By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
In a desperate attempt at re-imposing the most extortionate and brutal political party on Ghanaians, the chairperson of the rump-Convention People's Party (CPP), Ms. Samia Yaba Nkrumah, has announced that she and her party intend to fight through the courts to regain some landed and real-estate properties that the daughter of the country's first postcolonial premier claims were illegally confiscated by the state after the landmark and auspicious overthrow of her father on February 24, 1966 (See "CPP Heads to Court to Reclaim Seized Assets" Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 4/25/14).
This move is rather interesting, becase the founding father of the original Convention People's Party, Mr. Kwame Nkrmah, had absolutely no regard, whatsoever, for the peremptory legitimacy of our court system. The late dictator is on record to have summarily dismissed from the bench, judges whose opinions and verdicts were not especially tailored to rubberstamp his own. A striking case in point is the three Supreme Court justices, namely, Messrs. Arku Korsah, Van Lare and Akufo-Addo, who presided over the Kulungugu trial. All three were summarily dismissed from the highest court of the land, because they wouldn't consent to arbitrarily find Messrs. Ako-Adjei, Tawiah-Adamafio and Kofi Crabbe, all members of Nkrumah's kitchen-cabinet guilty of an assassination attempt on the life of their political overlord.
We are told that the targeted properties include the edifice that currently serves as the headquarters of Ghana's Information Ministry. And as to how these properties were acquired, Ms. Nkrumah and her goon-squad associates claim that it was through "deductions from the salaries of CPP members." This, of course, is where matters get tricky; and this may also be primarily why, to-date, no Ghanaian government has consented to the release of the alleged properties to the latter-day freeloading operatives of the plagiaristic and tautological Convention People's Party.
For starters, precisely how many members of the Nkrumah-led CPP were government employees and/or civil servants whose salaries and wages could be readily deducted at source from their paychecks? Not very many, if the dear reader were to seek my opinion. Chances are that just about every government employee was forced to give back some of his/her salary/wages - the routine figure was 10-percent or thereabouts - which was then deposited into the CPP bank account and falsely and thievishly claimed by Ali Baba and his Forty-Robber-Barons as party dues.
I sincerely don't think and believe that the Jiaggie Commision ever certified the credibility and/or authenticity of the sources of the monetary wealth used for the acquisition of the afore-referenced properties, let alone authorize their release to the operatives of the rump-CPP. In 1961, or thereabouts, under Nkrumah's infamous "Tighten-Your-Belts" policy, government employees across the country were forced to "save" up to 10-percent of their salaries and wages in the bank. Such forced savings, I firmly contend, were illegally and immorally appropriated in the acquisition of the purported party properties.
Ms. Nkrumah and her associates may, perforce, need to submit to whatever court it is that decides to take up their case, forensically sustainable evidence clearly indicating that, indeed, each and every one of those who "voluntarily" consented to such paycheck or wage/salary deductions was a bona fide member of the old and original CPP. Short of the preceding, Ms. Nkrumah and her associates may be aptly envisaged to have embarked on a very expensive wild-goose chase. For they may very well be soon inundated with lawsuits by civil servants and other government employees of the time and/or their children and grandchildren vehemently demanding the return or repayment of moneys extorted from their yesteryear's salaries and wages with inflation-calibrated interests over the course of the last half-century.
We clearly know and have extensively documented the same, that then-Prime Minister Nkrumah also used the Cocoa-Purchasing Company (CPC), to be strictly distinguished from the erstwhile Gold Coast Cocoa-Marketing Board, as an illegal party adjunct, and a front, to coerce farmers into membership of the CPP or in default be saddled with abject penury systematically and deliberately wrought by the massive boycott of their cash crops. That is the indisputable history of the Appiah-Dankwa-led Ghana Farmers' Council.
We have already extensively detailed this CPP scam-artistry elsewhere (See, for example, "When Dancers Become Historians And Thinkers" in the archives of Modernghana.com and elsewhere) and so find it unnecessary to reprise the same herein. Incidentally, I had the chance to meet Mr. Appiah-Dankwa in Kumasi, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, through his son, Mr. Appiah, then newly arrived from Germany and living with his young and quite attractive German wife in one of the posher residential suburbs of the Asante regional metropolis.
In sum, my well-considered contention here is that Chairwoman Samia Yaba Nkrumah has a far better chance of haunching down and diligently undertaking the sort of heavy-lifting that makes for heading a formidable political organization, rather than so cheaply and facilely attempting to use her late father's name and memory to rob the longsuffering Ghanaian taxpayer raw and bloody. Nkrumah's "halo-effect" was back in those "idiot baby" days. This is now - the Twenty-First Century, and a much more savvy Ghanaian national temperative and perspective on things patently political and self-serving.
_____________________________________________________________
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Board Member, The Nassau Review
May 6, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
###
