Nana Obiri Boahen is right; Let’s bring back colonial leadership

INTRODUCTION

When one of their own, Pastor Mensa Otabil correctly sees fit to call the great Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah “one of the best generational leaders Africa had,” and listeners from around the world tuned in to the BBC and proclaimed the great Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah “Africa’s Man of the Millennium,” the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and its leadership are calling for the return of” colonial leadership”!

THE STORY

Nana Obiri Boahen, a leading member of the NPP, reportedly made the following Matemeho-era scaremongering comment on radio, NEAT FM’s morning show called “Ghana Montie”:

“We have a long way to go as a country. I weep for Ghana. If that type of mediocre leadership cant’s stop, then I prefer the colonial leadership. Everything is in a mess under this leadership.”

Yes, Nana Obiri Boahen is right that Ghana as a country has a long way to go. This is entirely true because of politicians like him, and we posit his political status on the phrase “like him” because he and those in the opposition NPP are no different from President Mahama and his National Democratic Congress’s colleagues and friends, which is essentially that “all” Ghanaian political animals especially from the two leading political parties are cut from the same cloth.

And yet there is also no need or reason for him to “weep for Ghana” because Ghana is not dead yet. He and the NPP leadership should learn to cry their own cries for their living obituaries, leaving Ghana to mourn itself.

Let the dead bury their own dead!

And the living their own living!

In Ghana, however, the opposite appears to be the case, that of “the dead” politician burying the living citizen of the state!

Of course, opportunistic political animals such as Nana Obiri Boahen are among “the dead” and therefore have nothing to offer the country they are hypocritically weeping for, for they are all also patiently waiting their turns to repeat what President Mahama and the NDC are doing to the country.

President Mahama presents with the so-called “Dead Goat Syndrome,” Nana Obiri Boahen and his likes with “Drapetomanic Bovarism.”

Apparently Ghana’s woeful leadership failure appears to arise, primarily, from these diagnostic labels, not otherwise, for the troubled or disturbed psychologies of these Negro political animals are more likely to gravitate toward an opportunistic and unpatriotic asymptote of the kind of sociological, political, historical and economic analysis Molefi Kete Asante and Ronald Hall advance in their book, “Rooming in The Master’s House: Power and Privilege in the Rise of Black Conservatism.”

Or in Stanley Crouch’s “The Crisis of The Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership.”

But the serious question of President Mahama’s perceived “mediocre leadership,” to borrow Nana Obiri Boahen’s phraseology, was actually not born today.

It directly grew out of the unbroken continuum of the “mediocre leadership” of the Kufuor presidency.

It is more the reason, if even partly, why this dispensation of corruptible cacophony, of moral bankruptcy, and of political unconscionableness makes the Fourth Republic a stagnant brothel at a cul-de-sac.

Lest our view here is not mistaken for something else other than what the statement overtly says, we shall entreat our readers not to misconstrue this stance as an irresponsible instantiation of political equalization.

This is evidently clear from our outright rejection of the indiscriminate use or appropriation of the concept of “political equalization,” to justify every single instance of political evil in the nation, as and when the two major political parties irresponsibly attack or blame each other for mediocre leadership.

In fact, what postcolonial Ghana has had since K.A. Busia in terms of political leadership had always been a “colonial leadership,” a fact that may seem to have escaped the narrow mindset of the ever-weeping colonial apologist, Nana Obiri Boahen.

At a time when a large segment of the people of the United Kingdom (UK) has voted en masse to exit the European Union (EU), on account of the latter’s perceived authoritarian overlordship over Britain, and with the former describing its exit as that which will “go down in history as our independence day,” the likes of Nana Obiri Boahen are shamelessly calling for re-colonization of Ghana as though Busia, one of the criminal ideological forefathers of the NPP, did not turn the hard-won independence of Ghana over to the colonial masters after the February 1966 Western-backed coup d’état.

Nana Obiri Boahen is a latter-day reincarnation of the colonial stooges from K.A. Busia and J.B. Danquah to Obetsebi-Lamptey…all of whom were known political terrorists and nihilists and Benedict-Arnold-like fifth columnists, an extremely dangerous cast of backward-thinking men that fought so hard to reverse the great Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s well-executed agitations for independence in the hope that the then-Gold Coast be turned over to colonial Britain.

Ironically, Busia did not turn Ghana over to colonial Britain when he assumed the reins of power.

This single move betrayed his diabolical intentions and cast a pall on his credibility as a reliable proponent of political morality.

When they are not in power then either they or the colonial masters, or both, must be in power.

This stinking nostalgia makes no practical sense as the NPP and the NDC are “colonial” in political, economic and ideological outlook…says the lyrical pointedness of Fela Kuti’s “Colonial Mentality”!

And here is what the likes of Nana Obiri Boahen need to know:

“If the mountain won’t go to Muhammad then Muhammad must go to the mountain.”

Put “colonial leadership” in the stead of “mountain” and the likes of Nana Obiri Boahen in the stead of “Muhammad.”

In other words, the likes of Nana Obiri Boahen and the NPP can reach back in time and embrace colonial authoritarianism or pack their belongings and head to the metropolis, Great Britain, for they can equally enjoy “colonial leadership” in London too as taxi drivers, morticians, home nurse aids, watchmen and doormen, even as lawyers, teachers, professors, doctors, nurses, and so on.

