A Chip of the Old Block

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

I saw what I have designated as “The DaCosta Complex” coming quite awhile ago; and it had, at the same time, to do with the rapacious pushing of Ms. Samia Yaba Nkrumah, the daughter of Ghana’s first premier by his Egyptian wife, by the then-Member of Parliament for Komenda-Edina-Eguafo-Abirem (KEEA), Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom, into the mainstream of Ghanaian politics. Paa Kwesi, as he is popularly known, had even started embellishing some apocryphal aspects of the Nkrumah mythology to suit his purpose. There was, for example, that cockamamie story about the Show Boy’s having lectured at the University of Pennsylvania, at a time that even Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, a bona fide American citizen with an urbane American accent and a Harvard doctorate in sociology, to boot, could not even secure employment at U-Penn as an adjunct professor!

In reality, Nkrumah had only been a graduate student of Education at the flagship academy that the great and genius Dr. Benjamin Franklin built. And, in fact, when Nkrumah met Dr. DuBois on the campus of U-Penn, the latter had only been brought on-campus by a white philanthropic organization – perhaps the Rockefeller Foundation – to collect, collate, study and analyze data pertaining to the existential and economic status of “The Philadelphia Negro” since the official abolition of slavery in 1865. In other words, while he did much of his specially commissioned work on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, nevertheless, the man who graduated at the very top of his class at Harvard in 1896, being the first African-American to do so, was not even on the staff of this middle-level Ivy League institution.

Anyway, while ample details have yet to emerge vis-à-vis what might have provoked the newly elected chairperson of the rump-Convention People’s Party (CPP) to make arrant nonsense of Dr. Nduom’s apparently aggressive jockeying for re-nomination as the 2012 presidential candidate of the tautological party that Nkroful Kwame built, nonetheless, we learn that in the quite authoritative opinion of Ms. Nkrumah, Dr. Nduom has unseemly been “orchestrating activities [cynically geared towards] the disintegration of the party” (See “CPP is Fed up with Nduom’s ‘Nonsense’ – Samia Nkrumah” Ghanaweb.com 11/28/11). For those of us who have been studiously following the activities of the rump-CPP since Ms. Nkrumah became its effective leader, it was only a matter of time before a courageous key party operative called Edina Kwesi to order.

What makes the man insufferably obnoxious is his apparently pathological and ingrained belief that, somehow, he can facilely buy his way to power. Thus not quite long ago and shortly after he put forth feelers in the cynical guise of a CPP Youths for an Nduom Presidency, or some such patently bogus group, for example, Edina Kwesi was also widely reported to have “generously” supplied building materials to some seven rump-CPP constituencies for the erection of party offices. At the time, I wondered why it had taken Dr. Nduom barely a year before Election 2012 to demonstrate such kindly gesture. I mean, going into Election 2008, wasn’t the man who eventually clinched his party’s nomination for president fully aware of the fact of none of these constituencies woefully lacking local administrative facilities? Or had he, somehow, totally forgotten about the existence of these “orphaned” constituencies in his passionate quest for power as not even to have canvassed for votes in any of these constituencies at all?

Another “crime,” at least in the playbook of the rump-CPP, that the former maverick member of the Kufuor cabinet stands accused of by party General-Secretary Ivor Greenstreet, is that Dr. Nduom has secretively, cynically and conveniently ensconced himself behind calls for an early congress, geared towards the election of the party’s presidential candidate for Election 2012. Generally, such call ought not to occasion or provoke obloquy, except for the apparent fact of the CPP flagbearer for Election 2008 evidently hoping to massively cash in on his ad hoc investments in both the eponymous so-called fact-finding campaign group that he early this year established, and the Santa Clausian gesture of donating building materials to the aforesaid seven rump-CPP constituencies.

Well, it clearly appears that the man was not nicknamed “Mr. Employer” or “Adwuma Wura” for nothing. He may yet be the definitive answer to our newly ill-acquired micro-capitalist culture of “galamsey” (or environmental) degradation. But whether, indeed, the American-trained big-time business baron appreciates the imperative need for him to leave the vulturous garbage dump of Ghanaian politics to “Hausa-Koko” grubs and shameless pimps like Prof. Agyeman-Badu Akosa remains moot.

For me, though, the Nkrumah-Nduom rancor is one that strikingly and eerily recalls the epic betrayal of Dr. Joseph (Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye-Danquah by the schematically suave African Show Boy, some two-odd generations ago. But then, isn’t Chairman Samia Yaba Nkrumah simply an inextricable chip of the proverbial old block?

*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 “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected]. ###