By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
My hectic summer-teaching schedule has prevented me from promptly weighing in on the absolutely needless controversy generated in the wake of the firing of Mr. Sekou Nkrumah by President John Evans Atta-Mills. And curiously, while some critics, among them prominent NDC operatives like Mr. Ekwow Spio-Garbrah, have been characteristically quick and gratuitous in upbraiding the President, what none of these critics either seems capable of confronting or simply hypocritically prefers to conveniently ignore are the very fundamental questions of context and the realities of postcolonial Ghanaian history.
And so in their misguided bid to positioning themselves on the right side of history, they stolidly hope, it seems, fanatical Nkrumacrats like Mr. Spio-Garbrah have proceeded to rather unwisely cast President Mills and the younger Mr. Nkrumah in dialectical terms of “victimizer” and the “victimized.” In the preceding scenario, quite predictably, it is Mr. Sekou Nkrumah who is envisaged as the unsuspecting victim. The fact of the matter, though, is that both President Atta-Mills and Mr. Sekou Nkrumah are victims!
The latter is a veritable victim precisely because the blistering reality of human existence under the checkered tenure of the Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP) has been criminally and systematically kept from the Nkrumah children and Ghanaians who were not old enough to fully appreciate the dire consequences of even constructively carping President Nkrumah and his one-party dictatorial machinery of the CPP. In such an atmosphere of convenient dishonesty, myth has been permitted to trump the truth of history, with the first premier of sovereign Ghana being mendaciously and deviously and superficially cast as the “epic liberator” of Ghana and continental Africa as a whole.
Nonetheless, even as Mr. J. A. Braimah, a staunch and influential CPP operative, had occasion to painfully opine in the wake of the summary imprisonment and the deliberately induced death/assassination of Dr. J. B. Danquah, it very well appears as if the British colonial administration was far more interested in upholding and preserving the human and civil rights of their erstwhile Gold Coast colonial subjects than the Convention People’s Party under President Kwame Nkrumah (See T. Peter Omari’s Kwame Nkrumah: The Anatomy of an African Dictatorship. London: C. Hurst, 1970). Unfortunately, what Ghanaians have had under the tenure of President John Evans Atta-Mills is the curious and fatuously extravagant pageantry of a year-long centenary birthday anniversary celebration of the man who invented Preventive Detention in Black Africa as a means of both muzzling and cuffing forthright and unpopular criticism of his one-party dictatorship. If, indeed, the sole objective for launching a year-long centenary anniversary celebration of Mr. Kwame Nkrumah was to make Ghanaians and the rest of the African world believe that pioneering African nationalists and civil and human rights spearheads like Dr. Danquah did absolutely nothing for Ghanaians and Africans, then, to be certain, President Mills almost succeeded. “Almost” succeeded, that is, until the criminally mis-educated likes of Mr. Sekou Nkrumah frontally brought it home to “Tarkwa Atta” that the former University of Ghana law professor is not even fit to stand under the shadow of the statue of the man who gave Ghanaians both the infamous “One O’clock Fever” and the Kwame Nkrumah Concentration Camp (for the fatal “re-education” of his far more politically astute mentors and arch-rivals alike) at Nsawam. As a good friend recently had occasion to opine, had Mr. Sekou Nkrumah made his utterly despicable remarks about his political patron while his father served as Ghana’s President-for-Life, the announcement of his commendable dismissal as National Youth Coordinator in the Ministry of Youth and Sports, a veritable boondoggle, to be certain, would have found the younger Mr. Nkrumah languishing and gasping for breath in the Condemned Cell Block at Nsawam.
In sum, those cynical Ghanaians hell-bent on criminally contorting the objective facts of history in order to advance their selfish interests had better been warned of what awaits them. You see, political opportunism among the ranks of NDC and CPP operatives has dictated the unconscionable moral white-washing of Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, the allegedly single-handed inventor of postcolonial Ghanaian sovereignty. In the process, naturally, Nkrumah’s children have come to envisage Ghanaians for the most part, with the possible significant exception of Dr. Francis Nkrumah, the late dictator’s dauphin, as bumbling idiots. Perhaps in the dopey imagination of Mr. Sekou Nkrumah, ex-President Jeremiah John Rawlings handily passes the ideal leadership test because like his own father, Togbui Avaklasu I presided over the most flagrant abuse of human rights. Rawlings also believed in a one-man dictatorship, thus his invariable irritation whenever political agitators fed up with his gross mismanagement of the Ghanaian economy called upon the half-Scottish upstart to hand over the reins of governance.” To whom?” Mr. Rawlings was often heard to say.
As for Mr. Sekou Nkrumah’s description of Mr. Rawlings as the best leader, compared to Messrs. Kufuor and Mills, perhaps somebody ought to remind the dismissed NDC National Youth Coordinator that it was, indeed, Togbui Avaklasu Rawlings who both politically minted and proffered “Tarkwa Atta” to Ghanaians.
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and the author of 21 books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: [email protected]. ###