Nkrumah Was Not A Nice Man

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

I have, so far, resisted weighing in on the revived Kulungugu Debate currently raging in the country because as many of my readers are well aware, I have written extensively on the subject. Even Senegal's President Leopold Sedar Senghor thought Nkrumah was a cognitive basket case (See Mahoney's JFK: Ordeal In Africa). You may also want to google this writer's name in cross-reference with that of Ghana's first president in order to fully appreciate what he is talking about. Presently, I am also reading what Mr. Basil Davidson, the celebrated British Africanist and a respected authority on Kwame Nkrumah, had to say on the latter and, predictably, on all the critical points, there is not much to gloat over, much less to be proud of.

At any rate, anybody who has read Maj.-Gen. Ocran's account of the 1966 landmark putsch that auspiciously ousted the Founding-Father of Modern Continental African Dictatorship, is well aware of the fact that the munitions used in the Kulungugu assassination attempt (I prefer to call it "a suicide attempt") were not Molotov Cocktail. They came from the arsenal of the Ghana Armed Forces; Gen. Ocran is a credible witness because he worked in the Flagstaff House office of President Nkrumah as one of the most trusted military advisers to the Ghanaian leader. Furthermore, it was only President Nkrumah and his henchmen (and women) who had access to such sensitive national security facility.

To-date, none of his fanatical disciples have been able to forensically trace the flower-bomb (or bomb-planted bouquet) to any of Nkrumah's most formidable political opponents and/or sworn enemies. What is more, of the five criminal suspects arrested on the ground, as it were - namely, Messrs. Tawiah-Adamafio, Ebenezer Ako-Adjei, Kofi Crabbe, Yaw Manu and Robert Otchere - a whopping 60-percent, or three, were high-ranking Convention People's Party (CPP) operatives. In fact, two of the suspects were substantive cabinet appointees.

Thus the cynical idea, largely on the part of Mr. Kwaku Baako and his ilk, that just because the three Supreme Court judges who sat on the case acquitted Messrs. Adamafio, Ako-Adjei and Kofi Crabbe, all of them top CPP operatives, means that only Messrs. Yaw Manu and Robert Otchere were criminally culpable, is inexcusably silly and insulting. For starters, even the target of the alleged assassination attempt, President Kwame Nkrumah, did not agree with Justices Arku Korsah, Van Lare and Akufo-Addo, which was precisely why he summarily fired these fine and erudite gentlemen and reconstituted the Court. Justice Akufo-Addo, according to a reliable informant, would be subsequently recalled to the bench. Nkrumah clearly appears to have had a great fondness and regard for the mind of Justice Akufo-Addo, an Oxbridge-educated scholar of Mathematics and Philosophy. Nkrumah would also order the immediate imprisonment of Messrs. Crabbe, Adamafio and Ako-Adjei, the man who, legend has it, first brought a virtually unknown young Mr. Kwame Nkrumah to the seminal attention of Dr. J. B. Danquah.

At any rate, I don't see how Mr. Baako, whose father was one of Nkrumah's New Guard Disciples, thinks that he has a better appreciation of the history of that turbulent era in Ghanaian politics than Prof. Mike Oquaye, who was old enough to remember and has spent much of his academic life and career researching and publishing on the same. Then also, Mr. Baako needs to read the reaction of Nkrumah bona fides like Dr. Alex Quayson-Sackey and Mr. Krobo Edusei to fully appreciate the serious factional fissures that existed among the top membership of the CPP, and could well have generated a Kulungugu situation.

Maybe Mr. Baako also needs to tell his audience precisely who authored the purported law-journal article he claims to have objectively established the involvement of the leaders of the United Party (UP) in the Kulungugu assassination attempt. About the one surefire fact of the period is that it was President Kwame Nkrumah who singularly - at least that is the opinion of IGP Harlley, see the report of the Inquest into the Death of Dr. J. B. Danquah at Nsawam Medium-Security Prison - orchestrated the prison assassination of the putative Doyen of Ghanaian and Gold Coast Politics.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
August 25, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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