By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Jan. 17, 2016
E-mail: [email protected]
At nearly 92 years old and an active journalist and a public lecturer, Mr. K. B. Asante has made himself quite a respectable and relevant figure on the Fourth Republican Ghanaian political landscape. Still, I am not certain about the accuracy of his assessment that his long-deceased former boss and postcolonial Ghana’s first leader, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, would have gladly consented to the American request to have the two Saudi-born Yemeni terror suspects temporarily resettled in Ghana (See “Nkrumah Would’ve Accepted Gitmo 2 – K. B. Asante” Starrfmonline / Ghanaweb.com 1/17/16).
We know through considerable research that in spite of his reams of hostile writings and speeches constantly and steadily lambasting the American government and his intemperate description of Washington as an imperialist vampire, largely to please his Soviet bosses, that Nkrumah generally lacked the courage of his convictions. For instance, while on an official visit to the United States in 1958, or thereabouts, Richard Mahoney reports that the Ghanaian leader had the chutzpah to claim in a CBS-TV interview that talk of racism and the inhumane treatment of African-Americans were grossly exaggerated by America’s detractors and aimed at unfairly embarrassing Washington in the eyes of the global community (See Mahoney’s JFK: The Africa Ordeal).
Nevertheless, as of whether the deposed late Ghanaian leader would have happily accepted Messrs. Mahmud Umar Muhammad Bin Atef and Khalid Muhammad Salih Al-Dhuby, would pretty much have depended on the period of his tenure during which such demand would have been made by the White House, State Department or the Pentagon or all three institutions of the American government. For example, if such request had been made in the late 1950s or early 1960s, while Nkrumah was earnestly negotiating to have the Americans fund the Akosombo Dam Project, in all likelihood, an indescribably desperate President Nkrumah would have readily consented to such a risky undertaking. With the proverbial Show Boy, it was fundamentally a question of the bottom-line.
It definitely would not have been because the U.S.-educated Ghanaian leader had any genuine respect or affection for the American government and / or any of its key operatives. At the end of the day, and deeply at heart, Nkrumah was a shameless opportunist and a pathological cynic who was widely known for his pontifical and stentorian speeches against the white-racist Apartheid regime in Pretoria, even while also secretly trading with the white South Africans in items ranging from apples, munitions and mining equipment (See Kwame Arhin’s Kwame Nkrumah: His Life and Work).
Nonetheless, what I am more interested in here and want Ghanaians to be aware of is the incontrovertible fact that Mr. K. B. Asante, the former Presiding Officer of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA), is a staunch supporter of the faux-socialist Nkrumaist-packed Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC). We must also not forget that Nkrumah had massive protest demonstrations organized in Ghana’s capital of Accra, when the French government decided to have one of their nuclear warheads tested in the Sahara Desert, in one of its former West African colonial territories. Needless to say, Messrs. Bin Atef and Al-Dhuby are the veritable equivalent of human nuclear bombs.
It is also quite certain that if former President John Agyekum-Kufuor or Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia had secretly arranged to have Messrs. Bin Atef and Al-Dhuby resettled in Ghana, shortly after their release from the U.S. Naval Base at Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay, after 14 years of “preventive detention” without trial, Mr. Asante’s reaction would have been diametrically the opposite of what it is presently; and his condemnation would have been both swift and poignant in thrust and very different from what he is claiming and smugly alleging today about what the attitude and the temperament of his former boss would have been.
Indeed, about the only other way that anybody could fairly accurately presume Nkrumah to have been poised to cottoning up to the decision to have Messrs. Bin Atef and Al-Dhuby granted asylum in Ghana, would have been to use such gesture to ingratiate himself with his North African neighbors, especially Egypt’s President Abdel Gamal Nasser, whose support the megalomaniacal Ghanaian leader desperately needed to push through his patently quixotic agenda of African unification under a one-party socialist dictatorship.
Still, at the end of the day, what Ghanaians need to recognize, first and foremost, is the fact that they cannot continue to live under the speculative shadow of a man who primarily envisaged their country as a mere stepping stone and a decidedly incidental geopolitical appendage towards his temporally oversized ambition of becoming the first president of a Union of African Socialist States.
*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs