Mr. Chissano Has A Point, But...

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

Garden City, New York

April 11, 2015

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

I wish I had been present in Ghana and to have attended the African Leadership Lecture, instituted by the University of Development Studies (UDS), at which the former president of Mozambique, Mr. Joaquin Chissano, was the main presenter and guest-of-honor. Following the brutal assassination of President Samora Machel, by the deliberate downing of his plane by the white-racist regime of the erstwhile Apartheid South Africa, it was Mr. Chissano who almost single-handedly held the fort. And, according to most of the available accounts, he did a heck of a lot of good work to hold the hitherto perennially war-torn former Portuguese colony in peace and stability.

And on the latter score, it is important to underscore the adjectival-noun of "Portuguese" because the Portuguese colonialists were notorious for being the most brutal and exploitative of their African subjects. President Machel and his associates, unlike our much fortunate President Kwame Nkrumah, had to train as soldiers and guerilla fighters in order to clean their country of the Portuguese colonial vermin. And when President Machel died in the mid-1980s, I was personally devastated. I was also elated when the immortalized President Nelson R. Mandela, upon assumption of South Africa's reins of governance, found it fitting to make the former Mrs. Graca Machel his wife and the first First-Lady of Post-Apartheid South Africa.

Not much of former President Chissano's lecture was reported by the Ghana News Agency (GNA), and I hope that it had been recorded by the host institution with the intention of making it globally accessible on Youtube. In this sense, therefore, I unreservedly agree with UDS Vice-Chancellor Haruna Yakubu that our tertiary academies need to create forums of the kind recently afforded Mr. Chissano, in order to enable our scholars and purveyors of knowledge "subject the issues of leadership and development on the African continent to the required [level of] critical thought" (See "Chissano Bemoans Failure to Pursue Vision of Forebears" Ghana News Agency / Modernghana.com 4/11/15).

Indeed, the greatest problem confronting the African people presently is an abject lack of critical thinking in terms of how our independence-generation of leaders are perceived and missteps objectively assessed. For instance, Mr. Chissano is apt to glorify and even lionize the pioneering likes of Presidents Kwame Nkrumah, Kenneth Kaunda, Julius Nyerere, Ahmed Sekou Toure, Jomo Kenyatta, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Amilcar Cabral and Samora Machel. But he is totally on a different and not necessarily truthful, objective and constructive plane, when Mr. Chissano declares that "the leaders of Africa's liberation struggle were not selfish but were accountable to their people, and were guided by solidarity, patriotism and common purpose. Those were values which helped them to achieve independence for their countries."

The first thing that is wrong with this aspect of Mr. Chissano's analysis is the fact that the anti-colonial struggle, wherever it occurred on the African continent, was not the brainwork of any one person or the architectural design of any single personality or individual. In Ghana, for instance, it is epistemically criminal to credit Mr. Kwame Nkrumah and his tautologically named Convention People's Party (CPP) with having singularly spearheaded the country's liberation struggle, which officially began with the Danquah- and Grant-led United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), not in June 1949 but in August 1947. But even more significant is the epochal period of the 1920s spearheaded by Mr. Joseph Ephraim Casely-Hayford and his landmark National Congress of British West Africa (NCBWA) which practically set the tone and stage for both the Pan-Africanist movement and regional political groupings like the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

By a wicked stroke of unpardonable mischief and criminal propaganda, today giants like Messrs. Casely-Hayford, Kobina Sekyi and John Mensah-Sarbah are virtually missing from the roll-call of vanguard African nationalists and liberation fighters. I also sincerely don't know that a pathologically egocentric, egomaniacal and hypocritical major Apartheid Trader President Kwame Nkrumah - Dr. Leopold Sedar Senghor once called him a mad man in dire need of prompt psychiatric examination (See Mahoney's JFK: The Africa Ordeal - ever rendered himself accountable to the Ghanaian people, as Mr. Chissano reportedly sought to suggest. Indeed, Nkrumah's one great desire to become a law unto himself was what caused the then-Prime Minister Nkrumah to unilaterally abrogate the more accountable Westminster type of governance at Ghana's independence and opt for the relatively unaccountable and dictatorial status of Executive President in 1960.

Thereafter, Nkrumah did not have to periodically and regularly appear before Parliament to render a systematic account of his stewardship. I don't know if this patent act of leadership misbehavior is a sterling example of democratic leadership in Mozambican political culture. There are a legion other issues that have deleteriously contributed to the political and material regression of Ghana presently, which were almost singularly minted by the Nkrumah-led Convention People's Party regime, but which time does not permit us to delve into presently.

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