President Kufuor is a Post-Colonial Pioneer

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

He has committed his own fair share of human errors and blunders, as it is to be expected. And he continues to mildly blunder from time to time, even as he recently did by attending the farcical swearing in of the condignly embattled and morally blighted President John Dramani Mahama. Needless to say, his greatest political error in judgment was when he decided to join the rag-tag cabinet of the then-Chairman Jerry John Rawlings in 1982, after Ghana's enfant terrible ousted the democratically elected government of President Hilla (Babini) Limann and the Nkrumah-leaning People's National Party (PNP).

The Rawlings-chaperoned Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) would viciously orchestrate the savage abduction and summary execution of three high court judges, all of Akan ethnicity. Predictably, the death-squad frontmen would almost exclusively be all of Ewe and other non-Akan heritage. I am quite certain that this is the one moment in his otherwise admirable political career that the two-term democratically elected Ghanaian premier would rather not recall.

But one thing is incontrovertibly certain: President John Agyekum-Kufuor is apt to go down the annals of Ghanaian politicians and statesmen, and women, as the greatest and most enlightened leader in Fourth-Republican Ghana. In just eight years at the helm of his country's affairs, the Kumasi-born former Chief Executive Officer of Ghana's unofficial second capital would expedite the economic, cultural and technological development of the country at an enviably phenomenal pace that is rivalled by only two other Ghanaian leaders, namely, President Kwame Nkrumah and General Ignatius Kutu Acheampong.

And in retirement, the former New Patriotic Party (NPP) spearhead has made himself easily Africa's most toasted retired politician, and the reach of his fame is only expectedly dwarfed by that of Messrs. Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan and Desmond Tutu. And, of course, one may legitimately add the names of Drs. J. B. Danquah and Kofi Abrefa Busia; and also the names of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere.

What most of the other leaders have not been either remarkably fortunate or foresighted enough to accomplish, by way of promoting and preserving their memory and legacy, is the establishment of a viable eponymous foundation. Mr. Kufuor has admirably been able to do the latter, with the 2011 historic establishment of two significant landmarks on the campuses of Ghana's flagship academy, the University of Ghana, and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology.

If memory serves me correctly, the Kufuor Foundation is poised to promoting first-class scholarship through the establishment of several endowed chairs. And so when he rather modestly and almost plaintively declares that he wants to "remain relevant to Ghana and Africa," one can hardly dispute with the fact that Ghana's "Gentle Giant" has literally put his money where his proverbial mouth is (See "I Want to Remain Relevant to Ghana and Africa - Kufuor" JoyOnline.com/Ghanaweb.com 2/24/13).

Indeed, what makes Mr. Kufuor arguably greater than Ghana's most famous and seminal premier, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, is the fact that the former has also immensely benefited from the blunders of his predecessors, unlike Nkrumah whose iron-clad dictatorial approach to governance was arguably unmediated by any salutary indigenous model of leadership, other than the immitigably exploitative British colonial regime which the highly ambitious and admittedly dynamic "African Show Boy" directly inherited.

The preceding notwithstanding, it has unarguably been the liberal-progressive and staid, or tolerant, leadership style of Mr. Kufuor that has increasingly come to serve as the standard model for Ghana's Fourth-Republican presidency. Even the Danquah-Dombo-Busia welfarist approach to national development, which Mr. Kufuor so inimitably pursued, has been shamelessly adopted by the leading operatives of the pseudo-socialist National Democratic Congress (NDC), albeit with a scarcely meaningful and/or remarkable thrust.

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

Department of English

Nassau Community College of SUNY

Garden City, New York

Feb. 24, 2013

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