By: Kobina Antobam
It is one thing to ethnocentrically gather to celebrate the death of Joseph Danquah fifty years after. It’s another thing to use the occasion to consciously and intentionally insult Kwame Nkrumah and the intelligence of those of us who know nothing remarkable about Danquah’s participation in and contribution, or the lack thereof, to the active struggle for independence and national developments thereafter.
In its egregiously retching profanity, the gathering attracted only well-known sympathizers and promoters of tribal pomposity, dysfunction, and separatist congregation. Two days prior to the Danquah event, Gabriel Asare Otchere-Darko, whose only claim to fame is his association with the super RUMP-Danquah “Ideological” Institute, intentionally published an unauthenticated letter supposedly written by Joseph Danquah and addressed to President Kwame Nkrumah, claiming his innocence, detailing his inflated “sufferings” behind bars, and pleading for his release.
Otchere-Darko, probably with the blessing of the NPP, knew what he was doing. He couldn’t have his tribal gathering without touching on raw nerves. He just had to rub it in. In his deranged prejudiced mushy brain, he wants all Ghanaians to worship his “angelic innocent” Danquah and beat up on Kwame Nkrumah. Otchere-Darko, who wants so bad for New Patriotic Party to return to power so that an NPP government, if it ever happens, would resume direct secret taxpayer funding of his rump ethno-preaching Institute and his now dried-up main source of income and perks or even a ministerial position, purposely released that fake Danquah letter to generate unwarranted sympathy for Danquah and win extra support over and above the set ethno-determined membership of the NPP, and encourage dislike, even hatred, for Kwame Nkrumah.
Did Otchere-Darko succeed in his try to garner sympathy for Danquah? Yes, he did. But only from those whose minds have been made up long ago. Did he win additional crossover sympathy for his party, NPP, and Danquah? I don’t think so. He has rather succeeded in alienating and writing off a hefty chunk of the Ghanaian population who are enlightened and broadminded enough to delineate blatant ethnocentric herd behavior from a pragmatic, balanced, and realistic evaluation of the real players and their roles in Ghana’s history.
And then here comes Mr. Akufo-Addo. I still, for the life of me, can’t understand why the NPP’s presidential candidate, Mr. Addo Dankwah Akufo-Addo, continues unforgivably to be such a political masochist. It has been proven without a doubt that the core NPP membership is made up of descendants of the long-gone mate-me-ho tribal separatists who, after all these years, still see Kwame Nkrumah as a nagging unconquerable enemy who has to be woken up time and time again in order to lecture that dead man. Needless to say, Akufo-Addo has now made it very clear that he is a hardcore mate-me-ho, as if we didn’t know it all along.
The often politically beleaguered Mr. Akufo-Addo, in his misplaced delusional deviant ethnocentric adoration of Joseph Danquah, saw Kwame Nkrumah in an irresistible easy low hanging fruit, and decided he needed to score political points. Unfortunately, Akufo-Addo failed and failed miserably. He has bitten off more of the Nkrumah-bashing fruit than he could chew. He has shot himself in the foot, fumbled the football, and kicked the soccer ball into his own goal posts, accomplishing all of that in just one day.
The so-called floating voters he was counting on in 2016, if they are difficult to woo now, are no longer within reach of Akufo-Addo. He has driven them off with his appearance and his discourteous inciting speech and Nkrumah-bashing comments at the Danquah gathering. From all indications, Akufo-Addo has proven that he is no different from ex-President John Agyekum Kufuor. Akufo-Addo is as much an extreme ethnocentric as the hardened tribal segregationist, Mr. Kufuor. Of course, by not being his own man free of tribal influences and without a hint of tribal leanings, Akufo-Addo has definitely erased his election chances by alienating a crucial section of the Ghanaian community who may have made a difference in his favor in his quest for the presidency.
Adding to his many well-documented missteps, Mr. Akufo-Addo has also made a sad political miscalculation when he decided that it is important for him to lie to Ghanaians that Joseph Danquah was and is the most honorable innocent citizen that Ghana ever produced and will ever have. That Joseph Danquah never did anything wrong in his life, especially that he was never the United States Central Intelligence Agency’s most valued mole and prized asset in Ghana during Nkrumah’s time. And that Danquah never contributed to the imperialist neo-colonialist bloody efforts by America and the Western powers during the Cold War period to overthrow Kwame Nkrumah and his government and thwart the progress of other vulnerable newly freed countries and freedom fighting colonies in Africa and around the world.
The Western powers needed internal assistance for their post-World War II world domination and their Cold War posturing fights with the Soviet Union, and Joseph Danquah and few others were readily available, willing and anxious in Ghana to help defeat Nkrumah and get him out of the way, just to make the master (USA) happy.
What amazes me also is that these never requited, insatiably disgruntled Ghanaians have opted to persist relentlessly to glorify past Ghanaians who were utterly destructive and deadly to their own country and people, simply because those people and their dead villains, happen to be of the same tribal ancestry.
