Nkrumah was not Adolf Hitler

Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah was not Adolf Hitler.He was a great Ghanaian and a great African.

It seems that a handful of intellectuals, far be it from me to call them pseudointellectuals,have embarked on a mission to smirch Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah's image by writing what can best be described as articles that do not comport with the reality.In them the writers launch sulphurous invective against Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah,of blessed memory,trumpeting their passionate hatred of him and unleashing their deadly venom on him.One would not be sailing close to the wind if one described the contents of the articles as a catchword for academic shame.I have no doubt that Ghanaians worth their salt will be underwhelmed and nauseated by the articles.They are, indeed,articles that go beyond the pale.

Everyone is like the moon.We all have our dark side.But whatever his foibles were,which he must have had as a human being,it is a fact, universally acknowledged, that Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah was far different from the ordinary run of African leaders.His concern for the progress of Ghana and Africa at large was palpable.He was a good African leader,par excellence,whose core belief was that the independence of Ghana was meaningless unless the whole of Africa was freed from the yoke of colonialism.Here was a leader who,from the very moment he became head of government,realised that education and industrialisation were crucial to the whole matrix of development and set out to propel Ghana and Africa to greater heights.Here was a leader whose mind was riveted on the common good and not on his own selfish interests.

Before touching on what, to my mind, are Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah's achievements of timeless significance, I would like to ask why a handful of people in academia have embarked on this Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah-bashing. A writer is even on record as having said that Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah 'was not a good Ghanaian, whatever that means.

The article that really takes the biscuit is the one in which a writer compares Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah with Adolf Hitler.Such a comparison is an affront to all Ghanaians.A comparison of this nature is tantamount to holding the wrong end of the Ghanaian historical and political stick.It is,at best, infelicitous and,at worst,injudicious.How on earth could a man who murdered six million people in cold blood and invaded one country after another, causing horrendous deaths and destruction, be compared with Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah? How could a man whose actions gave the entire world a Dantesque vision of hell on earth be compared with Osagyefo Dr kwame Nkrumah?

As I have already intimated, Dr Kwame Nkrumah had his weaknesses as a human being.Nobody is saying that he was so faultless that he should be put on the fastest track to sainthood, but to be totally blind to the plethora of good things he did for Ghana and Africa and compare him with Adolf Hitler who was synonymous with death and destruction is something that borders on intellectual bankruptcy.I repeat that,like every human being, there was a chink in Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah's armour,but his dark side, benchmarked against his achievements, pales into complete insignificance.How many Primary Schools,Secondary Schools,Teacher Training Colleges,and Universities did we have at the time of independence and how many did Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah build before he was overthrown.How many factories did we have before independence and how many did he establish after independence?He did not use Ghana's money to buy houses in Europe.He put it to good use so that future generations will feel proud to say Here was a leader who had the welfare of his people at heart.

Instead of hurling fresh dung at Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, let us learn to express our most profound gratitude to him for what he did for Ghana and Africa in the short period of eight years eleven months.To see Ghana and Africa in the foothills of development was an anathema to him and there was nothing that could lessen his vaulting ambition to help develop Ghana and Africa at large.I do not have the slightest doubt that but for his educational policies, millions of Ghanaians, including those who have the temerity to shower insults on him, would never have had Secondary and University education.

Fellow Ghanaians, let us be thankful to Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah instead of spitting on his image.As the saying goes,There is no duty more obligatory than the repayment of kindness.He was a man of vision, a leader who had the welfare of his country and continent at heart.Thanks to him Ghanaian children from poor, humble homes, from Bawku to Akropong Akwapim, could rub shoulders with Ministers' children in any Secondary School in the country.Those who are convinced that I am speaking with a forked tongue can stand up and be counted.Can any Ghanaian put his hand on his heart and tell me that since the overthrow of Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah in 1966, a whopping 42 years ago,our rosary of leaders, of all hues and backgrounds,have built more educational institutions than Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah did in eight years eleven months?

