Mr. Sekou Nkrumah Is Woefully Misguided

It is rather sorrowfully amusing to hear Mr. Sekou Nkrumah vacuously touting the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC) as “the greatest and most experienced political party in [Ghana] today” (see “NDC Is The Best – Sekou Nkrumah” Ghanaweb.com 10/30/07). Generally speaking, yours truly is absolutely no fan of Juju or Voodoo. Still, I would not be in the least bit surprised if it shortly comes to light that, indeed, as some of us have suspected all along, the Dzelukope Mafia has out a jinx on this poor Nkrumah lad. Or, perhaps, somebody among the sinister ranks of the latter group has poisoned either Sekou’s drink or his food.

Else, how could this son of our country’s first president whose prematurely widowed mother’s diplomatic passport and, in effect, her Ghanaian citizenship were callously stripped of her by the half-Scottish Chairman J. J. Rawlings, Supreme Founding-Father of the so-called National Democratic Congress, joyfully truck with his parents’ inveterate ideological enemies? The answer, it goes without saying, appears to lie somewhere between the Quixotic foolery of youth and a gross misreading of Ghana’s postcolonial history. And here, it bears remarking that those of us who witnessed Mr. Rawlings’ address at the inauguration of the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum have yet to forget the curiously meticulous exception with which the former Chairman of the so-called Provisional National Defense Council proclaimed what the swashbuckling Mr. Rawlings then termed as President Nkrumah’s epically flawed character and stature on the postcolonial Ghanaian political landscape.


Of course, while we fully acknowledge the ideological, political and even personal foibles of Ghana’s pioneering premier as a matter of public record, we also firmly believe that Mr. Rawlings, of all postcolonial Ghanaian leaders, is the least qualified to self-righteously enumerate what the career coup-plotter deems to be the character flaws of President Nkrumah anywhere in the land of Ghana, much less on the very sacred grounds of the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum. The foregoing events may well have informed Mr. Gamal Gorkeh Nkrumah, Sekou’s elder brother, to deftly and politely finesse the publicity-hungry and megalomaniacal Mr. Rawlings out of the main proceedings of the recent funerary celebration vis-? -vis the passing of Mrs. Fathia Nkrumah. And as was to be expected, Mr. Rawlings spared no chance to impudently lash out at the Nkrumah family for having “ungratefully” put the infamous Butcher-of-Dzelukope in his place, on the margins of the funerary celebration, exactly where the Dzelukope Mafia capo belonged.


Interestingly, in his tirade against the Nkrumah family, for having dared to deny him center-stage at Mrs. Nkrumah’s funeral, Mr. Rawlings had the sacrilegious and heretical temerity to boast that had he so desired, the Dzelukope Revolutionary could have summarily prevented the erection of the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum. And maybe he quite well could have done exactly that, with the bloody muzzle of his gun trained at the noggins of innocent, unsuspecting and defenseless Ghanaians, of course. Which is why it comes as absolutely no surprise that in the scabrous wake of having dispossessed Mrs. Fathia Nkrumah of her diplomatic passport, Mr. Rawlings would also, having effectively deported Ghana’s maiden First Lady from the country, turn over the latter’s state-provided residence to his tribesman, the Togolese opposition leader and exile, Mr. Olympio. Which is also why it is rather amusing to hear Mr. Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, the NDC’s former deputy Eastern Regional minister obliquely sneer that the National Congress of Dzelukope Democrats “is not a party that practices tribalism” (Ghanaweb.com 10/30/07).


It would also be quite intriguing to hear Mr. Sekou Nkrumah explain to the rest of his countrymen and women, exactly how the very party that giddily and greedily sold off the Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), largely to NDC party faithfuls and cronies and their allies abroad, came to share the same ideology as the erstwhile Convention People’s Party (CPP). We think we partially know the answer; and it is simply that either Mr. Sekou Nkrumah is living in a fool’s paradise, like all the rest of his P/NDC fellow travelers, or he must have been quixotically promised a political gift-horse that the P/NDC will never be able to deliver, either in this present generation or the next one, a gift which may well turn out to have been a Trojan Horse, in effect.

On one point, though, we wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Sekou Nkrumah: It is the fact that, indeed, “as a political party, the NDC has come to stay,” in about the same manner that it is a virtual certainty that, hard as we may try, Ghanaians will never be able to remove all the pathological assassins and common criminals that constitute the membership of the so-called National Democratic Congress. Fortunately, however, like cholera and malaria, Ghanaians can comfortably hope to effectively contain and even drastically control the lethal parasites that constitute the membership of the P/NDC. Which is why we can only chuckle and smile at this patently lunatic “victory march,” so-called, by the hulking P/NDC to either the Osu Castle or the Flagstaff House come January 2009.


In the meantime, keep dreaming, Nation-Wreckers; this much is your democratic right!

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English and Journalism at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of twelve books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.

Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.