Danquah’s Democratic Legacy Has Outlived Nkrumah’s One-Party Dictatorship!

Fact: Danquah’s Democratic Legacy Has Outlived Nkrumah’s One-Party Dictatorship!

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

Tomorrow (9/21/09) marks the non-birth birthday of Ghana’s first postcolonial prime minister and subsequently self-styled life-president, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah. Had he lived, the putative African Show Boy would have been celebrating his 100th birthday anniversary. Actually, he would not have been celebrating his authentic birthday anniversary because, as he clearly acknowledged in his autobiography, nobody in Nkrumah’s family appears to have kept any account of the day on which he was born; and so perhaps out of wistful envy of his colleagues, sheer embarrassment or fad, the Show Boy, ever a preeminent fabricator, decided to invent one for himself. Indeed, as one clear-headed writer observed recently, Sept. 21, 1909 fell neither on a Friday, the real day on which Mr. Nkrumah was born, nor on a Saturday, the adopted “birthday” of our “centenarian.”

But that Ghana’s seminal tyrant and unbested dictator should be celebrated on the faux-centenary anniversary of his birth – some historical accounts claim that he had been born a little earlier than his official date of birth or a year or two later – is quite ironic, in view of what we know of the reality of postcolonial Ghanaian history. For by the eve of his overthrow, on February 24, 1966, even some who had staunchly supported him had begun to wonder whether it was at all sound for the British colonial administrators to have been “rushed” out of the country, in view of the rank corruption and the complete abrogation of civil rights, particularly those of his ideological opponents, that epitomized the main fare of the so-called Convention People’s Party (CPP).

Instead, Nkrumah would die painfully of a gnawing cancer, largely induced by his chain-smoking of tobacco, it has been alleged in some circles; he would die at 63, a globally disgraced dictator and a broken man in a Bucharest hospital in the eastern European country of Romania, barely six years after he had auspiciously driven himself into a Guinean exile, by his own unpardonable misdeeds, amidst a spontaneous outburst of jubilation and popular pageantry on the streets of the Ghanaian capital of Accra and the entire countryside or rural enclaves, just about the same sensation that his overthrow had been greeted with. That was on April 27, 1972. Like newly manumitted plantation slaves, however, by the time of his death, some Ghanaians, as well as other Africans and foreigners, who had benefited immensely from his profligate mismanagement of the country’s economy had begun to feel nostalgic of the late tyrant and even rue his overthrow altogether. The latter group appeared to prefer the erratic stewardship of the proverbial devil they had come to know to the hitherto unknown angel who had assumed their reins of governance.

Indeed, as this author observed earlier in another article, for several weeks after his overthrow, in February 1966, Ghanaians of all walks of life had jubilated and hailed their Christian almighty God, among other deities, for having opportunely rescued them from the untold hardship and tyranny brought upon them by a smooth-talking charlatanic son of the soul, who seemed to have oppressed them even far more than the “odious and arrogant” British colonialists, to whose unwanted presence then-Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah had attributed most of the woes of his countrymen and women.

As so in a really grave sense, it wasn’t quite clear precisely what he meant when Ghana’s Vice-President John Dramani Mahama recently told a durbar of the chiefs and people of Nkrumah’s Nzema homeland, in the south-western enclave of the country, that Nkrumah’s “legacy has outlived and outshined all his peers” (“Nkrumah’s Legacies [sic] Outlived His Peers – Veep” Ghanaweb.com 9/19/09). It wasn’t clear because Kwame Nkrumah was neither the contemporary, in the strictest sense of the term, nor the peer of the immortalized Dr. Joseph (Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye-Danquah, the man to whom the Show Boy is routinely compared on both political and ideological grounds. Still, the fact that Danquah was clearly ahead of both his time and his protégé (i.e. Kwame Nkrumah), is clearly evinced by the salubrious triumph of democratic governance over a one-party dictatorship, as zealously advocated by the Show Boy and was recently, respectively, affirmed and condemned by President Barack H. Obama.

