By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
July 23, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
I read Dr. John Kayode Fayemi's quite long but fairly interesting lecture with predictable amusement; predictable amusement because I really did not expect much that was new and refreshing from the third keynoter of the Third John Evans Atta-Mills Memorial Lecture. About the only Nigerian citizen who had occasion to boldly call out a pathologically dictatorial President Kwame Nkrumah by the latter's most fitting accolade was the immortalized President Nnamdi Azikiwe, a radical Pan-Africanist who once edited Dr. J. B. Danquah's famous Times of West Africa, regarded as the first modern Ghanaian daily newspaper in the twentieth century (See Nnamdi Azikiwe's Eulogy On The Death Of Dr. Danquah At Nsawam Prison). I did not expect Dr. Fayemi to note this significant fact and phase of the pre-Nkrumah anti-colonial struggle. It wouldn't have made the Show Boy seem big and pioneering enough.
Indeed, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe was a pioneer of seminal magnitude in a way that could not be claimed for the future President Kwame Nkrumah. The latter himself acknowledges in his autobiography that it was the great Nigerian scholar-activist who advised him to enroll into the then-all black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. And for those of our readers who may not know this, it was Dr. Azikiwe who first seriously brought the name and identity of a largely unknown and London-stranded Mr. Nkrumah to the attention of Dr. Joseph (Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye-Danquah. The other better-known version of this narrative, though, has Mr. Ebenezer Ako-Adjei bringing the existence and identity of Kwame Nkrumah to Danquah's attention. Not surprisingly, the one tangential reference which the third Atta-Mills lecturer made to the Doyen of Gold Coast and Modern Ghanaian Politics had to do with the Danquah-Busia(-Dombo) ideological camp as one of the two main ideological centers of postcolonial Ghanaian politics (See "The Lessons And Legacies Of Professor John Evans Atta-Mills" Ghanaweb.com 7/23/15).
The presenter also made significant mention of the fact that the country's current democratic dispensation was incubated and hatched at the University of Ghana, without equally significantly highlighting the fact that it was Dr. Danquah who singularly spearheaded the battle that culminated in the temporally auspicious establishment of the country's flagship academy, thus making possible a sustained academic cultural ferment that continues to make Ghana the foremost postcolonial leader on the African continent. I raise this issue because Dr. Fayemi claims to have had at least 15 years of close contact with Ghana and intimate working relationships with quite a number of leading Ghanaian public figures, including the man he recently had the prime opportunity to eulogize.
He also, predictably, fails to mention that erudition, scholarship and all, President John Evans Atta-Mills was an integral part of the Rawlings team that visited untold economic hardship and terror on Ghanaians throughout the 1980s and 90s. For instance, as Vice-President to Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, Prof. Mills witnessed the brutal regime and practice of the infamous "Identification Haircuts," and may well have himself supervised quite a few. He also vowed to rain "Kenya" on Ghanaians if he was not declared winner of the 2008 presidential election. The British High Commissioner to Ghana had to summon then-Candidate Atta-Mills, in the company of Prof. Kofi Awoonor, to his Green Hill residence to explain himself on the "Kenya Inferno" question. And so I was a bit offended to hear Dr. Fayemi call Prof. Mills "The King of Peace."
Anyway, for those of our readers who may not know what it is, "Identification Haircuts" entailed the raw and bloody shaving of the heads of people deemed to have fallen out of favor with the Rawlingses or not supportive of the Rawlings-led governments by the use of broken beer or liquor bottles. That is the one indelible legacy that any person claiming to be an honest and truth-talking "Philosopher-King," like Dr. Fayemi, ought not to have forgotten to record or mention. But then, what does one expect of the citizen of a country whose threshold of what passes for political decency is reckoned to be much lower than what currently prevails in Ghana?
Then also, an honest lecturer would have noted the fact that President Atta-Mills was merely the lucky prime beneficiary of such President John Agyekum-Kufuor's HIPC-guided, people-oriented social intervention programs as the National Health Insurance Scheme, School-Feeding Program, Metro-Bus Services and social-welfare and safety-net programs that ensured that the very poor and elderly would receive regular monetary support to help cushion them against the "Rawlings' Necklace" or the Stygian economic mess bequeathed Ghanaians by the Rawlings-Mills government of the so-called National Democratic Congress. No need to talk about gross administrative incompetence and the $20 Million Aveyime Rice-Plantation Scandal.
Well, recently, a good friend of mine whose wife comes from the Bendel-State vicinity of Nigeria, and who spent considerable period teaching in Nigerian schools in the late 1970s and early 1980s, lamented to me that the current crop of Ghanaian leaders are running the country so ruinously that one could almost confidently bet that these Ghanaian leaders went to Nigeria to borrow a blueprint on how to destroy an oil- and mineral-rich country. The friend I am talking about is, you guessed right, a bona fide Ghanaian citizen!
Indeed, the very decision to have a disgruntled former Nigerian state governor, and a possible electioneering-campaign sponsor of President Atta-Mills, as well as President John Dramani Mahama, deliver the Third Annual Atta-Mills Memorial Lecture does not surprise yours truly one bit. It has everything to do with the nation-wrecking blueprint that my good friend and elder brother lamented to be about quite recently.
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