By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
To use the solemn occasion of the 49th anniversary of the prison assassination of Dr. J. B. Danquah by President Kwame Nkrumah to justify the democratically unjustifiable enactment of the Preventive Detention Act (PDA), was rather callow and childish on the part of Prof. Agyeman-Badu Akosa, the former director of the Ghana Medical Services (See "Akosa: Nkrumah's PDA Was Necessary to Deal with Terrorists" Radioxyzonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 2/6/14).
Indeed, the balance sheet on the history of political violence, both in the heated transitional period leading up to Ghana's independence and the latter's immediate aftermath, clearly and heavily tilts overwhelmingly against the Nkrumah-led Convention People's Party (CPP). Almost all the available authoritative evidence, both eyewitness and objectively researched evidence (See Dennis Austin's Politics in Ghana: 1946-1960), points to the incontrovertible fact of Mr. Nkrumah's having run a veritable reign-of-terror, in much the same way that the former Flt.-Lt. Jerry John Rawlings would prosecute a virtual culture-of-silence between December 31, 1981 and January 1992.
Even assuming polemically that some form of emergency powers had to be invoked in order to stem the steadily rising tide of violence that seemed to be fast engulfing the country between 1958 and 1966, the bulk of which was CPP-generated, by the way, it was still imperative that in any constitutional democracy, such as staunchly claimed for their hero by ardent Nkrumah partisans, those so rounded up in the name of stanching criminal acts of terrorism ought to have been promptly arraigned before a legitimately constituted court of law and forensically prosecuted as such.
In the Kulungugu cause celebre, for example, 60-percent of the criminal suspects rounded up at the crime scene belonged to President Nkrumah's own party and cabinet. This ought to compellingly alert Prof. Akosa and his fellow Nkrumah fanatics to the glaring fact that Nkrumah's most vicious and dangerous political and ideological enemies were largely internally conceived, incubated and hatched.
But what is even more significant and interesting to observe is that even after the Supreme Court of Ghana had tried and acquitted Messrs. Ako-Adjei, Tawiah-Adamafio and Kofi Crabbe, President Nkrumah promptly quashed the aforesaid Supreme Court verdict and summarily ordered these legitimately acquitted criminal suspects to be indefinitely detained. He would also summarily dismiss the three justices who had presided over the trial, namely, Justices Arku-Korsah, Van Lare and Akufo-Addo.
The foregoing may be what Mr. Samuel Atta-Akyea, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) Member of Parliament (MP) for Abuakwa-South meant, when he pointedly described the enactment of the infamous Preventive Detention Act, an inexcusable torture instrument crudely imported from Prime Minister Nehru's India and, to be certain, a vintage carryover from British colonial rule, as one that "rather unfortunately gave [rude] expression to [a paradoxical brand and breed of governance called] Constitutional Absolutism."
My personal concern and the primary source of inspiration for this brief article, is the rather tired, boorish and blasphemously perennial belittling of both the memory and stature of Dr. Danquah, the man who made it possible for him and his kind to attend Ghana's flagship academy, the University of Ghana, by Prof. Agyeman-Badu Akosa. If he has any forensically sustainable evidence linking Dr. Danquah to any terrorist activities against President Nkrumah, let Prof. Akosa reveal it now, or he may well risk a defamatory lawsuit in the near future.
Likewise, if he wants to be regarded as a serious and respectable politician, then Prof. Akosa had better predicate his patently outrageous public pronouncements on Dr. Danquah on verifiable and forensically provable evidence.
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Feb. 9, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
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