fraud from beginning to the end?
Then finally, to top his irritation for me, he said the coup leaders themselves spoke about “creeping dictatorship, but not “brutal dictatorship” So we are to swallow the coup makers’ distinction here while it narrowly absolves Nkrumah. The question is, what other things are we to accept in strict terms that was said against Nkrumah?
As for the Nkrumaists, it suffices to say that they are fanatics of impressionism and not students of broad principles of logic or reasoning that will lead to the ultimate truth. They are never interested in the truth! Truth to them comprises ideology, hearsay, idolization, hero worshipping, shibboleth and sheer subservience to others' views and writings. No education has enabled them to think beyond what somebody else has indoctrinated them to believe with childlike devotion.
That is why it is possible for many fine Nkrumaist minds to spend time insulting a person who was imprisoned without charge or trial and who died in the prison of the Great Deceiver.
That kind of broad principles of logic and reasoning is what we need to enable us to unmask the machinations of Kwame Nkrumah, the person responsible for the backwardness of Ghana and African nations. When he had the opportunity to lead, he led all of Ghana and Africa into the palpable darkness from which we are still struggling today to escape. What is more serious, he destroyed the finest minds of his time to overlook his evils and to supplant the true heroes with his name.
Fortunately today, Nkrumah has no leadership philosophy or legacy in Ghana. His brutal dictatorship is cast into the dustbin of history, never to be resurrected again. And his motley crowd of cheerleaders have their voices perpetually drummed out by the great spirit of the martyr for the true freedom and independence of Ghana and Africa, Osagyefo Dr. J.B. Danquah, the doyen of African politics.
Samuel Adjei Sarfo, JD, MA, BA, etc. is an Attorney and Counselor at Law, a Teacher of Lore, Certified High School English Educator, Researcher and Scholar. He can be reached at sarfoadjei@yahoo.com