There is no gainsaying the fact that the overthrow of Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah , which ushered in caudillo-type politics, set the clock of Ghana's development back.It was a bad hammer blow for Ghana's development.The country was shaken to its core and it started reeling under the crushing weight of this type of politics.There is no need biting our tongue over this,we should call a spade a spade,we should stop dancing KPANLOGO around the truth and say that the whole developmental apparatus, put in place by Osagyefo Dr kwame Nkrumah, seized up following his overthrow and the country was converted into a brakeless lorry moving inexorably into a ravine.Indeed his overthrow provided a habitat in which almost all the good things he did were destroyed.Lives were destroyed with bewildering insensitivity and uniformed kleptomaniacs,euphemistically dubbed leaders, had a wonderful chance to feed their bestial craving for political chicanery and at the helm of affairs were people whose heads were bereft of everything except a whale of ignorance.His overthrow ushered in a period in which the country was at the mercy of people born without all their marbles and the country was mired in the maeltrom of unchecked political lunacy.People were gratuitously bludgeoned to death with giddy enthusiasm and our dear country became one of the iconic symbols of medieval brutality on the continent.Our dear country became a place where one group of exponents of caudillo-type politics handed over the blood-stained baton to another group of their ilk with pepper being constantly sprayed, metaphorically speaking, into the eyes of civilian leaders to make it impossible for them to finish their political task.Our dear country became a place where caudillos demonstrated their most barbarous and murderous instincts,presiding over some of the most horrific killings ever seen in our Motherland, killings that could be described, without any fear of contradiction, as egregious even by the standards of some of the horrendous African civil wars I have seen with my own naked eyes in the Central and Southern parts of Africa.That period gave us a close-up view of the sheer viciousness of caudillo terror.In short, the country started going into reverse and we went round the world with a huge begging calabash, resulting in our country being in hock to foreign countries.

Fellow Ghanaians, I hope you will not disagree with me that not too many Ghanaians will look back on those years with unmitigated pleasure,a period when barbarism took on a whole new significance and the citizenry were presented with a singular chance to have an insight into what it was to live in hell on earth, a period in which the ship of state was piloted by trigger-happy people who trampled on fellow citizens like inebriated elephants.

Thanks to Mother Africa,some sense was pumped into the heads of those who had embraced the ethos of violence and camouflaged autocracy for donkey's years, causing them to remove their feet from the pedal of political lunacy.It must be said,however, that since the ushering in of a Democratic Dispensation an attempt has been made by the various actors on the political stage,including some of the greatest exponents of caudillo-type politics,to raise the country from its rotten knees.They have tried to do something,like repairing roads, but they have had their work cut out for them, since the very strong foundation for development built by Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah went with the wind after his overthrow and the country has been lurching from crisis to crisis ever since.

Finally, I would like to reiterate that instead of using Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah's image as a cuspidor, smirching his name in the gutter and comparing him with Adolf Hitler,let us be thankful to him for what he did for Ghana and Africa.If we compare Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah with Adolf Hitler,with whom shall we compare those who,among other horrific things,in the very recent past, caused the mysterious kidnapping of certain members of the Ghanaian society,had them bludgeoned to death and burnt?Everybody is silent over that episode,but we should not forget that Justice has no expiry date.I would also like to remind Ghanaians that our country is about the only country in the world where Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah's books like Africa Must Unite, Consciencism, etc are not easily available.It is a shame of mount Afadzato proportions.After his overthrow, Osagyefo's books were burnt in a distasteful display of intellectual lunacy, just as the Nazis of Adolf Hitler burnt thousands of books they deemed decadent prior to embarking on the killing of Jews, Gipsies, etc.I would like to appeal to the relevant authorities to make Osagyefo's books available to the Ghanaian public.

Far from being on their way to the museum of history,Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah's image and achievements will live on until donkeys can grow a beard.It is now that I understand what Nkrumah Never Dies means.