On Akufo-Addo's "Old" Age, Sekou Nkrumah Is No God

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
August 26, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]

Sekou Nkrumah's observation of doubt about the ability of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to effectively govern Ghana, on grounds of old age, ought to be accorded the immitigable abject contempt that it deserves (See " 'Old' Akufo-Addo Cannot Lead Ghana - Sekou" Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 8/26/14). What is significant here, though, is the fact that the son of Ghana's first president is not calling the mental acuity and/or intellectual puissance of Ghana's former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice into question.

Sekou's own father, President Kwame Nkrumah, died at 63 years old a woefully dejected man in Ahmed Sekou Toure's Guinea. That was, of course, how the younger Mr. Nkrumah came by his first name. But what is relevant here to discuss is that long before his auspicious overthrow, many of the closest associates of the Nkroful native had observed signs of creeping dementia in the legendary African Show Boy. At least one distinguished African head-of-state, President Leopold Sedar Senghor, had seriously questioned the sanity and intellectual acuity of President Nkrumah (See Mahoney's JFK: An African Ordeal).

It may just well be that it is his own late father's psychological hang-ups and relatively shorter lifespan that Mr. Nkrumah is trying to gratuitously project onto the personality profile of Nana Akufo-Addo. You see, Nana Akufo-Addo and President Nkrumah were born one generation apart; and that makes a heck of a lot of difference. The public healthcare system, at least here in the West, has dramatically improved. That was not the case on April 27, 1972, when President Nkrumah, reportedly, died of what has been controversially characterized as lung cancer in a Bucharest, Romania, hospital.

Of course, the healthcare situation in Ghana now may actually be far worse than it was during the late sixties and early seventies. I can testify to the latter observation with authority and confidence, because I spent most of my childhood at landmark hospitals like Korle-Bu, Legon, Kyebi, Komfo Anokye and Agogo. Fortunately, however, like most Ghanaian politicians of his class and stature, Nana Akufo-Addo has the privilege of access to some of the best healthcare facilities abroad. And I am also quite certain that unlike most of his predecessors, Nana Akufo-Addo has healthcare development as one of his topmost priorities, should he become privileged enough to serve as President of Ghana. Akufo-Addo's own maternal grandfather, Nana Sir Osagyefo Ofori-Atta I (aka Kwaku Duah) - (1880-1943) was instrumental to the establishment of the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital and Achimota College.

But that age is a bogus and an extraneous and a distractive argumentative war being fiercely, albeit vacuously, waged by both the inveterate political opponents of Nana Akufo-Addo, on the one hand, and the former Foreign Minister's ideological opponents, on the other hand, is evidenced by the grossly incompetent leadership of the Mahama/Amissah-Arthur-led government of the National Democratic Congress. And Mr. Nkrumah must be well aware of the vapid hollowness of his argument, thus his rather disingenuous likening of Nana Akufo-Addo to the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, almost as if the latter were the former's identical twin brother.

And just why would Sekou Nkrumah have Ghanaians believe that Nana Akufo-Addo is, somehow, destined to live and die in much the same way and manner as President Atta-Mills? Well, there is an old Convention People's Party (CPP) slogan that sought to immortalize the African Show Boy by blasphemously apotheosizing the latter. It runs as follows: "NKRUMAH NEVER DIES!" That may very well be the case. At least in the clinically warped and addled imagination of the Nkrumacrats. Still, Sekou Nkrumah is not God. And that is the factual reality.

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