By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Feb. 8, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
It is not that late and former President Kwame Nkrumah does not need any kindly gesture of forgiveness, as that which was charitably proclaimed by Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on the 50th Anniversary Commemoration of the Prison Assassination of Dr. J. B. Danquah. The fact of the matter, as poignantly observed by English writer Robert Louis Stevenson, in his seafaring classic Treasure Island, is that "Dead Men Don't Bite." Their disciples and ideological adherents may, however, bite to more than a fault.
The wanton atrocities perpetrated by Ghana's first postcolonial premier against the innocent and justifiably resistant are beyond redemption, if the infamous late dictator's half-Egyptian daughter were to ask me. And so, really, Ms. Samia Yaba Nkrumah is dead-on-target when, to Akufo-Addo's laudable conciliatory gesture of forgiveness, the Chairperson of the rump-Convention People's Party (r-CPP) angrily ripostes that her father did absolutely nothing wrong to require/deserve forgiveness from the family and loved ones of the late Dr. J. B. Danquah (See "Nkrumah Doesn't Need Forgiveness - Samia To Nana Addo" Modernghana.com 2/6/15).
Regarding the strength of her self-righteous indignation, Ms. Nkrumah asserts the following: "We are relying on judgments by the courts of law that convicted these people [for] their involvement in some murder cases." It is not clear what the leader of the rump-CPP is talking about, because Dr. Danquah was never tried or convicted of any acts of criminality whatsoever, from the Kulungugu assassination attempt on the life of President Nkrumah to the 1943 ritual murder of Nana Akyea-Mensah (Barima Ohemeng), this writer's own maternal granduncle.
The fact of the matter is that Dr. Danquah was never once put on trial for any acts of criminality. Indeed, on the two occasions that he was arbitrarily arrested and detained under the infamous Preventive Detention Act (PDA), no official charges were preferred against the former magnanimous mentor of Mr. Nkrumah. But what is even more significant to point out is the fact that 60-percent of the suspects arrested and prosecuted for the 1962 assassination attempt on his life, were members of President Nkrumah's own cabinet or inner-political circle, including Messrs. Ako-Adjei, Adamafio and Crabbe.
And of those suspects known to belong to the political and ideological opposition, including Mr. Obetsebi-Lamptey who, by the way, was promptly cleared by Attorney-General Geoffrey Bing of any linkage or involvement, against the wishes of a rabidly paranoid President Nkrumah, and Mr. Yaw Manu, none of them provided the prosecution with any forensically sustainable evidence linking Dr. Danquah to this, admittedly, tragic act of criminality. And so it is not clear precisely what Ms. Nkrumah means by her "reliance on judgments by the courts of law that convicted these people of their involvement in some murder cases." At any rate, President Nkrumah roundly rejected the verdicts of the three Supreme Court justices who sat on the case, namely, Justices Arku Korsah, Van Lare and Akufo-Addo.
Ms. Nkrumah also says that: "We are relying on declassified documents that have linked some of these people to Western intelligence." She might, were Ms. Nkrumah a person of integrity, have also promptly added that President Nkrumah openly consorted with the Russian KGB, whose West African operations were headquartered in Accra; Nkrumah is also widely known to have collaboratively used the KGB to repress Ghanaian citizens as well as to destabilize neighboring African countries and governments, including Dr. Houphouette Boigny's (Ofei-Boahen's) Ivory Coast and Mr. Sylvanus Olympio's Togo.
Indeed, there is forensically credible evidence that it was President Nkrumah who personally ordered the brutal assassination of the ardently anti-communist Togolese leader (See Mahoney's JFK: The Africa Ordeal). Ultimately, pathological basket cases like Ms. Nkrumah, and some of the other hardnosed Nkrumacrats, such as Messrs. Kwesi Pratt and Agyeman-Badu Akosa, need to courageously and honestly come to terms with the fact that no enemy or inveterate political opponent of President Nkrumah's could as effectively demonize the late former dictator than Nkrumah himself did by virtue of his own grossly incompetent and immitigably extortionate leadership.
At any rate, has Ms. Nkrumah bothered to find out precisely why the overwhelming majority of Ghanaians celebrated the Feb. 24, 1966 putsch that ousted the Kwame Nkrumah-led regime of the Convention People's Party with far greater fanfare than they had celebrated the country's declaration of sovereignty from British colonial rule on March 6, 1957?
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is the author of "Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana." New York and Bloomington, IN: iUniverse.com, 2005.
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