Ghana and Africa: Founder’s Joke

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

The African Union is well within its rights in celebrating September 21 as a special mythmaking event marking the birthday anniversary of Ghana’s first president, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah. However, such a statutory birthday as was declared by President John Evans Atta-Mills is still moot and an edict that needs to be further debated, if this holiday is not to be summarily abrogated in the near future (See “Wednesday 21st Sept. Declared Statutory Public Holiday” Ghanaweb.com 9/19/11).

First of all, ramming such a holiday down the throats of Ghanaians leaves much to be desired, especially in view of the fact that Ghana is a parliamentary democracy in which all matters deemed to be of national significance ought to be debated and decided upon by the elected representatives of the citizenry. In the case of Mr. Nkrumah’s hypothetical birthday anniversary, no such debate ever occurred prior to President Mills’ signing of the same into law.

It is also rather ironic, albeit not altogether without historical relevance, that the African Union would decide on the celebration of Mr. Nkrumah’s birthday in Sirte, the Libyan hometown of Col. Muammar Gaddhafy, the recently ousted dictator of the North-African country of some six million inhabitants. For like Col. Gaddhafy, President Nkrumah was an extortionate dictator and a notorious flouter of the fundamental human rights of the Ghanaian people whose overthrow on February 24, 1966, was widely celebrated across the country by citizens of all shades and stripes, including such key players of the erstwhile Convention People’s Party as Dr. Alexander Quayson Sackey and Mr. Krobo Edusei. And it is not altogether without reason that even today, the mere mention of the name of Mr. Nkrumah is apt to provoke a lot of anger and controversy among those who vividly remember the veritable albatross that Ghana’s first president had become on the eve of his auspicious overthrow by the Kotoka-led National Liberation Council (NLC), allegedly acting with staunch, albeit oblique, backing of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The latter landmark event is absolutely no anomaly at all since, as already pointed out time and again in earlier writings by this author, there is credible forensic evidence that Mr. Nkrumah had himself collaborated with the CIA in both the ousting and assassination of Togo’s President Sylvanus Olympio. It is also an open secret that the grandstanding and tough-talking Ghanaian leader had also collaborated with key political operatives in Kenya in several attempts at the overthrow of President Jomo Kenyatta. Nkrumah’s egotistic motives vis-à-vis his proposed summary geopolitical unification of the African continent was also felicitously exposed by Tanzania’s President Julius Nyerere at the Organization of African Unity’s Cairo, Egypt, summit in 1964.

Thus, most levelheaded Ghanaians and Africans, in general, are not the least bit fooled by the quixotic attempt to apotheosize the clinically megalomaniacal “African Show Boy.” Nkrumah himself demonstrated quite a lurid bit of the foregoing in his lifetime by flamboyantly having an image of his profiled head imprinted on Ghana’s monetary currency, the cedi, as well as having his portraits boldly displayed in all public buildings and spaces. But that a constitutional democracy like Ghana should be celebrating a man who indefatigably worked towards the summary abrogation of our fundamental human rights and personal liberties, could not be more insultingly absurd.

It is also insufferably insolent for Mr. Kwabena Akyeampong, the deputy ministerial appointee who issued the edict marking this year’s celebration of the hypothetical birthday of the founder of the tautological Convention People’s Party (CPP), to have rather imperiously opined that, indeed, “Dr. Nkrumah was the [sole] motivating force behind the independence of Ghana from British colonial rule in 1957 and became [Ghana’s] first president.”

Of course, it is an immutable fact that Mr. Nkrumah was the first president of independent Ghana. Nonetheless, it ought to be emphasized, in no uncertain terms, that Nkrumah was absolutely no “motivating force” behind Britain’s granting of self-rule to the erstwhile Gold Coast on March 6, 1957. The latter credit squarely belongs to the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics, Dr. J. B. Danquah, and the other members of the legendary “Big Six,” as well as key operatives and underwriters of the seminal United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) like Mr. Alfred George “Paa” Grant and Mr. Kobina Sekyi, the lambent-witted Cape Coast barrister who mentored Dr. Danquah.

*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 “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: [email protected]. ###