Reconcilliation For What?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Feb. 4, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]

During the Half-Century Commemoration of the Prison Assassination of Dr. Joseph (Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye-Danquah by President Kwame Nkrumah, the presidential candidate of Ghana's main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) called for the reconcilliation of political forces aligned behind the Danquah-Busia-Dombo Tradition and the Nkrumah-led Convention People's Party (CPP) - (See "We Have Forgiven You - Akufo-Addo Tells Nkrumah's Family" MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 2/5/15).

This call, while incontestably noble and even statemanly is, nevertheless, rather paradoxical and premature. Indeed, if there is any dire need for reconcilliation between any two major political forces and/or camps in Fourth-Republican Ghana, it ought to be first and foremost between the Kufuor-Kyerematen faction, on the one hand, and the Adu-Boahen/Akufo-Addo faction of the New Patriotic Party, on the other. Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom's opportunistic and resume-gilting trucking with the Kufuor-led government of the New Partiotic Party, and the mischievous role played by the Edina native during the 2008 presidential election, fully convinces me that any relationship between the rump-Convention People's Party and the NPP ought to be purely intellectual and discursive, nothing serious or practical.

The apparent unification of the NPP, as attested by the Tamale and the party's national congressional primaries last year notwithstanding, even as I write tonight, there is a serious internecine battle raging within Ghana's largest political party which, if not carefully and deftly handled, could well prove to be more deleterious than the seemingly perpetual acrimony between the rough-and-tumble Nkrumacrats and the urbane and patrician democratic forces aligned behind the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics.

I can, indeed, envisage the Nkrumacrats and the Danquah-Busia-Dombo Traditionalists coming to some sort of agreement and/or understanding over the need to foreground and prioritize Ghana as the primary objective and focus of our collective national development agenda. Still, like it or hate it, we need to frontally face up to the fact that until the diehard Nkrumacrats come to the necessary realization that both the anti-colonial and postcolonial struggles and achievements of Ghana are not the sole and especial or uniquely copyrighted and/or patented preserve of any individual personality, and that the historical reconfiguration of modern Ghana as the proverbial lodestar of continental Africa and the global African community, is the veritable and bona fide handicraft of each and every individual participant of these collective struggles, achievements and experiences, there can be no meaningful talk about reconcilliation.

At any rate, it is not clear to me whether Nana Akufo-Addo has been in any personal discussions with any prominent and/or representative members of the Nkrumah family recently, who have categorically expressed any heartfelt guilt or qualm over the untold atrocities perpetrated by their infamous patriarch against Dr. Danquah, the latter's immediate family and political and ideological associates. But, of course, the fact of the matter is that nobody can unilaterally and so pontifically manufacture and magnanimously dole out the time-honored gesture of forgiveness in the manner widely attributed by Ghana's former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice by the national media.

You see, I have personally been subjected to a hurricane of abuse and unutterable malediction by some fanatical Nkrumacrats, including my former academic advisors who have used Talibanized proxies to Jihadistically cause my ambuscation, for simply writing extensively and truthfully on the politics and patriotic citizenship and scholarship of Dr. Danquah. I also find some of the recent inadvertent attempts to vitiate the unimpeachable courage of Dr. Danquah, via the unguarded, if also contextually unedited, publication of some of his prison letters to the latter's former protege and arch-nemesis, the then-Life-President Nkrumah, in a rather facile bid to courting the general sympathy of Ghanaians, to be rather tawdry and even demeaning.

Yes, Dr. Danquah was incurably human with his own fair share of foibles; still, when I think of Nana Kwame Kyeretwie Boakye-Danquah, even as the authoritative British political scientist and scholar Dennis Austin once noted with charming eloquence and great admiration, I think of a man who unreservedly stood up to gross injustice under the Stygian reign-of-terror that was the regime of the so-called Convention People's Party and valiantly paid the ultimate price for the same.

This is the Dr. Danquah that I want to remember, and not the sort of pathetically pasty and morbidly vulnerable and inexcusably immured and savagely humiliated in his 6-by-9-foot condemned-cell coop, and forced to live the indescribably ignoble and primitive and brutal existence of an irredeemable criminal at the Nsawam Medium-Security Prison and then, upon his systematically and deliberately induced demise, decreed to be interred and memorialized like a thug.

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