By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
The decision by the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences to celebrate the memory and achievements of President Kwame Nkrumah in the specious name of an annual "Founder's Week" festivities is what is carcinogenically wrong with Ghanaian intellectual culture. This is also where our abject lack of curricular ingenuity ought to be radically tackled. For it goes without saying that intellectual dishonesty is Ghana's greatest problem (See "Ghana Needs New Science Agenda - Professor Asenso-Okyere" Ghana News Agency/Ghanaweb.com 11/23/13).
Those who know the history of university education in the country are well aware of the fact that the institutions that presently go by the names of the University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, and the University College of Education, Cape Coast, were originally constituent departments of our country's flagship academy, the University of Ghana, Legon. We also know that the critical policy of free education, officially implemented by the Nkrumah-led Convention People's Party (CPP), was originally mooted as far back as the 1930s and 40's by Mr. William (Paa Willie) Ofori-Atta.
In sum, for the Founders' Week to be properly and more historically accurately celebrated, all the members of the legendary Big Six and their path-paving associates ought to be celebrated as a group. This inexcusably bankrupt individualist culture of celebrating President Nkrumah, almost as if he single-handedly lifted Ghana and its people out of a cultural and political vacuum into nonesuch enlightenment, as eloquently expatiated upon by the late Prof. Kweku Folson, not only unpardonably insults the integrity and identity of who we are as a civilized people with civilizational antiquity, it also makes a criminal mockery of the level of our intellectual and cultural awareness as a people to the rest of the world.
Indeed, I would have loved to have had it reported that the keynoter for this year's "Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Lectures," Prof. Kwadwo Asenso-Okyere, had also discussed whatever radical innovations he had brought to bear on the curricular development of the premier tertiary academy that he once headed. To-date, what I remember most about the checkered tenure of the ousted Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana, regards the criminal involvement of his own son in the leakage of examination papers. And it is quite certain that had he guided the younger Mr. Asenso-Okyere in much the same manner that he would have today's parents do, he most definitely would not have been forced to resign his most prestigious academic administration job in the country.
Prof. Asenso-Okyere is, however, dead-on-target to observe that the country's science and technology curriculum and curricula, in general, do not encourage creative innovativeness. We shockingly and sheepishly witnessed quite a bit of this political deviance during the 2012 presidential election, when Mr. John Dramani Mahama, the incumbent, erratically embarked on a vote-buying campaign with laptop computers for students, without having preceded such act of flagrant corruption of Ghanaian politics with the requisite technological facilities to make these stolen gifts operational and relevant to the purpose for which they were made available, to begin with.
That the creativity and genius of the Ghanaian child is a matter of globally public record, cannot be gainsaid. And so, of course, is the criminally bankrupt lack of ingenuity of the average Ghanaian politician.
____________________________________________________________ *Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D. Department of English Nassau Community College of SUNY Garden City, New York Nov. 23, 2013 E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net ###
