Nkrumah Shot Danquah, Dumbo!!!

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

It horrifies me to hear Nkrumah fanatics like Mr. Bernard Mornah, of the People’s National Convention (PNC), make a boastful claim about how the neo-Fascist regime of the Convention People’s Party (CPP) was righteous in its virtual enslavement of democracy-loving Ghanaians and murderous prosecution of its ironic cause of continental African unification.

One also wonders why Mr. Mornah has been allowed to live in Ghana and enjoy the full benefits of a democratic political culture to which he and his ideological associates have contributed zilch, even while recklessly, unconscionably, sacrilegiously and incessantly pretending as if the Danquah-imbued democratic dispensation of Ghana’s Fourth Republic was the worst thing that ever happened to our beloved nation (See “Nkrumah Should Have Shot J. B. Danquah” Ghanaweb.com 2/24/11).

On the 45th anniversary of the auspicious overthrow of the “African Show Boy,” the jejune General-Secretary of the so-called People’s National Convention, reportedly, told an Accra television news station that “one of the biggest mistakes that Dr. Kwame Nkrumah made was not shooting Dr. J. B. Danquah and other leaders of the opposition when they raised objections to the way [that] he led the country.”

The most poignant and logical riposte to such hogwash is that, really, Nkrumah led Ghana to nowhere! Today, for example, the much-touted administrative structure of decentralization being doggedly pursued by both the left-leaning National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) was taken hook-line-and-sinker from the playbook of the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and modern Ghanaian politics, and definitely not from Nkrumah’s “Revolutionary Path” or even the shockingly incoherent pseudo-Marxist tract titled “Consciencism.” And to think that there is actually in existence in twenty-first century Ghana, a bunch of wayward and godforsaken souls who think that the best thing that ever happened to Egyptian civilization, since the pyramids and the invention of papyrus, is deposed President Hosni Mubarak, is, to say the least, simply flabbergasting.

Then, again, it is goons and mercenaries like Messrs. Mornah and Kwesi Pratt who are currently crouched inside foxholes in Tripoli fiercely defending the Gaddhafy dictatorship. We only hope that these unconscionable freeloaders and opportunists could half-appreciate the damning implications of their unholy attempt to deny ordinary Libyans the Danquah-minted democratic fruits they so shamelessly relish here in Ghana.

The sad and, perhaps, even wicked reality is that not even Mr. Gamal Gorkeh Nkrumah, the half-Egyptian journalist son of deposed and late President Nkrumah, believes that the three-decade political stranglehold of Mr. Mubarak advanced the collective aspirations of the Egyptian people. Most likely, Mr. Mornah missed the telling interview that the younger Mr. Nkrumah granted an Accra television station, in which he profusely, albeit implicitly, lauded the Danquah-ian spirit of constitutional democracy as the wave of twenty-first century Egypt.

Anyway, Danquah Institute chief Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko could not have been more accurate to speculate about the eerie eruption of an Egyptian-type popular revolt in Ghana, if the “Show Boy” had not been auspiciously accorded the heave-ho on February 24, 1966. For my part, however, I would rather have had Jato Dzelukope chased out of town like the parasitic human-cockroach that he is!

At any rate, to say that Nkrumah made a great mistake of not shooting the man who paid for the “Show Boy’s” return sea passage with money from Danquah’s own wallet, grossly understates the salient facts of Ghanaian history. Actually, about the only mistake that any major Ghanaian statesman made in the heady days of our independence struggle, was to have good-naturedly presumed to lift a cynical and Machiavellian “Verandah Boy” out of the alleyways of a South-London ghetto and attempt to make a Pygmalion –type of Xerox copy out of him.

*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 a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and author of “The Obama Serenades” (Lulu.com, 2011). E-mail: [email protected]. ###