Kweku Baako Is Politically Tentative

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

He may, indeed, not be a card-carrying member of the rump-Convention People’s Party (CPP) of whose original brand, a veritable offshoot of the Danquah-led United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), his father (Mr. Kofi Baako) served as its most eloquent, albeit barely coherent, chief ideologue and spokesman (See “I’m Not a Card-Bearing Member of the CPP – Kweku Baako” Ghanaweb.com 1/28/10). What needs to be highlighted, however, is the fact that merely not toting the membership insignia, or certification, of any organized political party does not necessarily make one an independent thinker.

More so, when Mr. Baako is also reliably reported to be forcefully claiming that “he is a staunch adherent of the principles of Nkrumaism,” whatever these may entail. Then question, then, logically arises: What is Nkrumaism, by the way?

We ask the foregoing question because the editor-in-chief/publisher of the New Crusading Guide also claims that he fervidly worked with adherents of the Danquah-Busia camp on the question of inducing a democratic political culture in Ghana, dating back to 1970, and then only to risibly contradict himself within the next breath by asserting categorically that “I cannot join the NPP [New Patriotic Party] because philosophically and ideologically, we are different.”

Indeed, the philosophical and ideological tenets of the Danquah-Busia Tradition are fundamentally opposed to the kind of “one-man, one-party dictatorship” pontifically espoused by President Nkrumah and vocally expounded by the elder Mr. Baako. And so it could not be that the younger Mr. Baako appreciates precisely what he is talking about when he boyishly beams, apparently proudly, that “when it comes to the democratic struggle in Ghana, from 1970, that was when I worked with the NPP.”

The glaring fact of the matter is that the NPP did not exist in 1970; neither did the most recent incarnation, or spawn, of the Danquah-Busia Tradition exist throughout the decades of the 1970s and 1980s. There, however, existed the Busia-led Progress Party (PP), of course; and so maybe Mr. Baako ought to be telling his admirers, supporters and sympathizers that, indeed, he once was a staunch ideological disciple of Dr. K. A. Busia. And if the foregoing also has validity, then Mr. Baako ought to explain to his audience why he had not trucked with the Gbedemah-chaperoned and Nkrumah-leaning National Alliance of Liberals (NAL) during the same period.

In essence, what I am trying to delineate here is the fact that, indeed, it is quite possible for Mr. Baako to sport the equally valid and even progressive guise of a media maverick, in which case being a self-styled “staunch Nkrumaist” becomes an obvious anachronism.

What I would suggest, instead of the preceding is for Mr. Baako to stoically accept the fact that he may well have either willfully or unwittingly morphed into what may aptly be termed as a “trans-ideological media statesman,” the kind of levelheaded and model patriot who calls the proverbial shots as he sees it, rather than unwisely allowing himself to be hamstrung by the stultifying blinkers of ossified ideologues and ideologies.

At any rate, about the only relatively redeeming observation that can be made about the foregoing regards the indisputable fact that even a clinical megalomaniac like Mr. Kwame Nkrumah was possessed of a kind of sacrificial, missionary zeal that is sorely lacking among many a Fourth-Republican Ghanaian politician these days.

*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 Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI), the renowned pro-democracy think tank, and the author of 21 books, including “Intimations of Love” (Atumpan Publications/Lulu.com, 2009). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.

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