Dr. Amoako-Baah Hails Dr. Danquah

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
March 30, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]

It is a flagrant act of dishonesty when Ghanaians like Prof. Agyeman-Badu Akosa, who ought to know better, are able to look their fellow citizens in the eye and vacuously assert that the country's woes began in the wake of the overthrow of the Nkrumah-led Convention People's Party (CPP) - (See "Ghana's Education Is Almost Useless - Amoako-Baah" MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 3/27/15). This is the kind of curricular "know-nothingness" that KNUST's Dr. Richard Amoako-Baah was alluding to, when during the recent debate between the two prominent public intellectuals, the renowned political scientist poignantly observed that the greatest problem with the country's higher education is its woeful lack of practical organicity.

But what was even more significant was the fact that in castigating the poor quality of Ghanaian education, Dr. Amoako-Baah obliquely appeared to agree with Dr. Joseph (Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye-Danquah that the inordinate fixation of our country's leaders, beginning with President Kwame Nkrumah, with landmarks and other self-glorifying monuments, rather than teaching our youths the more progressive and enduring art of critical and creative thinking was squarely to blame for the country's underdevelopment. On the preceding score ought to be promptly highlighted the fact that as early as the 1950s, Dr. Danquah was carpeting his former political protege for scandalously failing to recognize the fact that the first test of any modern nation's development was "the liberty of the individual."

Danquah had also invoked the evergreen Akan philosophical maxim that privileged humanity over monuments or inanimate matter: "When I call money, money does not respond; when I call baubles [beeds], baubles do not respond. It is human beings that matter above all else." If I recall accurately, the foregoing loosely translated quote is an ancient Akan drum-script. And as the son of an astute and versatile State Drummer, Dr. Danquah was naturally at home and as comfortable with the classical Akan drum-script as any erudite scholar of his epistemic breadth and stature could be.

Indeed, Dr. Amoako-Baah would have been right on target if he had also pointed out the fact that it was criminally unregenerate intellectuals like Prof. Akosa who were to blame for the extremely difficult time that our most progressive leaders are having in moving the country forward. If, indeed, the political climate under President Nkrumah was as ideal and paradisical as Prof. Akosa claims, what explains the more thunderous national celebration of the National Liberation Council's overthrow of the Nkrumah-led CPP than our celebration of the proverbial Show Boy's declaration of Ghana's sovereignty on March 6, 1957?

You see, we are talking about issues of gravity here, not a farcical bout of intellectual masturbation of the kind that Prof. Akosa has become so morbidly known to obstreperously indulge.

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