In his purposeless exaltation of, and to prop up Danquah, Akufo-Addo decided also to pass summary judgment of guilt on only Kwame Nkrumah, impose his (Akufo-Addo’s) preferred sentence on Nkrumah, who accomplished so much for Ghana, and then commute his self-imposed sentence on Nkrumah and forgive Nkrumah, all in one speech. If anyone is anxious to dig his own grave alongside Danquah, Kofi Abrefa Busia, and all the better-forgotten mate-me-ho saboteurs and CIA assets, Addo Dankwah Akufo-Addo couldn’t fit into the self-dug grave any more precisely.
Those Ghanaians who stubbornly refuse to accept the fact that in their midst are fellow countrymen who will readily sell their birthrights and their country to their former colonial masters for just “thirty pieces of silver,” are very naïve and living under rocks and are disgraceful fools. Danquah was and still is definitely Ghana’s most prominent poster boy for spying on one’s own country and passing sensitive information to the imperialists and neo-colonialists and assisting the CIA in Nkrumah’s overthrow. Danquah was definitely an imperialist stooge, no two ways about it! It is very scary to even consider the idea that Danquah was being prepped by the CIA to take over from Nkrumah. Thank God that it never happened!
Every really perceptive, intelligent, and pragmatic Ghanaian accepts the fact that some ministers and other high-ranking civil servants are still, in today’s Ghana, being paid to provide sensitive damaging national information to the spy agencies of one or more of the Western and the Eastern blocs. If Danquah could do it, then it wouldn’t pass muster for any Ghanaian to think that there is not at least one Ghanaian in or near the seat of the government now who is not on the payroll of a foreign intelligence agency.
As recently as in 1985, Felix Peasah, a security officer at the American Embassy in Accra, Theodore Asiedu, a police inspector with the Bureau of National Investigation, and Stephen Balfour Ofosu, an ex-Chief Superintendent of Police, all pleaded guilty and were convicted for passing government secrets, and for arranging taps on the telephones of some diplomatic missions and high-level Ghanaian government officials, for the benefit of the CIA. One Robert Yaw Appiah with the Post and Telecommunications Corporation was also convicted of passing copies of the keys of utility hole covers to a CIA officer stationed in Accra.
So, we should easily accept that Danquah was very guilty of espionage and he wasn’t a saintly Ghanaian. It should be understood that turncoat Danquah, who was handsomely compensated, became a spy for the West when Nkrumah stole his thunder and led the fight for our freedom. Jealousy immediately took hold of Danquah and radicalized the man and everybody else who spoke his language.
Only tribal identity, ethnic relationship and affiliation make some Ghanaians today insist that they have to exalt and extol the saboteur Danquah, in order to prune, prune, and prune away the prestige of Nkrumah till he doesn’t matter anymore to Ghanaians. IT’S ALL TRIBAL JEALOUSY AND NOTHING ELSE. Many countries around the world would easily have sentenced Danquah to death and actually hanged him for spying, but not Nkrumah.
It was also painful to listen to Akufo-Addo’s fatuous mockery and retching odor-filled putrefaction in his downward unstoppable slide into self-defeat and his tacit confession of ethnocentric tendencies, when he threw a condescending patronizing olive branch to Nkrumah admirers for reconciliation, and by asking them to forgive and forget. Akufo-Addo really did the unthinkable, the unforgivable and the abominable by throwing the olive branch in the wrong direction. Again, Akufo-Addo’s inclination towards political self-mutilation and self-defeat is mindboggling. This goes for all NPP bootlickers, too.
Akufo-Addo is very aware that there is a tail-chasing flea-bitten deranged whiny puny chihuahua in New York City who shows up every day in the electronic media with his chirpy yelps and his unrelenting insults and his ineffective vilification of Kwame Nkrumah. Akufo-Addo should rather, despite it being a useless request, ask his New York ass-sniffing tribesman kook to change, apologize, and cease and desist, but not someone like me or other Nkrumah admirers. I am not the one who raises Cain about Nkrumah every chance I get and especially when there’s no need to.
Again, Mr. Akufo-Addo should rather ask the flea-infested varmint in NYC, who claims to be related to every prominent Akyem and Twi-speaking personality in the world, to initiate any attempt at atonement and reconciliation. Don’t ask me. Don’t ask other Nkrumah admirers. And don’t even go after his children. When Nkrumah admirers and supporters are often silent in their acceptance and appreciation of the accomplishments of the Osagyefo, it is the mate-me-ho ethno-centrists, tribalists, secessionists, and genocidal maniacs who constantly stir up the dust, disturb our peace and exhume Nkrumah for their own macabre necrophilous entertainment and ritual satiation.
And, there is ex-President Kufuor who ran the country for eight years as if the country was his tribal property, and who used his office to demean and belittle Kwame Nkrumah, and who elevated the Asantehene and other Twi-speaking chiefs over and above other chiefs in the country. These days, Kufuor runs to the Asantehene any chance he gets but can’t bring himself to utter Kwame Nkrumah’s name. Even the Asantehene himself, for political correctness and for fear of offending his tribesmen, does not go near any celebration in honor of Kwame Nkrumah! If Mr. Addo Dankwah Akufo-Addo wants anyone to forgive and forget, it’s not Nkrumah admirers who should be asked to do so. Akufo-Addo should ask Kufuor and easily identifiable others to desist from being so narrowly ethno-centric, and publicly recognize Nkrumah even if Nkrumah wasn’t a Twi-speaking Asante or Akyem but an Nzema GHANAIAN, for his intelligence and achievements, and apologize to Ghanaians for their misplaced admiration of criminal Danquah.
