By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Accusations by hirelings of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) that virtually all the leading think-tanks in Ghana are in the pay of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) are absolutely devoid of merit (See “IMANI Barks at NDC for Claims it is NPP Surrogate” MyJoyOnline.com 8/19/11).
To be certain, the most appropriate riposte by the leaders of these civic brain-trusts ought to be in the form of a systematic exposition of the historical origins and development of these intellectual data banks in Ghana to both their critics and the public at large, rather than a grotesquely visceral display of conniption, as was exhibited by IMANI’s Mr. Franklin Cudjoe on a talk-show the other day.
And on the preceding score must be recalled the fact that although the man from whom many a Ghanaian Leftist – or Socialist-leaning – political party or organization claims as his/her source of inspiration, the late President Kwame Nkrumah, was himself a quite remarkable intellectual, the key operatives of these parties and organizations have themselves doggedly pursued decidedly anti-intellectual agendas.
We see striking examples of the preceding in the likes of Gen. I. K. Acheampong and Flt.-Lt. Jerry John Rawlings and currently the Mills-Mahama government, although President John Evans Atta-Mills himself has been widely recognized as a remarkable intellectual.
On the other hand, the Danquah-Busia Tradition is fundamentally intellectually oriented and more ideologically cohesive; and this is absolutely no accident at all, for both statesmen were scholars and thinkers of the first order. Likewise, think-tanks, by their very nature, are intellectual depositories of cogently formulated perspectives on national policy agendas.
In other words, it is all too natural to expect that birds of identical plumage, as it were, would flock together. In sum, what really needs to happen on the Ghanaian political scene for there to prevail a balanced and intellectually enriching institutional and national discourse, is for Left-leaning political parties like the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the Convention People’s Party (CPP) to also begin to forge an intellectual tradition that is comparable to that which exists in the Danquah-Busia camp.
To-date, almost exclusively what passes for Nkrumaist ideology in Ghana is populism, the bizarre sort of gut-oriented soap-box rhetoric that essentially plays to the basest instincts of the least educated and woefully underemployed. And the latter pretty much explains why rather than formulate a cohesive and comprehensive housing policy, for example, the Mills-Mahama government vacuously decided to thrust the country’s housing-policy agenda into the hands of the proprietor of a nondescript South Korean construction company by the name of STX.
Likewise, it is largely because such outsourcing policy was not well-thought-out that in the wake of heated parliamentary debates on the issue, coupled with widespread national outrage, the Mills-Mahama government began to sheepishly backpedal.
It is also rather ironic that at the time of his death, Mr. Larry Bimi, an NDC partisan and anti-judicial crusader, was head of the Busia-founded National Center for Civic Education (NCCE). And so maybe it is about time that NDC operatives with some modicum of academic orientation began seriously thinking about the establishment of think-tanks reflective of their party’s ideological orientation, instead of enviously and childishly seeking to trash and impugn the worth and integrity of such democratic liberalist-oriented think-tanks as IMANI, Danquah Institute, CDD and IEA.
The fact of the matter is that it constitutes the height of intellectual and moral vacuity, for State Capitalist and human rights-trampling institutions like the National Democratic Congress, to expect that think-tanks like IMANI and the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) would docilely and gleefully march according to the jarring drumbeats of the Rawlings posse.
*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 Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of 22 books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.
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