Opinion
On the 106th birthday anniversary of Ghana’s first postcolonial prime minister and president, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, Ms. Lucy Ennin, regarded as Ghana’s first female Member of Parliament, was reported to have castigated successive governments that emerged in the wake of the auspicious overthrow of the Convention People’s Party (CPP) for having totally destroyed the country’s economy (See “Ghana Cannot Produce ‘Common’ Matches – First Female MP Laments” MyJoyOnline.com 9/21/15).
Ms. Ennin’s admittedly quite valid observation is only part of the story. The fact of the matter is that by Feb. 24, 1966, the Nkrumah-led CPP government had effectively bankrupted the country’s economy. One only needs to read Dr. Frimpong-Ansah’s classic monograph The Vampire State in Africa to get a sobering sense of where Nkrumah left the country. For instance, most of the factories established by the key operatives of the CPP were already running hundreds of thousands of cedis in deficits. In 1961, Nkrumah’s “Tighten-Your-Belt” budgetary policy had forcibly extorted 10-percent of the salaries and wages of all Ghanaian public workers and civil servants in the name of bank savings.
But what is even more important to highlight here is the fact that it was the socialist-leaning National Democratic Congress (NDC) that dismantled the industrial base of the country. And so Ms. Ennin ought to be assessing the extent to which socialism, as misguidedly championed by President Nkrumah and his ideological descendants, has been successful or a massive failure vis-à-vis the development of the country. We must also significantly point out that the short-lived Busia-led Progress Party (PP) government did not dismantle the seminal industrial base of the country. When I left Ghana in 1985, for instance, the Kade Match Factory was in full operation. Rather, Prime Minister Busia ensured the continues operation of the most viable state enterprises established by his predecessor, even as he intensely focused his attention on the country’s rural development.
Ironically, it was those who loudly claim to have been politically and ideologically inspired by President Nkrumah, such as the Ahwoi Brothers and Messrs. Kwesi Botchwey, John Dramani Mahama, John Evans Atta-Mills and their Chief Patron and Godfather, Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, who irreparably destroyed the country’s industrial base. And so if today the country is woefully incapable of producing a primary commodity like match sticks, it is almost exclusively because the National Democratic Congress’ Abongo Boys callously and unconscionably collaborated with the “agents of Western imperialism” – that is their own coinage, by the way – to systematically regress the socioeconomic development of Ghana.
The destruction of the erstwhile Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), an Nkrumah brainchild, was single-mindedly undertaken by the “social democrats” of the National Democratic Congress. And so what Ghanaians ought to be presently discussing is precisely what President Mahama and his former boss, the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, intended Ghanaians to celebrate on President Nkrumah’s birthday anniversary, now that the latter occasion has been made a National Holiday.
Other than a lurid attempt to criminally evade responsibility for their apocalyptic destruction of the country’s socioeconomic and cultural fabric, the relevance of the annual celebration of the so-called Founder’s Day has yet to be convincingly argued before the court of Ghanaian public opinion. President Mahama and his minions also need to tell the nation precisely how they intend to make up for the humongous cost of lost labor which the annual celebration of President Nkrumah’s birthday means, in terms of cedis and pesewas.
Ms. Ennin, the pioneer female MP, is accurate in lamenting the morally abject self-aggrandizing attitude of Fourth Republican Ghanaian politicians of both major parties. But the fact remains that the prime beneficiaries of the destruction of Ghana’s industrial base are the very people who claim to be the bona fide ideological scions of Mr. Kwame Nkrumah who, by the way, focused the overwhelming bulk of his intellectual and the nation’s financial resources on his temporally oversized pan-Africanist agenda than the critical and seminal development of Ghana.
That the Nsawam Cannery was sweet-heartedly quartered up from GIHOC to irredentist “revolutionary values police officers” like Mrs. Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings and her so-called 31st December Women’s Movement (DWM), ought to tell Ms. Ennin that at the end of the day, metaphorically speaking, Kwame Nkrumah was his own worst enemy. You can talk about Hotel Kufuor, but let anybody show Ghanaians the number of Nkrumah-founded factories that have been cannibalized by any scions of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo ideological camp.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Sept. 22, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]