Nkrumah, Nkrumaism, Nkrumaists and Nkrumacracy. Part One

By Dr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo
On this occasion of our Republic Day, it is necessary to pay homage to the theology of the personage who gave us the day we can never define or the independence we can never explain….the one and only show boy who misled us in order to glorify himself; so here goes…….
Nkrumaism is the suspension of one’s analytical reasoning for the cultic worship of Kwame Nkrumah in the belief that he never dies or does no wrong. It is also the wholesale inheritance of Nkrumah’s friends (if any) as heroes and the scathing criticism of his real or imaginary enemies.
Within this ideology, the elements of Nkrumah’s dictatorship: his imprisonment without trial, his self -aggrandizement, his one-party state and his life presidency all constitute a catechism of faith which must be defended on the fake grounds of opposition treason and passionately extolled by blatant lies or by reference to similar evils elsewhere. His disastrous economic policies which left a rich nation on its knees is seen as a great model, and his character as an ingrate is deemed worthy of emulation.
To the Nkrumaists, unanswerable questions are made simpler by postures of diversion and deviation or simple distractions or gratuitous insults. And the most straightforward questions are resolved by the statement that Osagyefo Dr. J.B. Danquah was a CIA agent, or that Nkrumah was voted Africa’s man of the millennium; or that some persons somewhere praised him somehow, or that similar evils existed and were accepted elsewhere; or that all those against Nkrumah are treasonous “Mate Me Ho” nation wreckers and their descendants. There is not a single question the Nkrumaists answer by dwelling on the salient issue of Nkrumah’s arran dictatorship.
No doubt, Nkrumah is the poison ivy of the African leadership conundrum, and even its economic and educational failures. Having been extensively trained in the USA and in the UK, he returned to Africa without any intention to replicate the democratic dispensation in those western civilizations, but rather to exploit the existing leadership culture of tyranny for the purpose of his own perpetual self- aggrandizement. Thus he appropriated for himself the title of the Osagyefo hitherto reserved for chieftains, and conferred upon himself the permanency of traditional rule while abjuring its concomitant accountability. He also had a crier sing his appellations and describe his feats in super-human terms at functions. He abolished free speech and hence suppressed criticism of his flaws and instituted for himself some kind of one party state within which dissent became anathema in Ghana’s political context. Meanwhile, he broached no competition from these traditional rulers, once threatening that he would make them run, leaving their sandals behind. In this, Nkrumah behaved as an absolute monarch with the divine right to misrule, and called his version of theocracy our republic, thus showing his total ignorance of what a republic really means..
As the poison ivy of the African leadership template, Nkrumah’s leadership became an example for many African tyrants who oppressed their people. And his overthrow was also an adumbration to the many military coups in Africa that brought to power the likes of Iddi Amin, Emperor Bokasa, Siad Barre, Yayah Jammeh and Eyadema. At present his greatest minion and student is Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe who intends to rule for life. As a pioneer in the African leadership experiment, he led in the abolition of the basic freedoms of the citizenry and trampled on their independence. He abolished the pluralistic democratic dispensation, the habeas corpus, freedom of the press, freedom of creative entertainment, the freedom of association and the freedom of the franchise, destroying the pride and dignity of the people to have a choice in their leadership, and subjecting them to a reign of terror hitherto unknown in the Ghanaian civil leadership.

Under these severe indictments, what do people mean by the scientific ideas of Nkrumah or his notion of the African personality? What science is found in emplacing one's effigy on the common currency and splashing one's images and statues on the streets? What is the science in imprisonment without trial, or declaration of life presidency or the imposition of a one party state? What is the science in the dismissal of the Supreme Court judges? And when people speak of Nkrumaism as the embodiment of Nkrumah's ideas, exactly what do they mean? Exactly what does it mean to have an African personality? Is it the unalloyed worship of that immortal? Is it the uncritical acceptance of his attempt to impose the template of his leadership under a United Africa; or his disastrous economic policy that led a rich country bankrupt; or his waywardness in neglecting the affairs of the state in pursuit of some unfathomable albeit grandiose international prestige? The Nkrumaists must clearly explain this Nkrumacracy, the so-called science within the Nkrumaist philosophy, or forever remain silent..

Now all of a sudden, the death of Lee Kuan Yew provided the Nkrumaists with an impressionistic hero by which to measure Nkrumah's misbehavior. To the Nkrumaists, this is their version of scientific thinking, that they will narrowly strike a similarity in Yew and Nkrumah’ s dictatorships, gleaning the former's success and imputing it as a certain possibility under some futuristic, albeit phantasmagorical, Nkrumah leadership. They take no account of the fact that by 1966, the economy of Ghana had already hit reverse gear, and that Nkrumah and Yew were already headed in opposite directions: Nkrumah leaning toward communism while Yew remained a capitalist; Nkrumah hitting a slippery slope while Yew vaults to economic heights. But this concocted analogy between Nkrumah and Yew is what scientific reasoning looks like to the lost tribes of the Nkrumaists…to those intellectual eunuchs, ass heads, cuckolds and somnambulists.
Now I dare say that if Nkrumah lived today, he would have shown remorse for his evil deeds and converted, like Buhari, to a true democrat to shame his followers. But this reality will not dawn on the Nkrumaists whose idea of progress is shriveled in the daily praise of a dead and buried dictator. And this type of ardent incapacity to hear no wrong, see no wrong and say nothing wrong about Nkrumah lies at the corner of their own unscientific thinking. They cannot even put a working definition of a dictator and find that Nkrumah perfectly fits in. What else can they do?