And so clearly, Mr. Mahama must have been alluding to the other four members of the “Big Six,” those leading members of the erstwhile United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) who were arrested and summarily charged with sedition, in 1948, for supposedly agitating the masses of Gold Coasters against British colonial imperialism. The other four members of the “Big Six” were, of course, Mr. Ebenezer Ako-Adjei, the man whose allegedly singular instrumentality brought a hitherto virtually unknown Kwame Nkrumah into catastrophic contact with the Doyen of Gold Coast politics and the mainstream of modern Ghanaian political culture; and Messrs. Edward Akufo-Addo, Emmanuel O. Obetsebi-Lamptey and Eugene Aaron William (Paa Willie) Ofori-Atta.

Rather curiously, to illustrate his vacuous assertion about Nkrumah’s legacy having both “outlived” and “outshined” his peers, President Atta-Mills’ sidekick chose all the wrong examples, such as the Akosombo dam and the Show Boy’s policy of free education for all Ghanaian children of school-going age. The problem with the foregoing examples is that neither of them has an original ideational proponent or architect called Kwame Nkrumah. And as this author has had ample occasion to point out, amidst desperate and vacuous charges of historiographical “modification” and outright “falsification,” largely by Nkrumah fanatics and other woefully misguided sympathizers, the ideational conception of the Akosombo dam is the incontrovertible brainchild of a British colonial geologist called Sir Albert Kitson (1868-1937). Indeed, the construction of the Tema Harbor, as well as the modern township after which the latter takes its name, is also the indisputable ideational conception of Sir Albert Kitson; and likewise the Bui dam, whose recent sod-cutting was undertaken by former President John Agyekum Kufuor.

It is also interesting and significant to highlight the fact that the futuristic policy of free education as an integral plank of Ghana’s national development agenda, initially appears in the Working Papers of the Danquah-led Gold Coast Youth Conference, long before Mr. Nkrumah’s appearance among the executive ranks of the UGCC and his subsequent appointment as general-secretary of the first modern political party of the erstwhile Gold Coast. The preceding would be given further boost when in 1948, the executive/steering committee of the UGCC broached the need for the establishment of alternative high schools for dismissed student supporters of the Nii Kwabena Bonnie-led riotous boycott of European merchants and traders. The schools, later designated as Ghana National Colleges, would be mendaciously claimed by the Show Boy as his own singular initiative. This, as well as a myriad other crafty incidents of Nkrumaist theft, would prompt Mr. George Alfred (Paa) Grant to bitterly lament that “That Youngman has stolen all our plans,” in the wake of Nkrumah’s flagrantly devious and opportunistic breakaway from the UGCC (See Dennis Austin’s Politics in Ghana: 1946-1960).

Our well-researched and soberly considered contention here is that yes, Nkrumah may well have his own unique legacy, such as doggedly and adamantly pursuing a dictatorial policy of one-party governance that lent legitimate ammunition to the Apartheid South African government’s contention regarding the indigenous African being congenitally incapable of forging a democratic political culture, the Akosombo and Bui dams, as well as the salutary policy of free education are, however, unquestionably none of such legacy.

In any case, on the question of American financing of the entire Volta River Project/Scheme, Mr. Komla Agbeli Gbedemah had a far more significant role and credit than the Soviet-leaning and rabidly anti-American Kwame Nkrumah. And yes, we unreservedly concur with Vice-President Mahama that the Akosombo dam supplies more than 50-percent of Ghana’s energy needs. We, however, envisage such abjectly tendentious argument also to be one that is a patently vacuous ratiocinative abstraction. For the real question to ask is not the amount or percentage of hydro-electric power supplied the country by Akosombo, but rather the reliability of such power supply to Ghana’s industrial development, measured against other more productive and efficient alternatives such as proposed by the likes of Messrs. K. A. Busia and Ofori-Atta at the time of the legislative debates concerning the construction of Akosombo, eighty-percent of whose energy output fed the Kaiser aluminum smelter at Tema.

*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 also a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI), the pro-democracy think tank, and the author of 20 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected]. ###