What role did your father play, Mr. Yammin?

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

What does the Arab-looking Mr. Joseph Yammin, and his phenotypical mien is contextually significant to underscore here, mean by his rather outrageous claim that President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, during his 60th Independence Anniversary speech, attempted to destroy the legacy of President Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first postcolonial leader, in favor of the legacy of his own father and those of his “political ancestors”? (See “ ‘Akufo-Addo Distorted History to Favor His Father’ – Yammin” Abusuafmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 3/9/17).

The scandal-wracked former Deputy Sports Minister would be better off telling the rest of the nation what his own father and his relatives, if he has any in Ghana, contributed to country’s liberation struggle against British colonial imperialism. He should also tell Ghanaians what President Akufo-Addo detailed in his speech on March 6, 2017 about his “political ancestors,” namely, Messrs. J. B. Danquah, William “Paa Willie” Ofori-Atta, Edward Akufo-Addo, Ebenezer Ako-Adjei and Emmanuel Obetsebi-Lamptey, that scandalously upended the factual reality of the narrative of Ghana’s anti-colonial liberation struggle, in particular where such factual detailing either conflicted with or flagrantly diminished the role and contribution of the future Prime Minister and later President Nkrumah.

The real blame here belongs to Messrs. John Evans Atta-Mills, late, and John Dramani Mahama who provided this uncouth political waif with the clearly undeserved political platform to be able to brazenly presume to play within the league of his ideological superiors. The fact of the matter is that it is rather fanatical Nkrumacrats like Mr. Yammin, and the rest of his faux-socialist hoodlum pack, who have criminally distorted the history of the country to the damnable extent of making it seem as if Ghanaians had absolutely no sense of dignity and the need to vigorously and jealously fight off British colonial rule, until the rather belated arrival of a hitherto London-stranded Mr. Kwame Nkrumah.

Needless to say, the fact of the architectural authorship of Ghana’s independence being collectively owned is well beyond debate. In other words, it is only congenital liars and political charlatans like Mr. Yammin who can comfortably espouse the patently puerile myth of Mr. Nkrumah’s being the sole or principal architect of Ghana’s liberation struggle. We must also highlight the fact that the human rights record of the Nkrumah-led regime of the Convention People’s Party (CPP) is one that morally makes British colonial rule seem like the most auspicious modern political system ever experienced by Ghanaians old enough to remember and to be able to make the relevant comparisons between the two eras.

Personally, I would have dated modern Ghana’s independence struggle from the 1860s with the founding of the Fante Confederacy, and not necessarily from 1897, the foundational year of the Aborigines Rights Protection Society (ARPS), singularly and fervidly championed by the erudite and immortalized Mr. John Mensah-Sarbah (or Sabaah), which effectively guaranteed that, unlike South Africa, indigenous Ghanaian landed property would not be “Bantustanized” or statutorily alienated and expropriated by the British colonial regime’s operatives.

By: Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs