By: Kobina Antobam
If you believe in unidentified flying objects (UFOs), then you must be completely out of this world and “spaced out” all by your crazy self on a faraway planet. And if you also believe in NPP’s much-ballyhooed property-owning tradition as an honorable pursuit for all Ghanaians, you must then be right here on Earth somewhere in Ghana but very delusional and crazy like a pilfering fox.
If you also decide that you have heard enough of Nkrumah, Danquah, and Kufuor from yours truly, then you are one of those Ghanaians who cherished, welcomed, and celebrated Kufuor’s and NPP’s deliberate and methodical degradation of Nkrumah and the empty glorification of Danquah for good eight years. If you are one of those people, then you will be hopelessly exasperated about the constant reminders of especially Nkrumah accomplishments.
Before we go on, the question is: where were you and why were you quiet when Kufuor was rewriting Ghana’s history right under your nose but can’t stand reading about the pursuit and insistence for him to answer for his past actions and prejudices? If you insist on being stubbornly ethnocentric about it, then you can go find somewhere to hide your guilty face and hang your heavy head in shame because you ain’t seen nothing yet!
When the NPP, in its beginnings, sought nationwide acceptance and tried to project an image of viability but was saddled with the predicament of extenuating its negative legacy, that is, the legacy of conniving with a foreign intelligence agency to overthrow Kwame Nkrumah, the initial NPP members concluded that the party did not have any substantive ideology to tag onto which it could sell to discriminating Ghanaians in order to lighten its historical burden.
After a hopeless search, they settled on Joseph Danquah and his meaningless idea of private ownership of property and called it a “tradition” and planned to implement it as a national policy. What they did not understand is that private property ownership is a given in all societies and should not take precedence over, or override, a wider national economic policy like industrial and infrastructure development. The idea of private property ownership should not have consumed the soul, time, and attention of the ma-te-meho party and rendered them corrupted to the core.
A simple deductive reasoning will help you realize that, in his desperate desire to cuddle up to and gain a seat on the lap of his foreign subversive bosses and clandestine sponsors, Danquah struggled with putting forth a counter stance against Kwame Nkrumah’s rule and socialist leanings. Danquah wanted desperately to please his colonial masters so much that he ended up being impaled by his own bloody sword!
When it comes to the adoption of an appropriate economic ideology for Ghanaians, it is imperative to mention here that, though it served its purpose at the right period, pure socialist economic policy does not fit well in today’s expanded global economy, especially when post-World War II Cold War has been virtually over. Almost all subjugated nations are now relatively free of colonialism and are trudging along, at varying paces, to bring themselves up to the economic and social levels of, or better than, their former colonial masters. We are, of course, in times now when the great fathers and surrogates of socialism, such as Russia, China, and even Cuba are either fast shedding that communist legacy or are struggling to distance themselves from that ideology.
But, right after the Second World War and during the Cold War era, it was imperative for many newly freed vulnerable colonies, when confronted with concerns of national security, preservation of territorial and cultural integrity, and personal freedoms, to adopt socialism in order to repel the weighty, overbearing, divisive, violence –ridden neo-colonialism and imperialism. Many of the new and weak countries, like Ghana, were always wide open for internal destabilization and unrelenting threats of super-power sabotage and overnight overthrows of their governments, especially when those fledgling countries either tried to help other kinsmen become free or simply stay neutral. For those Ghanaians who are too young to remember or refuse to brush up on their history, they should be told that there were many occurrences of externally contrived and foreign supported coups-de-tat across all continents.
So, Kufuor and the NPP’s declared support and justification for the overthrow of Nkrumah is a mere smokescreen in a desperate fruitless effort to appear germane to the current democratic transformations and revolutionary “springs” taking place in many growing and steadily developing former colonies.
Let Ghanaians be aware that the NPP has had nothing whatsoever to do with the ideation, development, birth, and the growth process of Ghana’s current democratic dispensation. The NPP have only had their bomb-throwing bloodied hands in the destruction of national political and economic structures and the denigration of the creative ideas of others outside their group. There is never a good idea if it did not come from them. That kind of attitude engenders one and only one reaction from the rest of the population. That means that there is no need for them to want to or be allowed to join in the process and practice of current democratic nation building. They will always corrupt the system if you let them.
For as long as NPP has been around, they have struggled with all forms of illusive justifications for the forcible removal of Nkrumah. But they know that we know that they know that Nkrumah and his ideology were relevant during his time. Repeat: Because of prevailing super-power interferences and exigencies of that period, Nkrumah and his ideology were appropriate for the work he did for his countrymen during his time. Period!