I wasn’t a Young Pioneer in the Nkrumah days. My family members, as far as I can recall, were not actively involved in the politics of the day. We carried on with our lives and the elders in the family focused their attention on the kids’ upbringing and education, including mine. But there is or was not a single member of my family who does or did not appreciate and thank Nkrumah for his timely and fitting leadership, especially when Ghana needed someone exactly like him to see us through the struggles for independence and the developments that followed.
It is also very foolish not to accept that those were different times. Those were turbulent times. The very fact that Nkrumah came along, foresaw what was ahead for Gold Coast citizens and Africa as a whole, pulled away from the confused, crawling, snail-paced headless chickens of the United Gold Coast Convention, and was able to wrestle our independence from the recalcitrant and racist British in the shortest possible time, all of that should make ALL Ghanaians appreciate the sacrifices Nkrumah made for us to be where we are today.
These days it is fanciful and attractive to throw around the words “dictator” and “brutal” to label Kwame Nkrumah. The truth is that Nkrumah was neither brutal nor a dictator. With the encouragement and assistance of the CIA, any and all recorded incidences of brutality in the country were actually perpetrated by a jealous terrorist tribal group of Ghanaians. Neo-colonialists and post-independence imperialists who wanted continued unstrained unfettered control over Africa and some spiritually beaten Ghanaians were the ones who backed Nkrumah to a corner, removed him from office, and killed him.
Anyway, can any Ghanaian today name a single democratically functioning African country or colony during Nkrumah’s time which was headed by democratically elected Black Africans as heads of state, which also had turnover regular elections, such as we have today in Ghana? Now that we have our brand spanking new dysfunctional time-untested democracy, Nkrumah has become mate-me-hos’ whipping boy who is being used to cover up their own incompetence and violent past.
Unfortunately, however, amongst us are ethno-centrists who will not let go. In their struggles for political control of the country, the mate-me-hos love to forcibly inject Kwame Nkrumah, who’s been dead for over forty years, into today’s political fray, even though he is not running for any political office these days. Considering the numerical membership strength each of the NDC and NPP, the newly reconstituted Convention People’s Party, with Nkrumah’s daughter or anyone else at the head, has an infinitesimal chance of becoming a populously successful party.
But NPP agitators the world over will rather go after Samia Nkrumah, Kwesi Nduom, and others, and add them and today’s CPP and other Nkrumah-leaning parties to the NDC as their combined Ghanaians who need whipping and annihilation. Sometimes, it seems that it is easier and more convenient to fight Nkrumah, his children, and all admirers of the man than to single out the NDC as the only stumbling block in the way of NPP’s diminishing chances for the presidency.
To my fellow Nkrumah so-called “nuts” (that’s what they call us): just as the NPP wants to woo and win you over to their side in order to swell their stagnant tribally-centered numbers in order to win the next elections, bear in mind that they only want an unequal condescending relationship with you. If you make the mistake of voting for them, you will not get a leadership position in the NPP party because you are of the “wrong” tribe; you will not get an uninterrupted flow of electricity; petrol and gas prices will not go down; the cedi will not suddenly appreciate in value simply because NPP is in power; the quality and level of the flow of water will not get better. You will wake up the day, the week, the month, the year, and decades after, and your life will remain the same. Bear in mind that our energy and economic problems are already well defined by very difficult economic constraints and international forces which can’t be fixed with street demonstrations and loud disturbing protests.
What you will only get from an NPP government is more Nkrumah bashing. If their fawning display of drooling love for Danquah even when they are not in office is so abhorrently evident for all of us to see, wait till you make that woeful mistake of contributing to NPP’s return to power. You will get Osafo Marfo, who would love to drive you out of Akan-dominated areas of the country. You will get genocidal Kennedy Agyapong who will be more strident in his distaste of some tribes in the country. And don’t forget Otchere-Darko, ex-President Kufuor, and many others who can’t wait to get their paws back on Ghana’s national resources. You might even get back ex-convict drug trafficker Eric Amoateng. Akufo-Addo does not have the backbone to keep these hungry predators at bay.
So, watch out, all so-called Nkrumah-crats. They are coming for you. They insult and are condescending to every Ghanaian outside their tribal group. But they still want your vote. They can’t help their hereditary condescending instincts! And guess what? They will beat you with Kwame Nkrumah’s bones after they have won you over and then pull a Rodney King on you: “Can’t we all just get along?” That’s exactly what Akufo-Addo tried to do at the Danquah death gathering.
NOTE: I am the only real Kobina Antobam, Takoradi. I was born Kobina and was named after a smart successful uncle. All other Kobina Antobams who show up here are just trying to neutralize the “venom” out of my “sting.”
Good day.