And that is why I say that if all that Nkrumah did was to be a brutal dictator, our citizens would have lived past it by this time, because we are in Danquah’s democracy, and Nkrumah’s legacy of dictatorship is permanently consigned to the dustbin of history, never to be retrieved. But Nkrumah went beyond his dictatorship to destroy the minds of the people to accept tyranny as liberty, and propaganda as gospel truth, and revisionism as good history, and long after his death, our most educated citizens remain self-doubt and full of inferiority complex, with their minds obnubilated by his fiction, and the truth is not something they can see, speak or hear. That is why the future of our country is bleak.

But our hope is now widespread insofar as the notions perpetuated by Nkrumah have been effectively abolished. Nigeria has taken the lead in showing us the glowing beauty of the democratic dispensation, and Ghana is also an example in true freedom and justice. Our constitution is brimming with a bill of right that guarantees the habeas corpus, the sovereignty of the people and their franchise, the freedom of speech and association, and the independence of the judiciary. In the coming years, Africa's respect in the world will be quantified by how closely the continent follows the democratic footprints of Osagyefo Dr. J. B. Danquah, and how far it shuns the evil ideology of Nkrumah’s dictatorship, i.e the Preventive Detention Act (PDA) one party state, a life presidency and the splattering of a dictator’s imagery on our currency, our streets and civil institutions. And within the context of the new democratic dispensation, anachronistic rant like that spewed here by these ardent Nkrumaists will surely find its way to the dung heap of history, to be cited as a true example of the morbid reasoning and incoherent ideation of the psychotic Nkrumaists.
Indeed, for a person flaunting his scholarship to Africa and the world, Nkrumah was the alter-ego of several characters in fictional narratives or tragic drama. In the first place, Nkrumah was pretty much like Kurtz, the character in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” who set out to civilize the natives of Congo only to find himself sucked into the depths of their savage culture. The only difference is that Kwame Nkrumah was a Black man. Nkrumah was the Great Leader in Ayi Kwei Armah’s “The beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born”, under whose watch fecal corruption festered, and whose overthrow created catatonic joy among the masses of our people. Nkrumah was also Kongi, in Nobel Laureate Soyinka’s “Kongi’s Harvest”, the arrant dictator whose lust to subjugate traditional authority misled him to perform unthinkable rituals.
In spite of Nkrumah’s evil deeds against Ghana, he left a bunch of militant followers who know how to criticize even Jesus Christ except Nkrumah himself. These lobotomes follow a poisonous ideology in whose context Nkrumah does no wrong and never dies, and within which his ardent followers strain at the gnats of Nkrumah's perceived enemies and leave the log on Nkrumah's eye-balls intact. But, in general, the Nkrumaist position is doomed ab initio: they must defend the terroristic rule of an arrant tyrant and a blatant traitor...his imprisonment without trial, his declaration of one party state, his conferment of the power to overrule court judgments, his declaration of life presidency....

Even for an attorney professionally trained to defend both sides of an argument, I pity the awkward and contradictory position of the Nkrumaists. I really don't know of any leader that incarcerated both his foes and allies alike like Nkrumah, or went all out on a suicide mission to fatally doom his own presidency as Nkrumah did. And if any other leader committed one percent of Nkrumah's evil deeds, his followers would be up in arms against that person. Remember how they profusely cite the injustices under Busia and Kufuor's regimes to cast them as non-democrats and to justify Nkrumah's cruelty to Ghanaians?
But their position regarding Nkrumah is understandable because they were indoctrinated to imbibe the propaganda that Nkrumah does no wrong, and that Nkrumah never dies. Fortunately for all of us, these people who are old and decrepit will soon die off with their shibboleth. But you and I, the younger generation, have a duty to dissect the truth, and let it guide our actions. We must confess that PDA was wrong, that life presidency was wrong, that dismissal of judges was wrong, that betraying friends who helped you was wrong, that indoctrinating children to snitch on their parents was wrong, that putting your effigy on a currency was wrong, that destooling chiefs and appropriating their titles was wrong.....If we don't do this, my greatest fear is that somebody else will find a "good excuse" to abolish our freedoms and hard-earned rights, citing Nkrumah as a glowing example. Remember that Rawlings has done it before; and that is why Kola has aptly stated how so similar J.J. is to Nkrumah.....

For them to be taken seriously, the Nkrumaists must confess all Nkrumah's evil deeds here, or else make a fool of themselves by defending them. In the end, that is how they can gain redemption.This is because the typical Ghanaian's crippled intellectual ability, gullibility and vulnerability and lack of confidence and creativity all descend from Nkrumah's heritage which indoctrinated us in early childhood and made us receptacles to fakery and bad doctrines and took away from us the ability to ask questions and analyze incisively. So when the Ghanaian is deceived by the fake pastors and political leaders or shamans and witchdoctors and online scammers, the source of his child-like faith and acceptance of all imposture is traceable to his young pioneer days, when the end all and be all of his life is to subject his intellect to the worship of a conceptual idol, and to praise and serve him for life.

This is the time to free ourselves from the psychological shackles imposed on our minds by the great impostor, and to analyze and criticize and scrutinize these old assumptions which the great deceiver has implanted in our genes, making it impossible for us to decipher the good from the bad, the ugly and the evil. And Nkrumaist devil worshippers, satanists, their agents, assigns, ideologues, praise singers, young pioneers, action troopers and hangers-on will be condemned to the darkest catacombs of political Erebus, from whence their ideological screeching will become akin to the whimpering of Cereberus, the mighty dog of Hades when tamed by Heracles. And when all these come to pass, sensible men will find better pastime for their talents, instead of spewing what is evolving here to be a trash heap the size of Mount Everest.

There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person."
--Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu1
"The accumulation of all power, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands...may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
--James Madison, Federalist 46

Samuel Adjei Sarfo, Doctor of Jurisprudence, is a general legal practitioner in Austin, Texas, USA. You may email him at [email protected]