And as it is evident now the world over, believe that times would have eventually changed for Nkrumah, or his legitimate successor(s), to have gradually transformed Ghana into a successful free society, politically, economically, and socially. He tried but was stopped abruptly at a time when worldwide segregation and racial prejudice had peaked and the world was run solely by racist European and American white men; and for the continued control of the former colonies, with the cajoled assistance of poor, naïve, newly freed local saboteurs, who were completely lacking in their knowledge and understanding of superpower wranglings, but eager and willing to sell their birthrights for less than “thirty pieces of silver.” Two excellent examples were Afrifa and Kotoka.
At this point, it is appropriate to let readers know that this is not a debate about the merits and demerits of socialism, capitalism, or any other ideology. Though he was right, this is also not an argument on the legitimacy of Nkrumah’s ideological selection. This is only an elucidation of the beautiful positive idealism and hope captured in starry-eyed young Ghanaians at the time of independence, and the path that had to be taken, which was unfortunately shattered, demolished, and erased by bribed, overzealous, ethnocentric, impulsive, greedy, murderous, kleptomaniacal, stupid, and crude self-indulgent bomb-throwing members of the Ghanaian society in 1966, all accomplished to the celebratory satisfaction of the colonial masters, and which has now allowed corrupted, destructive, criminal elements to run amok and hold the affairs of the country at a ransom.
It is also worth mentioning here that there is no denying the fact that unlike today’s fake politicians parading around in Ghana as some caring nationalists but who are very deficient in the skills of governing but still very efficient in corruption and whose daily actions are full of disastrous consequences for the nation at large, Kwame Nkrumah truly cared and he surely delivered on his promises. Nkrumah was sincere. He was ambitious, of course, but brilliant. And, as he promised, so did he develop the country within the shortest possible time. His electrifying eloquence, shrewdness, magnetism, and charm, and especially his selflessness made him an international phenomenon and he has not been matched since.
So, when the New Patriotic Party came around and wanted to look honorable and cultured, it was immediately evident that there was nothing new about them. They couldn’t wash off their dirty past or shield it in the closet forever. Not only did Kufuor and his cabal quickly embark on cutting off Nkrumah’s lifeless buried limp legs in order to present him to Ghanaians as an incarnate of some crippled evil overlord, they also made sure they hoisted visionless saboteur CIA mole-rat Danquah as the fitting antithesis of what Nkrumah stood for, all for the wrong reasons. That is why they have thrown about the indigestible tradition-less property owning nonsense that many smart, well-meaning Ghanaians refuse to even touch with a ten-foot pole. What the hell is that tradition, anyway? This property owning nonsense of a so-called tradition is a simple-minded, stupid, thieving Ghanaian’s idea of an economic principle, theorem, or a nation building policy that went wild and wrong during eight years of John Agyekum Kufuor and his NPP.
And it also goes without much emphasis that subversive imperialist stooge Danquah’s protégé, Kufuor, was the leader who consciously and deliberately acculturated Ghanaians into the current escalating levels of corruption when he made it his creepy preoccupation that Kwame Nkrumah’s accomplishments were rendered theoretically unimportant and dismissible to young Ghanaians. (J. J. Rawlings was on target when he recently hit the corruption nail directly on Kufuor’s head.)
But, as regards the substance of NPP’s rule and any of their replacement policies or fake traditions to offset Nkrumah’s successes, there is no reason to entertain the slightest thought that the NPP triumphed in their attempt to rewrite Ghana’s history. Kufuor’s sneaky efforts to degrade Kwame Nkrumah’s stature on the world stage and elevate Danquah did not gain any traction or an iota of recognition for Danquah. The world ignored Kufuor and his egomaniacal and ethnocentric followers and named Kwame Nkrumah The African Of The Century! How about that? Shove that in your mouth and masticate it well before you swallow so that you don’t choke on it! Damn you all tribo-racist Ghanaians!
It’s mindboggling to realize that when Mr. Kufuor decides to eulogize Nelson Mandela in faraway South Africa, who also had to consort with Communists in his fight against apartheid, as one of the greatest Africans, it jolts our memories to Kufuor’s unforgivable, irremediable, and damaging tribal prejudices and disdain he sanctioned towards Kwame Nkrumah in his own backyard during the eight years of NPP rule. It is not difficult to notice how Mr. Kufuor, even today, can’t bring himself to publicly utter Kwame Nkrumah’s name. Kufuor’s selective amnesia about Nkrumah’s existence and accomplishments in his backyard but his prompt recollection of faraway Mandela’s constitutes his (Kufuor’s) self-exculpatory ethnocentric evil persona.
You may choose to disagree with me if you want to. But if you do, then may an ugly, dirty, and hideous-looking Ghanaian vulture perch on your rooftop, lay in wait for you, then fly a sortie directly above you and drop the hottest, disgustingly odorous poop on your head when you step out of your house. This same “handsome” vulture has my permission to have a repeat performance on Mr. You-Know-Who, too.
Good day and Merry Christmas.
