By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Quite predictably, I read Ekow Nelson’s “Open Letter to Samia Nkrumah” (Ghanaweb.com 1/10/09) with a mixture of amusement and anger. For starters, the facile presumption, on the part of the letter writer, that the glorious and enviable niche carved by the Danquah-Busia-leaning New Patriotic Party (NPP) can be readily occupied by the rump-Convention People’s Party (CPP), by a curious process of political osmosis, is utterly preposterous.
For the London-based arm-chair critic’s information, what differentiates the NPP and the CPP are the irreconcilable and respective ideologies of private entrepreneurship healthily mediated by a welfarist governmental policy as an indispensable economic cushion for the poor and underprivileged, on the one hand, and hardnosed state capitalism, in which the collective national wealth is owned and controlled by a few powerful men and women, as was distastefully witnessed under the Nkrumah regime, with private enterprise effectively stifled, with the inevitable exception of the neocolonialist cocoa and extractive industries, as well as the businesses of a few political cronies.
In sum, by absolutely no stretch of even the wildest imagination can the CPP be rationally envisaged to constitute a viable substitute for the more human, civilized and humanist agenda of the NPP.
The letter writer himself appears to fully recognize the foregoing fact, thus his cynical maintenance of a cavalier posture towards the effective and tactical cooptation and near-complete assimilation of the most radical and progressive, albeit hardly creative and materially productive, elements of the Nkrumaist camp by the so-called National Democratic Congress. The fact remains, incontrovertibly, that about the only method by which the Red Cockerel could reassert its patently unsavory dominance on the Ghanaian political landscape is to unseat the pseudo-Marxist National Democratic Congress (NDC), with whom the Red Cockerel shares both ideology and a pathological penchant for witch-hunting and other dictatorial tendencies.
His abject attempt to economize on the facts underlying Lee Ocran’s defeat by Ms. Samia Yaaba Nkrumah, definitely puts Mr. Nelson and Dr. Paa Kwesi Nduom in the same boat, one that trawls on waves of denial in search of an impudent ideology of utter deceit, by which bizarre and reprobate commodity it hopes to make easy disciples of Ghanaians in the throes of political Alzheimer’s. The fact is that, Mr. Lee Ocran, the former incumbent NDC-MP for the Jomoro constituency, in the Western Region, almost squarely lost his reelection bid on the basis of injudicious nativism and sacrilegious iconoclasm. Having, in his own apparently quite colorful imagination, done so much for his constituents, Mr. Ocran, who has since repented, presumed to cavalierly reduce the globally epic stature of President Nkrumah, also a naturally venerated local hero, into a mere political footnote.
It just may well be that, indeed, Mr. Ocran has achieved more for “Jomoroans” than the legendary African Show Boy did; but what the NDC point man unforgivably failed to humbly put into perspective is the fact that while the original CPP patriarch envisaged the entire African continent as his political and ideological play pen, Mr. Ocran has only had to deal with an infinitesimal one-two-hundred-and-thirtieth (1/230) of the political cartography of Ghana! Then also, nativistically and callously asking Ms. Nkrumah to return to Italy, where she has lived for most of her adult life, amounted to the proverbial pugilist analogy of hitting below the belt. It came off as insensitive, especially for those of us who appreciate the kind of emotional and psychological trauma involuntarily experienced by this quite resilient daughter of two disparate nations, races and cultures.
Still, it goes without saying that I enjoyed Mr. Nelson’s “Open Letter to Samia Nkrumah” more for its sophomorically insulting tenor and thrust, than because of any valuable lessons or message that it might presume to offer its audience, even the converted and incurably fanatical. For one salient example, the writer seemed to be rather confused and addled in the thrust of his logic. Thus, having counseled Ms. Nkrumah against opportunistically using her “constituency as a transit lounge [not even a launching pad] for leadership ambition,” the London-based CPP archduke then imperiously tasks Ms. Nkrumah to prep herself into becoming the Sonia Gandhi of Ghana. Mr. Nelson actually has Gandhi spelled as “Ghandi.”
And here, perhaps, some levelheaded student of Indian history and politics ought to remind Mr. Nelson that about the only connection between Ms. Nkrumah and Mrs. Sonia Gandhi is the Italian peninsula, where the latter was born and the former has sojourned. Then also, Mrs. Gandhi’s primary and sole claim to Indian heritage and political leadership is conjugal, whereas for Ms. Nkrumah it is patrimonial and congenital. Finally, the writer’s allusion to the Indian Congress Party, in ideological terms, has far more relevance for Dr. Busia’s equally democratic Ghana Congress Party than Kwame Nkrumah’s CPP.
In any case, maybe Mr. Nelson needs to be told off on his crassly nonsensical suggestion that the NPP parliamentarians, in the quite predictable aftermath of Election 2008, would be spending the next four years in the Ghana National Assembly stupidly engaged in a patently regressive orgy of incrimination and recrimination, even as the rump-CPP fervidly gears up in a delectable bid to replacing the Danquah-Busia scions. What arrogance!
The pity, ultimately though, is Mr. Nelson’s vacuous and facile presumption that, somehow, all that it takes to capture the minds and hearts of the Ghanaian electorate is simply for one to possess the “Nkrumah” cognomen. Doubtlessly, Mr. Nelson would have far enriched his article if he had bothered, even just in passing, to compare notes with Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the 2008 presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party. The fact is that such nominal symbolism did not work in Kenya and Zambia, so why does our London denizen supposes, against all common sense, that, somehow, it is airtight-bound to work in Ghana? The Congo-DRC and Togo, maybe?
Come off your infantile reverie, Mr. Nelson; Ghanaians are more sophisticated than you appear to be giving them credit for! Even the people of Jomoro well appreciate the fact that Ms. Nkrumah was accorded their mandate in hopes of her working diligently to assist with a remarkable improvement in the quality of their lives, not merely because she happens to be the daughter of a great Ghanaian icon!
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D. is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com. ###