It is ironically understandable why Kufuor’s government tolerated the corruption of Adam and Eve under his “colonial leadership,” which unpatriotic buffoons such as Nana Obiri Boahen never saw anything wrong with, even while Kufuor spread his political ethnocentrism across the country.


FINAL THOUGHTS

Let us ask Nana Obiri Boahen: Are Akufo-Addo, Sammy Awuku…and the NPP not already under the “colonial leadership” of the International Democrat Union (IDU), a right-wing international organization funded by the UK-based Westminster Foundation for Democracy?

Is the NPP democratic?

There is no doubt in our minds that the NPP always wants to take the easy way out, including not embarking on a door-to-door grassroots campaign to win the hearts and minds of the masses with a convincing message that the leadership of the NPP can do a better job than the “colonial leadership” they are in love with and clamoring for, rather than choosing to appear on radio and television to spew garbage, political lies, etc., and to dabble in armchair and ivory-tower pontifications about “colonial leadership.”

Is Nana Obiri Boahen going to ask the British to apologize for deporting Prempeh and his immediate family to the Seychelles?

Or ask the British to return all the gold and diamond they stole from the Gold Coast to Ghana?
Why do the likes of Nana Obiri Boahen not want Apartheid instead?

And if indeed they truly want “colonial leadership” back in Ghana as they always claim, why then will Nana Obiri Boahen’s bofrot-face brother, Kofi Juma call the British High Commissioner to Ghana, Jon Benjamin, the representative face of “colonial leadership,” “a fool”?

Have they not been calling President Mahama “a fool” too?

How does Nana Obiri Boahen expect “a fool” such as Jon Benjamin to rule Ghana?

Is Nana Obiri Boahen suffering from Colonial Couvade Syndrome?

Where will NPP be if there were “colonial leadership” in Ghana?

What will be Nana Obiri Boahen’s role in this hypothetical system?

Unfortunately, the likes of Nana Obiri Boahen, what Malcolm X called “the house Negro” are those who are destroying Africa and negating human intelligence.

How sad and how dare the media offer these “house Negros” platforms to spew garbage!
No wonder!

Ghanaian politics has become so cheap that any Chipmunk-looking Negro politician can open his mouth wide and throw up fecal matter!

Finally, if Ghana and Africa want true, genuine, conscionable and patriotic leadership it certainly should not be anything like the unconscionable, bloodthirsty, wicked, nihilistic, uncaring “colonial leadership” which did more harm than good to the African body, soul and psyche.

In other words, the colonial enterprise and Nana Obiri Boahen’s “colonial leadership” were fundamentally about the uninhibited rape and plunder of the African mind, body and soul as well as of the African future and its vast natural wealth, all of which exist today in the unbroken continuum of post-colonial African leadership.

Neither should be of the type we normally associate with the NPP and the NDC and the likes of Nana Obiri Boahen. Of course the African appears to be his own enemy, we dare add.

Significantly, the pheromonic nostalgia of the NPP and its partisan forebear, the United Party (UP), for colonialism and “colonial leadership” is extremely astonishing, to say the least, given that their policy push for this strain of political leadership is not a metaphoric desire but a fundamentally literal one. For if we may also add, Nana Obiri Boahen is a man of unambiguous literalness, apparently not an influential public figure of circumlocutory metaphor as some may see it.

Nevertheless, we also need to learn from Walter Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”!

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

At a time when we should be thinking of colonizing the West and bringing back the wealth it stole from Africa (and those it helped and continues to help African kleptocrats hide in its banks) to develop the continent, we are rather mischievously plotting to bring back the same bloodsucking “colonial leadership” to deepen the woes and the many conundrums of Ghana’s (and Africa’s) underdevelopment via its [the West’s] uninhibited rape and plunder of our vast wealth.

Are the NPP and the NDC not giving us enough of this “colonial leadership”? What is the point of importing “colonial leadership” when we have it in abundance for export?

Ghana and Africa do not need re-colonization as a matter of fact.

Ghana and Africa are colonialism in and of themselves…by and large. And the Ghanaian leadership is addicted to it.

“Colonial leadership” is all the more the postcolonial psychology of African politics…exclusive of the political worlds of Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, Malcolm X, Fela Kuti and Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, Ama Mazama, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Molefi Kete Asante, Walter Rodney…

Namely, colonialism is the oxygen sustaining African leadership; it is the energy powering the African sun; it is the African deity of Eurocentrism.

Colonialism is simply a useful idiot. And a useful idiot is what Nana Obiri Boahen and the Ghanaian leadership…represented by the NPP and the NDC…in fact are, in addition to the fact that whether it is of the NPP or the NDC, the Ghanaian leadership is a destructive, toxic colonial clone.

This is why we still have the Kotoka International Airport, rather than the Kwame Nkrumah International Airport, say, with the former providing ample arrival and departure opportunities for the colonial mindset, the colonial apologist, and narcotic drug traffickers…:

“None but ourselves can free our minds.”

So Bob Marley…Marcus Garvey…seh!

Nana Obiri Boahen is a colonial monster! His uncontrollable frustration is also his undoing!

REFERENCES

Ghanaweb. “Colonial Rule Better Than Mahama’s Mediocre Leadership…Obiri Boahen.” June 23, 2016.

Ghanaweb. “UK Votes To Leave EU In Referendum.” June 24, 2016.