Only Nkrumacrats Yearn for the CPP

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

Garden City, New York

Oct. 9, 2015

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

When you ask these Nkrumacrats to list some of the compelling reasons why the rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP) ought to be reckoned as a serious contender for power in Fourth-Republican Ghana, all they do is to impetuously and incoherently list some projects undertaken by the Nkrumah-led veritable dictatorship of the so-called Convention People’s Party (CPP). For the rest of the way, they mostly assume the comically defensive posture of elementary school pupils by sheepishly attempting to justify the untold atrocities perpetrated against both innocent and unsuspecting Ghanaians, as well as astute and foresighted statesmen like Dr. J. B. Danquah who fiercely fought CPP dictatorship and the wanton pillaging of our national resources in the dubious name of Pan-Africanism. Indeed, a former graduate of Legon’s School for the Performing Arts, and sometime junior lecturer of the same school, even once claimed that it was Mr. Kwame Nkrumah who single-handedly designed and authorized the construction of the country’s flagship academy, the University of Ghana. A deeply scandalized Prof. Addo-Fening would promptly call that dancing reprobate to order.

Well, I don’t know what these latter-day Cii-Pii-Pii-ites think of Ghanaians, but even as the deposed late dictator’s own son, Mr. Sekou Nkrumah, perhaps the sanest and most intellectually independent and objective of the known children of the country’s first postcolonial leader, pointedly put it, Nkrumah was incontrovertibly a ham-fisted tyrant who, nevertheless, notched quite a remarkable number of both personal and collective achievements for the country and, to an appreciable extent, continental Africa at large. Nonetheless, even as Mr. Sekou Nkrumah candidly admitted, the days of President Nkrumah are decidedly well behind the times. In other words, it is long overdue for those pathologically afflicted with the Nkrumah-worship funk to move on, even as we, collectively, irrespective of political affiliation or ideological persuasion, respectfully acknowledge the yeomanly contributions of those colonial and postcolonial pioneers who staunchly and courageously led the charge for Ghana’s glorious reassertion of her sovereignty from British colonial rule.

The true story of Ghana’s independence, it goes without saying, is not the exclusive copyright of any single individual, or personality, as woefully misguided Nkrumacrats like Mr. James Kwabena Bomfeh, Ms. Samia Yaba Nkrumah and Mr. Ivor Greenstreet, and the rest of the hoodlum pack, of course, would have the rest of the world believe. You see, it is very tempting for people who never had to either personally endure the untold ravages of CPP dictatorship or have any of their relatives summarily assassinated and brutally tortured by President Nkrumah to sing paeans to the sanguinary memory of the man whom Senegal’s President Leopold Sédar Senghor once called a clinically demented character in dire need of prompt psychiatric examination and treatment.

I prefer to put my avowed detractors and enemies on the defensive in perpetuity, and so about the only riposte that I am inclined to offer these clinical desperadoes is to, once again, emphatically observe that there is absolutely no chance for Dr. Danquah to have named any of his ten children after Russia’s Mr. Vladimir Lenin. The putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Modern Ghanaian Politics was never tentative about his informed belief in the immutably transcendent nature and goodness of constitutional democracy. We also absolutely have no need to luridly descend into any contest of personalities with these ideologically and politically desperate Nkrumacrats. Nevertheless, I must also confess my great amusement at one such scamp who, having epically failed to character assassinate Prof. Kwame Anthony Appiah, I know that upstart’s jaded and intellectually exhausted sponsors quite well, had the chutzpah just the other day to invoke the authority of his subject of boorish animus as a philosophically reconstructive elixir for the widely discredited image and reputation of his cultic icon.

And now talking of “urban legends,” maybe this lost soul would do himself and his ilk great good to learn something about the history of the bona fide “Akyemfoo” of the Saltpond-Anomabo littoral. You see, little boy, you may hate us all you want, but you cannot define us by your epistemic and scandalous nescience. Besides, you are too pathetic to court either my dislike or hatred. You simply do not exist in my purview of scholars and intellectuals worthy of critical and teachable engagement.

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