Legon Should Be Renamed After J. B. Danquah

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

I cannot but unreservedly congratulate former President John Agyekum-Kufuor, for having his edifying proposal for the establishment of the leadership and governance center approved by the governance council of the country’s flagship academy, the University of Ghana, Legon (See “Legon Okays Kufuor Center” MyJoyOnline.com 8/22/11).

I also hasten to add the fact that I had earlier on helped in editing the blueprints for both the Kufuor and Aliu Mahama foundations. Then also, in the wake of him being named co-recipient of the Hunger Prize, I staunchly defended the Danquah-Busia-Dombo Traditionalist’s alienable right to using his monetary prize for any project that the Oxford University alumnus deemed appropriate, including his own personal use.

What is curious, though, is the shameful refusal and/or abject failure of the University of Ghana Council to seriously consider naming the flagship academy, whose founding is owed in no small measure to the immortalized and putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics, Dr. Joseph (Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye Danquah, after the latter.

To-date, no significant monument, other than the rough-hewn statue located on the minor rotary – or roundabout – bearing his name somewhere in the Osu district of Accra recalls the memory of Dr. Danquah. Even President Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first postcolonial premier whom Dr. Danquah mentored and introduced into the mainstream of Ghanaian politics, and who already has the erstwhile University of Science and Technology named after him, also has a major institutional landmark on the campus of the University of Ghana named for him.

The most relevant and logical question, therefore, becomes: Precisely what crime did Dr. J. B. Danquah, the indefatigable spearhead behind the development of Association Football (or soccer), COCOBOD, the Tetteh Quarshie Memorial Hospital and even the constitutions leading the erstwhile Gold Coast to independence as Ghana, commit and/or perpetrate against the august republic that he so much loved and fervidly dedicated the bulk of his adult life to?

Interestingly, as President of Ghana, Mr. Kufuor even had occasion to laudably suggest that were Ghanaians a people known to be healthily oriented towards a non-ideological veneration of our heroes, “J. B.” would since long have been beatified as the Patron Saint of Ghana. What is even more curious is that other leaders, including many who recognized in the man the nonesuch qualities of a seminal and pioneering nation-builder, have already been recognized by the Governing Council of Ghana’s flagship academy.

Are we, therefore, to aptly understand from the University of Ghana’s governance council that in the estimation of its membership, the man Joseph Boakye-Danquah was just a marginal fluke in the history of the very academy whose seminal establishment he singularly facilitated?

Needless to say, the rest of the world is watching, knowing that our fledgling, albeit robust, Fourth-Republican democratic culture owes far more to the life efforts of Dr. Danquah than any other individual Ghanaian; and so far, to be true to ourselves, the sight of the scenery being displayed by our leaders is insufferably ugly!

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