A “Republican Holiday”: What is that?

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

I have firmly maintained for quite sometime now that not only do Ghanaians observe too many statutory – or state-mandated – public holidays, but even more significantly that most of these holidays, beyond a well-needed occasional respite, have absolutely no relevance for our cultural history as a progress-loving people. To be certain, this slew of holidays may well be contributing to the extremely slow pace of our collective sense of urgency vis-à-vis our national development agenda. It likely may also be costing us hugely in human resource underdevelopment. In sum, anytime that the government declares a national holiday, a blanket work stoppage occurs whose tab the nation, at large, is obligated to foot.

In other words, national holidays are paid vacations. What the foregoing, therefore, means is that anytime that the government declares a public holiday, our leaders ought to ensure that such day as is marked down the calendar as “labor-free” has cultural, material and psychological significance for Ghanaian citizens at large.

One statutory holiday allowed Ghanaians since 1960 is that which is called “Republic Day.” It occurs on July 1 every year; and as its name implies, it marks the day on which Ghanaians, supposedly, voted in a referendum to have a constitutionally elected “Executive Presidency.” But that “Republic Day” is absolutely of no practical significance, whatsoever, is evinced by the fact that before then-Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah declared July 1, 1960 as Ghana’s “Republican Year,” the country was run as a parliamentary democracy along the lines of the Westminster regime as originally established by Britain, Ghana’s erstwhile colonial overlord.

Under Westminster parliamentary democracy the Prime Minister, who is the legally elected Head of Government, is constitutionally mandated to regularly render stewardship account to the electorate through their parliamentary representatives. In Britain, and other traditional parliamentary democracies, such account is rendered by the weekly appearance of the Prime Minister before the august House of Parliament. It is during this time that issues of national moment, such as adequate funding for education, healthcare, housing and agriculture, among a plethora of others, are discussed, with the Prime Minister being called upon to answer questions at length and in detail. In a practical sense, therefore, such sessions – called “The Prime Minister’s Questions” in Britain, I believe – are akin to a “Town-Hall Meeting” on a national scale.

By declaring Ghana to be a “Republic” with an Executive Presidential System, it was primarily this kind of regular and intimate process of managerial accountability that then-Prime Minister Nkrumah sought to avoid. For an Executive Presidential System also means that not only is the President not obligated to render weekly – or a fairly regular – account of his/her stewardship to Parliament and, by extension, the people at large, the President also assumes “full executive powers,” which means that s/he is not obligated to consult with Parliament, or the Legislative arm of the government, in order to take such significant decisions as the declaration of war against another sovereign state as well as order, by decree, the arbitrary detention of citizens – invariably arch-political rivals – deemed to pose a formidable threat to either the official status or personality of the President and the ruling party.

In Ghana, this is exactly what occurred in 1960 and even a little earlier. Faced with a formidable political opposition that would not sit duck – or idly by – while he unilaterally transformed Ghana into a Soviet-style socialist economy and government, then-Prime Minister Nkrumah envisaged his official re-designation as an Executive President to adequately afford him the necessary clout to crush his opponents, in order to be able to systematically re-design Ghana’s hitherto market economy in his Marxist-oriented image.

What is also significant to recall here for the benefit of our readers, especially those too young to have fully equipped themselves with relevant knowledge of the events of this difficult moment in our beloved country’s history, is that by the time that then-Prime Minister Nkrumah called for a referendum on the “Republican Question,” his most formidable political opponent, Dr. Kofi Abrefa Busia, the parliamentary minority leader, being seriously threatened with Preventive Detention (or indefinite detention without trial), had been run out of the country into exile in Europe. It thus squarely fell on Dr. Joseph Boakye-Danquah, the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics and former mentor of Mr. Kwame Nkrumah who, hitherto had been in effective retirement from active politics since 1954, to put up a spirited, albeit a practically doomed challenge, against the increasingly megalomaniacal incumbent. Dr. Danquah would, predictably, end up detained without trial on the purely trumped up charge of being engaged in unorthodox activities that rendered him a national security risk. A second detention order in 1964, on a similar trumped-up charge, would witness the deliberately-induced demise of Dr. Danquah on February 4, 1965, in the Condemned Cell Block of the Nsawam Medium-Security Prison.

In the main, then-Prime Minister Nkrumah had mischievously cited Ghana’s continuous attachment to British colonial imperialism as his pretext for the switch to an executive presidential system, for as a member of the British Commonwealth of ex-colonials, under the Westminster parliamentary democracy, Queen Elizabeth II remained Ghana’s ceremonial Head of State, with a resident Governor-General (a virtual passive monitor) representing Her Majesty’s government in Ghana. In reality, nothing fundamentally changed about “Republican” Ghana’s relationship with the erstwhile imperial powers and the West in general, since Ghana’s inherited rudimentary and decidedly peripheral economic status virtually guaranteed that neither Soviet imperialism, to which influence Nkrumah heavily leaned, nor that of the West, would profoundly alter Ghana’s vulnerable economic status – as a primary commodity or cash-crop producer – in any meaningful way.

Recently, quite a remarkable number of perplexed Ghanaian intellectuals have publicly wondered why Ghana’s economy is not as technologically advanced and efficient as that of South Korea, a country that had the same level of economic development as Ghana’s in 1957, when our country reasserted its sovereignty from British colonial rule. Needless to say, the answer lies somewhere between President Kwame Nkrumah and his successors, particularly the post-1972 military juntas that may aptly and indiscriminately be characterized as being composed largely of “gustatory perambulators.” Indeed, it is this painful knowledge of Nkrumah’s “republican gimmickry” that likely motivated former President John Agyekum-Kufuor to, allegedly, make a fairly regular habit of skipping town on the eve of July 1 during his 8-year tenure.

Finally, a regular contributor to the “Features” column of Ghanaweb.com, writing under the caption of “The Re-Writing of Ghana’s History,” recently had occasion to accuse me, absolutely without any provocation, whatsoever, of imperiously presuming to deliberately and cavalierly distort what the critic termed as the “real” or “true” history of Ghana. I hope I haven’t flagrantly “re-written” Mr. Yaw Opare-Asamoa’s version of the “True History of Ghana.” Or have I?

*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 the author of 20 books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005) and a Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI), a progressive policy-shaping think-tank. E-mail: [email protected]. ###