If the tenure of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC) of Ghana, spearheaded by the notorious Flt.-Lt. Jerry John Rawlings could be aptly said to have been characterized by incessant shuttering of higher educational institutions, the present ruling government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), chaplained by Mr. John Agyekum-Kufuor, may be seen to have studiously embarked on a salutary program of national, cultural reconstruction. Recently, the NPP posted an Executive Summary of the President?s Educational Committee (or was it a Commission?) on the Internet (ghanaweb.com 8/7/03). The 35-page document entailed a broad overview of the country?s educational system, as it has operated over the 46 years of post-colonial governance. What the report eloquently indicated was the grim fact that the only government that paid more than lip-service, as it were, to the most crucial aspect of Ghana?s socioeconomic and cultural development was the Nkrumah-led Convention People?s Party (CPP). It was the latter administration, with its blanket initiative of a free-education program, that brought Ghana up to intellectual parity with the most advanced nations, East and West. And, indeed, as pointed out in an earlier discussion in this column, at his overthrow on February 24, 1966, Ghana ranked number one in the quality of education provided its citizenry throughout the African continent. On August 7, 2003, this writer came across a brief diaristic missive titled ?Richard Helms? (CIA) file on Nkrumah? in which the Johnson White House reported gloated over the CIA?s ?sustained clandestine activities to unseat the great Africanist regime in Ghana? as one that had been quite rewarding (ghanaweb.com).
What is interesting about the preceding is its frank acknowledgment of President Nkrumah as ?the great Africanist.? Oftentimes regimes and foreign leaders detested by the White House are routinely characterized as dictatorial and savage. Thus for the United States to characterize an African government and its leader, particularly, as ?great? and yet proceed vigorously and systematically with plans to destabilize and liquidate it, speaks profoundly to the primary interests of America vis-?-vis the destiny of the African continent and its people. In sum, it reflects the visceral dislike, on the part of U.S. leadership, of seeing Africa succeed and develop as a formidable sovereign entity. In the final analysis, it is the unsavory likes of the Out brothers, the general and his so-called air-marshal sibling. And it is also interesting to recall that recently when I had one of those vanity debates with some Ghanaian friends, one of them who hailed from the same village as the Otus did not hesitate to make a huge capital of the fact that these two brothers had been in the vanguard of pioneering, post-colonial Ghanaian luminaries. At that time, I had not come across the above-referenced memorandum implicating the Otus, as being in cahoots with the CIA, in the overthrow of the Nkrumah government. Among others mentioned were extant police commissioner J.W.K. Harlley and Lt.-Gen. J. A. Ankrah.
Indeed, Nkrumah?s CPP has been accused of some superlative forms of misprision or administrative venality. And while it would be foolhardy for anybody to totally ignore the validity or veracity of some of these charges, particularly recognizing the inescapable fact of the regime?s all-too-fallible human operatives, still the CPP was the best political machinery to be indigenously invented and so husbanded. Not long ago, for instance, I had a marathon telephone conversation with an enatic uncle who insisted that Nkrumah's overthrow marked an opportune moment for Ghanaians to be unburdened of the leaden yoke of a creeping dictatorship and be ushered into a gracious period of true democracy. It is significant to observe at this juncture that my uncle was living right here, in the United States, and working for the Voice of America, the government?s propaganda mouthpiece to the outside world at the time of the February 1966 coup. And, it is interesting to add, he has continued to live here, like so many of us self-confessed ingrates, even as he also insists and persists with his characterization of Uncle Sam as being patently and pathologically inimical towards the well-being of global African people. And, here also, let no one make any mistake, my uncle is largely accurate in his grim and dour assessment of Washington?s foreign policy vis-?-vis continental Africa, for we have legion facts on record to clinch or arguments.
Paradoxically, however, those of us who have such critical ax to grind with Uncle Sam also recognize the indubitable fact that America is the most conducive environment in which to pursue all forms of salutary intellectual and entrepreneurial endeavors. Interestingly, though, when I asked him to cite a single plank on its agenda that rendered the coup plot of the so-called National Liberation Council (NLC) opportune or auspicious, all my uncle could do was to insist plangently, and rather confusedly, that ?something needed to give? in order to ensure that Ghana was set on the proper political (or is it ideological?) footing.
Indeed, should the Kufuor government succeed in implementing the results of its findings, as published in the aforementioned Executive Summary of the President?s Committee, Ghana would be right back to where it was on February 24, 1966 ? a robust culture poised to confidently shepherding the rest of the continent into a salubrious assumption of the sort of intellectual temperament required for effective nation-building in the twenty-first century. As it stands, Ghana?s educational system, particularly the curriculum, reflects more of nineteenth-century ethos than even its increasingly obsolescent twentieth-century coordinate. We learn, for instance, that the system totally excludes pre-school education; and heaven knows this propaedeutic level is inestimably critical to the future development of every child. Indeed, my mother began her pupil-teacher?s career at the nursery level, at what was then called a Daycare Center, though this writer himself never formally experienced this aspect of the country?s educational system. And my siblings and I would later boast about the fact that not having been enrolled in a daycare establishment incontestably attested to our collective genius. Of course, that was more of an exaggeration than the unalloyed truth; which was that because both of our parents were educators, we experienced a veritable pre-school education at home, with our mother reading to us every evening after supper, and also providing us with an abacus with which to study Arithmetic, or basic numeracy, to be precise. Indeed, now that one thinks of it, this privileged experience largely explains the reason why almost every one of us, siblings, performed at the very apex of our classes.
The Ghanaian president?s Executive Summary also notes that elementary pedagogy overemphasizes grammar or generally diffused rote-type education, the sort inculcated into parakeets. Thus the practical, hands-on instruction that is the cache of mainstream American education, and the secret behind America?s phenomenal intellectual and cultural achievement over the last half-century is woefully lacking in Ghana. Thus we are hardly surprised to learn from the Ghanaian president?s committee of expert educators that ?little attention is given to technical/vocational education and the large informal sector.? But what is even more deleterious, observes the committee, is the fact that the system ?provides limited opportunities for [academic credit] transfer within the various streams.? In other words, it is almost as if two Ghanaian students in attendance at two different Ghanaian higher educational institutions were pursuing their academic and professional goals in two totally different countries.
In the end, the committee proposes an American educational structure, one that is made up of two years of kindergarten; six years of primary and three years, each, of junior and senior secondary levels. What is quite inadequate, to speak less of the wrongheaded, is the committee?s stipulation that mandatory basic education terminate at the junior secondary level, that is, the ninth grade, rather than the traditional twelfth grade as prevails here in the United States. Under the British colonial system, basic education ended at Standard Seven, the equivalent of Tenth Grade here in the United States. And even then, the drop-out rate meant that roughly 50-percent of the nation?s elementary school pupils completed their basic educational training. What also makes the current proposal inadequate is the fact that when one factors in the generally precipitous decline in the quality of the country?s education, largely the result of economic inattention, on the part of successive Ghanaian governments in the post-Nkrumah era, the quality of a ninth-grade education in today?s Ghana is roughly the equivalent of Standard-Three, or sixth grade, education in yesteryear. Needless to say, in the days ahead, we shall be examining other aspects of Mr. Kufuor?s Executive Summary that deserve highlighting and further discussion prior to their implementation. Indeed, it delectably appears that finally some of our leaders have come to an indispensable appreciation of the fact that as go the current educational system and curricula, so goes the destiny of Ghana.
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., teaches English and Journalism at Nassau Community College, Garden City. He also taught as a National Service Teacher of English and Literature at Osu Presbyterian Secondary School, Accra-Ghana, from 1984-1985.
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