Dr. Kwame Nkrumah
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
It ought to be crystal clear to each and every Ghanaian of age that the Deputy General-Secretary of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr. Koku Anyidoho, may very well be the master-brain behind the Anlo-Ewe terrorist organization calling itself the Homeland Study Group that has been promoting secession of the Volta Region from the rest of the country.
Recently, three members of the group were arrested and charged with high treason, a crime that could well earn them the death penalty (See “Akufo-Addo’s Kyebi Supremacy Agenda Cause of ‘Separatist’ Agitation – Anyidoho” Ultimatefmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 3/10/17).
According to the chief sponsor of the so-called Homeland Study Group (HSG), the treason suspects have turned violent in their agitation because of what Mr. Anyidoho terms as the falsification of modern Ghanaian history by President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. No such accusation could be more criminally absurd.
First of all, even a casual glance at the treasonous activities of the HSG clearly indicates beyond any shadow of doubt that the group has been in operation at least since the tenure of the late President John Evans Atta-Mills and the National Democratic Congress (NDC), well before the December 2016 election of President Akufo-Addo and the New Patriotic Party (NPP).
We must also promptly and significantly point out that Mr. Anyidoho is an Akan-hating Anlo-Ewe nationalist who once publicly stated that former President John Agyekum-Kufuor’s face was so ugly that he, Mr. Anyidoho, could not bear the mere sighting of the same. And here, it may be recalled that when he made this statement, Mr. Anyidoho had just been appointed Director of Communications at the Jubilee-Flagstaff House by then-President Atta-Mills.
He would be forced by his new boss to render an unreserved and unqualified public apology to his self-confessed tribal arch-nemesis. And so it ought not to come as any surprise at all that the Asiedu-Nketia second-bananas would be warning against any attempt to judicially deep-six the three Anlo-Ewe terror suspects.
We must also point out the fact that if Mr. Anyidoho knew his “Ghanaian History” as well as he claims, he would have readily known that Dr. J. B. Danquah, the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian Politics, and the most renowned and respected scholar and statesman of his generation, hailed from Kyebi-Adadientem, and not Kyebi proper, even though his mortal remains were interred in the old Kyebi Presbyterian Church Cemetery.
Now, the question of what Dr. Danquah contributed to the seminal development of Ghana, including the renaming of the erstwhile Gold Coast as Ghana, is a matter of canonical historical record and well beyond dispute.
It is also a matter of public record and the standard history books, including a quite authoritative version researched and published by Prof. Emmanuel Agbodeka, himself a bona fide Ghanaian of Ewe descent, that it was Dr. Danquah who singularly pioneered and championed the agitation and movement that eventually led to the establishment of the University of Ghana, attended by legions of the foremost Ewe leaders, scholars and thinkers in the country.
You see, dear reader, Trokosi nationalists like Mr. Anyidoho think and believe that they can terrorize and intimidate their way towards the false revision or re-writing of colonial and postcolonial Ghanaian history, including the patently false and criminal claim that Okomfo Anokye, the legendary unifier of the Asante people, was an Ewe national from a village in modern-day Benin Republic called Notsie. We shall make time to discuss this latter product of a neurotic imagination in due course.
And so perhaps somebody ought to remind Mr. Anyidoho that the Anlo-Ewes had 20 long years under the veritable reign-of-terror of Chairman Jerry John Rawlings and their most eloquent propagandist, the late Prof. Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor to do so.
And it is not that Prof. Awoonor did not do so, for he actually rewrote his own version of Ghana’s history as seen from the jaundiced lenses of the Sierra Leonean-Ghanaian that, like his harebrained nephew, the former Chairman of the Council-of-State was. That book, as I vividly recall, was titled “Ghana: A Political History from Pre-European to Modern Times” (1990), in which Prof. Awoonor sought to promote Ewe supremacy. Unfortunately for its author, that book has never been well received or recognized in scholarly circles as a landmark contribution to the discipline.
In sum, Mr. Anyidoho’s accusation is only the latest of his craven and dastardly attempts to project his own tribal supremacist neurosis or hang-up on President Akufo-Addo. And, predictably, like his uncle, he will not succeed.
Prof. Awoonor also published a self-funded book titled “The Ghana Revolution,” which bogusly sought to justify the brutal execution of Gen. I. K. Acheampong and the other Akan-descended leaders and former leaders of the Ghana Armed Forces, whose savage execution the author smugly described as “a salutary surgical strike” aimed at cauterizing the cancer of corruption in Ghanaian politics. He would poetically, in Shakespearean parlance, meet with the same fate. Maybe we can also talk about the $ 5 million Abacha payola which Chairman Rawlings vehemently denied for nearly twenty years in due course.
It is also rather laughable and plain stupid for Mr. Anyidoho to expect a man who vigorously campaigned for the presidency, largely on the strength of the achievements and yeomanly contributions of Messrs.
Danquah-Busia-Dombo and the Big Five Champions of Ghanaian democracy, plus Mr. George “Paa” Grant, of course, to be singing the praises of the very extortionate and brutal dictator who viciously, deliberately and systematically assassinated his foremost political icon, professional inspiration and hero.
But even assuming for the sake of argument that Dr. Danquah contributed absolutely nothing to Ghana’s liberation struggle, as this Trokosi nationalist would have his kinsmen of the Homeland Study Group and the rest of the world believe, Danquah’s mere induction of the young and wet-eared Mr. Kwame Nkrumah to the anti-colonial Ghanaian political scene would in of itself suffice as a quite remarkable contribution.
Mr. Anyidoho also needs to revisit the results of the 1956 UN-sponsored plebiscite that led to the incorporation of half of the erstwhile Trans-Volta Togoland into modern Ghana, in order to fully appreciate his criminally false and pretentious Nkrumaist adherence.
The fact of the matter is that the Anlo-Ewe leaders hated President Nkrumah with a vengeance that Nkrumah could not half-muster against Dr. Danquah. Mr. Anyidoho would be better off learning the real facts of Ghana’s history and stop passing off his rabidly anti-Akan madness as an excuse for both his abject lack of scholarship and civic responsibility.
*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
March 10, 2017
E-mail: [email protected]