By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Reading about the three-day ultimatum issued by the Minister of Education for the authorities of Ghana's flagship academy, the University of Ghana, Legon, to justify, in writing, their decision not to allow the campus of that august institution to be permanently converted into a commercial thoroughfare, I could not help but wonder what the man who fiercely, and singularly, fought for the establishment of that once-great institution would make of it, were the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics alive and well today (See "UG Explains Road Closure Policy to Education Minister" Radioxyzonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 3/20/14).
Indeed, such is the nature of the world and humankind as to take things for granted and even disdain the same, once the yeomanly heavy-lifting aspect of hard-won academies like the University of Ghana has fast and far receded into the stale, yellowed and dusty pages of the history books. And for those of our readers who may not be aware of the same, Legon, as Ghana's foremost academy is widely known, was not voluntarily and magnanimously bequeathed us by our erstwhile British colonial overlords; rather, it had to be fiercely and frontally fought for - and the capital resources that went into the creation and establishment of the country's oldest university were not granted, gratis, to the citizens and people of Ghana.
In sum, Legon was primarily created out of the blood, sweat and toil of the Ghanaian cocoa farmer, led by the latter's indisputably most ardent defender and champion, Dr. Joseph (Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye-Danquah. It is also significant to observe that Legon has educated more Ghanaian scholars, professionals and intellectuals than any single national academy of coordinate status and prominence. This is also the institution that The New York Times, based on the sterling genius of some of its alumni, as gloriously and honorably demonstrated right here in the United States, nicknamed "The Harvard of West Africa," not just Ghana.
Well, I partly grew up on the campus of the University of Ghana being bussed daily from Kwabenya to the Staff Village Primary School across the street from the University Hospital (I had arrived from Kankang/Sekyere too late to make it into Master Budu Seidu's University Primary School proper), during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and so I have a quite credible first-hand experience of the indescribably glorious past of this landmark institution, which is without a doubt the most representative of the intellectual ferment, pulse and temperament of our beloved nation, at large, to the international community.
But that Professor Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang, the substantive Minister of Education, who is also a former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast, created out of the old Department of Education at the University of Ghana, would write to Vice-Chancellor Ernest Aryeetey demanding to know the latter's reason for not facilely consenting to the obscene conversion of Legon into another public highway, makes an already disturbing situation all the more tragic. For there clearly inheres in all this fracas between the Legon authorities and the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress (NDC) a subtext of grudge, or ideological hostility, that has been conveniently, as well as mischievously, left out of the debate.
Indeed, the entire apparently premeditated and deliberate attempt to stampede the Legon authorities onto the margins of our national social life may well be obliquely related to some capricious vendetta that the key operatives of the Mahama government harbor against the man who presently heads that august institution, Professor Ernest Aryeetey, the renowned economist of remarkable international repute and stature who is hell-bent on upgrading the status of Legon into a respectable research academy of global standing. That Professor Aryeetey's tenure should also coincide with the return of the most anti-intellectual party and government to power, is all the more to be pitied and disconsolately mourned. For the National Democratic Congress has unarguably done more to flagitiously regress the standard and quality of Ghana's public educational system than any other political party or government in recent memory.
When the Rawlings-minted Provisional/National Democratic Congress has not been nihilistically engaged in the rampant closure of our tertiary academies, as it were, it has been zealously engaged in the dumbing down of the curricula of our elementary and secondary educational institutions. We even recently had the notorious and perennially bad-mouthing thirtysomething-year-old Deputy Education Minister, Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, castigating the Legon administrators for presuming to run the institution legitimately entrusted to them like an autonomous "mini-republic" within the sovereign Republic of Ghana. And, interesting to observe, Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa is, himself, an alumnus of Legon!
In all this, it is also worth observing the fact that Prof. Aryeetey has diplomatically and intellectually stood head-and-shoulders above his cynical detractors in government. I also take this prime opportunity to congratulate Professor Aryeetey on his reelection as Vice-Chancellor of the Oxbridge Academy of Ghana, otherwise known as the Boakye-Danquah Academy of Advanced Humanistic Studies.
Legon shall never bow to the predatory whims of the Barbarians, my profuse apologies to John Maxwell Coetzee, the great South African-born Australian novelist, linguist, essayist, translator and the 2003 recipient of the Nobel Literature Prize.
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
April 5, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
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