By Dr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo
Attorney and Counselor at Law
On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. J.B. Danquah’s prison death, many Ghanaians are still struggling to make sense of exactly why a national hero like Kwame Nkrumah could incarcerate his benefactor and fellow freedom fighter and watch him die a horrendous death. Naturally, Nkrumah’s followers have unleashed their propaganda machine in an attempt to justify or rationalize Nkrumah’s Preventive Detention Act (PDA) as the natural outcome of the so-called terrorism of the opposition, led by Dr. J.B. Danquah. Indeed, these Nkrumaists go to great lengths to sanctify and pacify the man’s dictatorial deeds, passionately imputing that those who criticize him are unpatriotic. This article examines some of the claims by the Nkrumaists, and assesses the value of these arguments in the context of Nkrumah’s dictatorial regime.
Nkrumaists are fond of using the bomb-throwing incidents to justify his atrocious treatment of his political opponents. The first bomb-throw occurred at Kulungugu in 1963, while the Preventive Detention Act (PDA) was passed in 1958. Thus the Nkrumaists are guilty of the fallacy of circular cause and consequence, where the consequence of the phenomenon is claimed to be its root cause. Truly, Nkrumah’s tyranny, as embodied in the passage of the PDA, was the cause of the armed struggle for freedom undertaken by certain patriotic citizens who clearly saw their freedoms appropriated according to the whims of a brutal dictator.
When he became power drunk, and openly portrayed his communistic ideas, Nkrumah would not tolerate any dissent neither from the official opposition nor from his own party members. After the PDA was enacted in 1958, his finance Minister K.A. Gbedemah who introduced the bill in Parliament had to escape into exile in the USA, fleeing from the Act he gleefully spearheaded. When the people were overfed with Nkrumaism and were suffering under his tighten-your-belt socialist policies, the bombs from his own camp became an option just as he himself was advocating violence as a strategy for freedom fighters elsewhere. And by the way, at the time of his overthrow, there were more CPP members in prison under the PDA than UP folks, just as Danquah had warned Gbedemah and his gaping sycophants. You can say this for Nkrumah that when it came to his mass incarceration, he did not discriminate between friend or foes, the opposition or CPP members, benefactors or enemies, and supporters and non-supporters. He was fair to everybody. Insofar as he dreamed that anybody needed to go to prison without trial, that person languished in jail.
Nkrumaists also raise negative sentiments against the glorious coup d'état that overthrew the dictator by associating it with the negative image of the CIA, as if the mass support for the coup was also engineered by the CIA. If the CIA overthrew Nkrumah, then they merely fulfilled our sacred national aspiration to "resist the oppressor's rule with all our hearts and minds forever more" and therefore are they our national heroes deserving of our eternal respect. But saying that Nkrumah's overthrow was the work of CIA merely turns our people into lobotomized idiots who did not have the courage to get rid of a dictator!! I do not subscribe to the idea that the colonial masters were responsible for giving us back our freedom from the tyranny of Kwame Nkrumah. The gallant men and women who overthrew Nkrumah should be credited with the greatest act of patriotism for our country. And if Nkrumah was so sure of the unpopularity of his overthrow, nothing prevented him from launching a triumphant return to reclaim his power. Unlike him, the new rulers would have given him a fair trial before shooting him. So this whole idea that the CIA engineered his overthrow is mere fiction, propagated by Nkrumah’s followers to contaminate the great euphoria brought upon the people by the dictator’s timely overthrow.
Nkrumaists claim that J.B. Danquah was a CIA agent. My question is, how can you prove this allegation when the man was never allowed to defend himself in a proper court of law? J.B. Danquah was incarcerated without trial and without due process, and as such, one cannot establish his guilt or innocence through inadmissible hearsay!! But more importantly, how does Danquah being a CIA asset answer the question of the brutal dictatorship of Kwame Nkrumah? Today, if anybody were to impose Nkrumah's type of dictatorship on Ghana, I myself will be working with the CIA to ship arms to Ghana to fight to restore democracy. And who will blame me for working closely with a foreign government to fulfill the aspiration in our national anthem "to resist the oppressor's rule with all our will and mind”? After all, throughout history, people have been provoked to fight more for far less.
Nkrumaists are always saying that Nkrumah does no wrong, and go ahead to rationalize and justify all his patent crimes against humanity, summarily condemning all his opponents as nation-wreckers and extolling him as our Messiah, and when we raise the man’s faults, they turn around to say that fairness demands us to be balanced by discussing the man’s greater qualities. What are these qualities? Ingratitude, lies, blackmail, jealousy, dishonesty, deception or overweening ambition? And when have Nkrumaists said anything positive about the other great men who invited Nkrumah over to help in the independence struggle?
Ironically, Nkrumaists state that Nkrumah gave us freedom from the colonial masters. We should only be proud of our independence if it truly gave us true freedoms. But what do they mean by "freedom from colonial masters"? Are they here accepting oppression from our own kind as a good substitute for "oppression from colonial masters"? Do they again narrowly define "self-government" as Nkrumah's singular right to impose a totalitarian regime on our people? I believe that the better task for Nkrumah was to have sought first the solid principles for democratic governance and to spread these across Africa. All others would have been added unto him. But his simplistic faith in dictatorship and his effort to propagate same across Africa makes him a truly bad leader for all time.
Nkrumaists also claim Nkrumah founded Ghana, but Ghana had already been created long before Nkrumah came. Rather, he came to claim that he was giving the people freedom, liberation and justice, and that is where the problem is. He could have vividly put on the table before the people that he was going to imprison them without trial and abolish all opposition and declare himself president in order to build our country into a great nation, and if the people had accepted him and his message, then he would have been considered honest under the circumstances. But he promised freedom and justice from colonial oppression, only to turn around to inflict a worse form of oppression on the people. How can we say that Nkrumah gave us freedom and justice and liberation when he abolished all these forms?
And if all he accomplished were the huge infrastructural developments minus the freedom, the colonial masters could have achieved more with these same resources and kept us under less oppression than Nkrumah. Indeed, we should think about it: if we had asked for industries and huge buildings and roads and schools in order to agree to remain in bondage, our colonial masters would have done far better with the millions they left with Nkrumah. What is more, they would not have oppressed us as much as Nkrumah did. At least, in their time, due process existed from which Nkrumah himself benefitted. Thus the notion that Nkrumah’s provision of infrastructure should mitigate his dictatorship is neither here nor there.
Nkrumaists also quote injustice in the US to justify Nkrumah’s injustice against the Ghanaian population. This is a fallacy of argument characterized as Tu Quoque. ("You Do it Too!"; also “Two Wrongs Make a Right”). This is a corrupt argument from ethos. It is no sign of intelligence to excuse one's own bad action by pointing out that one's opponent's acts are perhaps even worse than one's own. Such an argument has no substance in logic!
Finally, Nkrumaists concoct in their own minds a juggernaut of national crisis which Nkrumah needed to deal with, hence his imposition of a brutal dictatorship on the nation. But Nkrumah was not ruling any different population than those to whom he promised freedom and justice. And those disturbances he cited for his imposition of dictatorship existed long before he returned to Ghana, and he used the same instruments of agitation for his own political ends. In fact, that is how he managed to become president. And yet, all of a sudden, these disturbances were blown out of proportion to require a permanent emergency rule justifying mass incarceration.
And in the context of all these dictatorial posturing, his supporters still cast him out as the greatest African leader; now somebody explain to me how he became the greatest African leader.....By doing what exactly? Uniting Africa under the worst leadership in the world and leaving a legacy of totalitarianism across the continent? What did Nkrumah do that is a good example in leadership anywhere? I don't care who worships him or who builds a statue for him or who says what about him. But I can tell you why he is the worst leader anywhere and everywhere.
Nkrumah was a man without character full of destructive hatred and jealousy, deviousness, dishonesty, moral turpitude, ingratitude, greed, selfishness, self-aggrandizement, deceit, paranoia, covetousness and ruthless cunning. His propensity for dictatorship began right from the early days of independence until his glorious overthrow on February 24, 1966. The man entered the corridors of power with the sole purpose of perpetuating his rule and turning himself into a tin god. Those ready to make him a supreme god and fountain of honor should note the following salient facts: The “Great Leader” built what was then the largest prison in Africa not to accommodate criminals but to incarcerate his political opponents. The “Redeemer” declared the nation a one-party state with himself as life President, taking the sovereignty from the people and leaving just men with no alternative for a peaceful change of government except through his violent overthrow. In these and many other state actions, freedom of speech became anathema to the Ghanaian populace, and the court system which was initially seen as the guardian of the people’s rights came under siege when the Chief Justice was fired for failing to return a verdict favorable to the Great Redeemer. Nkrumah took away the natural right of habeas corpus by causing to be enacted the Preventive Detention Act (PDA), the power to imprison his political opponents without trial. He banned all competing political parties and declared Ghana a one-party state. He created a personality cult by putting his effigy on Ghana's currency and establishing brain-washing institutions whose residual effects are still found in some of our scholars of today. He neglected the business of the state in pursuit of his over-weaning ambition to rule Africa and to turn the continent into a communistic dictatorship which he had already begun to experiment in Ghana.
For these deadly sins, Nkrumah deserved to be overthrown because freedom and justice are fundamental and inherent rights of all humankind, and no known physical monuments will ever trump these rights. While Nkrumah may well be the best leader Ghana ever had because of his unique place in our history, he is also the worst dictator Ghana ever had because of the untrammeled power he exercised over the people. Academic dunderheads who were purposely trained en masse may choose to apotheosize the man without mentioning his faults, but they neither educate nor fool anybody. Nkrumah made sure to screw up their brains for all time, until they can only shout the empty slogan “Nkrumah never dies” and “Nkrumah does no wrong”. But to some of us, the man epitomizes our political tragedy since he is so unsurpassable in his dictatorial tendencies.
Fortunately, Nkrumah’s misrule has led to the present constitutional changes wherein the one-party system and life presidency have been constitutionally abolished, and wherein the people have been given the right to take up arms and rebel against any government attempting to take the sovereignty from the people. Today, by law, every Ghanaian has the right and duty to take up arms and overthrow any government that tries to repeat Nkrumah's brutal dictatorship. In view of this fact, one could conclude that the total and permanent repudiation of Nkrumah's brutal dictatorship is the only good legacy Nkrumah left Ghana, just as J.J. Rawling’s brutal dictatorship has the unintended consequences of establishing our presently solid democratic dispensation.
Samuel Adjei Sarfo, JD, MA, BA, etc. is an Attorney and Counselor at Law, a Teacher of Lore, Certified High School English Educator, Researcher and Scholar. A version of this article was first published in his New Statesman column Thoughts of a Native Son. He can be reached at [email protected]