By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
It is rather ironic for Dr. Tony Aidoo to be lauding President Kwame Nkrumah, for having started Ghana on a progressive path towards industrial development, knowing full-well that Dr. Aidoo also belongs to the very political party and government that so unwisely and criminally quartered up the erstwhile Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC) - (See "Kwame Nkrumah Is Incomparable - Dr. Tony Aidoo" Daily Guide/ Ghanaweb.com 1/13/14).
It is also not clear what he means when the former policy monitor in the office of the late President John Evans Atta-Mills asserts that "the setback in Ghana's educational sector is due to the lack of a philosophical foundation." Maybe somebody needs to advise Dr. Aidoo to read the extensive corpus of the published scholarship of Dr. Kofi Abrefa Busia, on both Ghanaian and continental African education - both formal and informal - in order to enable him to make more intelligent and constructive pronouncements on the history and quality of the country's education.
And on the latter score, it goes without saying that when it comes to the crucial subject of commanding appreciation of the geography, or anatomy, of Ghanaian education, it is Dr. Busia, and not President Nkrumah, who has absolutely no peer in the country. Unfortunately, stentorian fanatics like Dr. Aidoo have tragically prevented themselves from objectively researching and propagating the facts.
Undoubtedly, President Nkrumah contributed significantly to the material development of Ghanaian education, but Dr. Busia was ages and generations ahead of Mr. Nkrumah in terms of the organic appreciation of the role and function of education in postcolonial Ghanaian and continental African society. Busia also pragmatically understood the imperative necessity of balancing pedagogical facilities with the adequate and qualitative training of educators to operate these vanguard institutions of intellectual and cultural development. In fact, this was one of the major terrains on which the Prime Minister of the erstwhile Progress Party (PP) government fiercely debated President Nkrumah.
Dr. Aidoo would also do himself and his associates among the front ranks of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) a lot of good by accessing information regarding what Mr. William "Paa Willie" Ofori-Atta had to say about the geography and direction of Ghanaian education. And here, also, it bears emphatically pointing out the fact that the free-education policy so foresightedly rolled out by President Nkrumah and his Convention People's Party (CPP) government, at the dawn of the country's independence, owed far more to the sterling philosophical precepts of Mr. Ofori-Atta than any other postcolonial Ghanaian leader.
Of course, in this sphere of our national endeavors, too, Dr. Joseph (Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye-Danquah was a standout pioneer in ways that Nkrumah disciples like Dr. Aidoo can scarcely fathom. In the end, though, the Cudjoe-led IMANI-Ghana think tank ought to be highly commended for taking on a task that constitutes unarguably the most significant roadmap to the rapid and most meaningful development of our country's education.
As a people, we also need to wisely get away from such cheap and tawdry superlative sloganeering vis-a-vis the question of who is either the greatest or incomparable leader in Ghana's political culture. Rather, let us constructively use our talents and energies - artisanal and intellectual - to demonstrate our own individual and collective worth as postcolonial Ghanaian citizens in an increasingly technological and globalized environment and society.
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Jan. 13, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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