President Hilla Limann Was Not An Nkrumaist

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

On June 16, 2010, the leading privately-owned Ghanaian radio station JoyFm published a brief news item on its website captioned “Name A Monument After Limann, PNC Asks Government” (See MyJoyOnline.com). The contents of the article itself were laden with such elementary errors as Dr. Hilla Limann having supposedly led a political party called People’s National Convention to victory in 1979.
Of course, in 1979 no political party existed in Ghana called the People’s National Convention. The three major parties represented in the Ghanaian parliament then (and there were actually about 11 of them) were the Nkrumah-leaning People’s National Party (PNP), which then-Candidate Hilla Limann led to a landslide victory against the Busia-leaning Popular Front Party (PFP), which was led by Mr. Victor Owusu. In reality, both the latter party and the United National Convention (UNC), led by Mr. William (Paa Willie) Ofori-Atta, a member of the celebrated “Bix Six,” which would form a short-lived coalition government with the PNP, belonged to what has widely come to be known as the Danquah-Busia Tradition and, most recently, the Danquah-Dombo-Busia Tradition of unrelenting assault on the one-party dictatorship officially inaugurated on the African continent by Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, postcolonial Ghana’s first premier.
More significantly, however, the Danquah-Dombo-Busia Tradition seeks to healthily grow and entrench the progressive rule of constitutional democracy and a market economy.
At any rate, it was actually in 1992, with the emergence of Ghana’s Fourth Republic, after a protracted 11 years of virtual military dictatorship led by Flt.-Lt. Jeremiah John Rawlings and his pseudo-civilian Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), that Dr. Hilla Limann (1934-1998) formed his People’s National Convention (PNC) with the primary objective of wresting usurped legitimate power from Mr. Rawlings. Unfortunately, it soon became clear to the mild-mannered and erudite University of Paris-trained political scientist that he had woefully underestimated the extent of his popularity among a systematically spooked and successfully disoriented and grossly mis-educated Ghanaian electorate. In sum, during the little over a decade period that he forcibly assumed the reins of governance, for the second time, Flt.-Lt. Rawlings had, through the methodical application of raw terror, sheer demagoguery and Soviet-style propaganda, deftly disguised by populism, of course, thoroughly maligned and irreparably demolished the hard-earned reputation of Dr. Limann and his People’s National Party as “unarguably, the most corrupt, disgraceful and incompetent government in the history of Ghana.”
Logically and predictably, therefore, the astute and veteran Ghanaian diplomat would quietly recede into the margins of our national political culture, almost as if he had never been born or even existed.
What the afore-referenced news item woefully failed to highlight, by the way, is the stark fact that while, indeed, Dr. Hilla (Babini – his original name at birth) Limann had been remarkably influenced by President Nkrumah and his pro-Soviet and pseudo-socialist Convention People’s Party, a veritable neo-fascist political juggernaut, as also had legions of unsuspecting Ghanaian youths, nonetheless, by the time of his assumption of the reins of governance in 1979, the Sissala-West native was a thoroughgoing “economic moderate” and an ardent advocate of democratic political culture with a decidedly market-economy orientation.
Indeed, shortly after his accession to the presidency, Dr. Limann would issue a call for official deregulation of trade and commerce: “Let (market prices) find their own levels.” He also would spiritedly argue out the latter in a nationwide simulcast, an obvious reference to trade liberalization sagaciously dictated by the fundamental economic law of demand and supply. In this sense, therefore, Dr. Limann could more aptly be described as AN IDEOLOGICAL DANQUAHIST AND A SLOGANEERING NKRUMAIST. Indeed, about the only salient tenet that he shared with Ghana’s first elected premier was the age-old ideology of Pan-Africanism. But even on the latter score, as Prof. S. K. B. Asante, a leading Danquah scholar, recently pointed out during a public lecture (if this author accurately recalls), Pan-Africanism as a practical political enterprise may arguably have been inaugurated with the election of Dr. Danquah as the first president of the seminal London-based West African Students’ Union (WASU). About two decades later, the future President Nkrumah would appropriate the vehicular apparatus of WASU to launch his historic, if also melodramatic, continental African political career.
Legend also has it, and this writer stands to be promptly corrected, of course, that Dr. Limann had originally decided to cast his political fortunes with the Danquah-Busia Tradition in 1979 when he was accidentally and abruptly drawn into the top hierarchy of the Nkrumah-leaning People’s National Party by the key founder of the PNP, Alhaji Imoru Egala, who also happened to be a brother-in-law of our 1969 constitutional commission member.
What all the preceding points to, needless to say, is the incontrovertible fact of there being absolutely no question regarding the imperative need to naming a national landmark or memorial monument after Ghana’s sole Third-Republican president. But whether anything substantive or meaningful can be achieved by slanderously wondering, as Mr. Bernard Mornah of the People’s National Convention recently did, by comparing former President Limann to Dr. J. B. Danquah, the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics, is anybody’s good guess. Needless to say, Dr. Danquah stands as a pioneer in modern Ghanaian history in a way that not even Mr. Kwame Nkrumah could approach. And the latter himself uncomfortably recognized this indisputable fact. Mr. Mornah also listed the names of Messrs. Emmanuel Obetstebi-Lamptey and E. K. Kotoka, both of whom, like Dr. Danquah, are pioneers and/or pathfinders in modern Ghanaian history in ways that make Dr. Limann readily pale into relative insignificance.
At any rate, Mr. Mornah’s call for the institutionalization of Dr. Limann quaintly reminded me of a fusillade of personal abuse that this author, ironically, sustained from a quite recognizable member of the New Patriotic Party. In the self-righteous estimation of my assailant, of course, I had committed the at once felonious and sacrilegious crime of FAMILIAL APOTHEOSIS by poignantly and aptly referring to Ghana’s flagship academy, the University of Ghana, as THE DANQUAH ACADEMY. Needless to say, Danquah’s singular contribution to Legon’s foundation and systematic (curricular) development is a matter of public record. What is even more pathetic is that my critic seems to be a diehard AMERICOPHILIAC who incessantly peppers his quite considerable corpus of write-ups with the canonical thoughts of such political immortals as John F. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, James Earl “Jimmy” Carter and Ronald Reagan, among a legion of others.
In other words, my obliquely alluded critic is a man who has spent a remarkable span of his adult life here in the United States and ought to know far more and better about the great cultural significance of naming national landmarks and monuments after our national heroes. It is almost as if to say, or even imply, that the most appropriate means of preserving our collective national memory for both our own personal sanity and self-definition, as well as the salutary enlightenment and edification of posterity, is to pretend as if these illustrious nation-builders and thinkers never existed! Or it may simply be that in the poetic imagination of the “friendly critic,” as in “friendly fire,” the University of Ghana is too significant and precious a national monument to be named after a “Kyebi Mafioso.”

*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 21 books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: [email protected].
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