[ 2010-07-26 ]

Sekou must thank Prez Mills for not being Prez Nkrumah
My hectic summer-teaching schedule has prevented
me from promptly weighing in on the absolutely
needless controversy generated in the wake of the
firing of Mr. Sekou Nkrumah by President John
Evans Atta-Mills. And curiously, while some
critics, among them prominent NDC operatives like
Mr. Ekwow Spio-Garbrah, have been
characteristically quick and gratuitous in
upbraiding the President, what none of these
critics either seems capable of confronting or
simply hypocritically prefers to conveniently
ignore are the very fundamental questions of
context and the realities of postcolonial Ghanaian
history.

And so in their misguided bid to positioning
themselves on the right side of history, they
stolidly hope, it seems, fanatical Nkrumacrats
like Mr. Spio-Garbrah have proceeded to rather
unwisely cast President Mills and the younger Mr.
Nkrumah in dialectical terms of “victimizer” and
the “victimized.” In the preceding scenario, quite
predictably, it is Mr. Sekou Nkrumah who is
envisaged as the unsuspecting victim. The fact of
the matter, though, is that both President
Atta-Mills and Mr. Sekou Nkrumah are victims!

The latter is a veritable victim precisely because
the blistering reality of human existence under
the checkered tenure of the Nkrumah-led Convention
People’s Party (CPP) has been criminally and
systematically kept from the Nkrumah children and
Ghanaians who were not old enough to fully
appreciate the dire consequences of even
constructively carping President Nkrumah and his
one-party dictatorial machinery of the CPP. In
such an atmosphere of convenient dishonesty, myth
has been permitted to trump the truth of history,
with the first premier of sovereign Ghana being
mendaciously and deviously and superficially cast
as the “epic liberator” of Ghana and continental
Africa as a whole.

Nonetheless, even as Mr. J. A. Braimah, a staunch
and influential CPP operative, had occasion to
painfully opine in the wake of the summary
imprisonment and the deliberately induced
death/assassination of Dr. J. B. Danquah, it very
well appears as if the British colonial
administration was far more interested in
upholding and preserving the human and civil
rights of their erstwhile Gold Coast colonial
subjects than the Convention People’s Party under
President Kwame Nkrumah (See T. Peter Omari’s
Kwame Nkrumah: The Anatomy of an African
Dictatorship. London: C. Hurst, 1970).

Unfortunately, what Ghanaians have had under the
tenure of President John Evans Atta-Mills is the
curious and fatuously extravagant pageantry of a
year-long centenary birthday anniversary
celebration of the man who invented Preventive
Detention in Black Africa as a means of both
muzzling and cuffing forthright and unpopular
criticism of his one-party dictatorship. If,
indeed, the sole objective for launching a
year-long centenary anniversary celebration of Mr.
Kwame Nkrumah was to make Ghanaians and the rest
of the African world believe that pioneering
African nationalists and civil and human rights
spearheads like Dr. Danquah did absolutely nothing
for Ghanaians and Africans, then, to be certain,
President Mills almost succeeded.

“Almost” succeeded, that is, until the criminally
mis-educated likes of Mr. Sekou Nkrumah frontally
brought it home to “Tarkwa Atta” that the former
University of Ghana law professor is not even fit
to stand under the shadow of the statue of the man
who gave Ghanaians both the infamous “One O’clock
Fever” and the Kwame Nkrumah Concentration Camp
(for the fatal “re-education” of his far more
politically astute mentors and arch-rivals alike)
at Nsawam. As a good friend recently had occasion
to opine, had Mr. Sekou Nkrumah made his utterly
despicable remarks about his political patron
while his father served as Ghana’s
President-for-Life, the announcement of his
commendable dismissal as National Youth
Coordinator in the Ministry of Youth and Sports, a
veritable boondoggle, to be certain, would have
found the younger Mr. Nkrumah languishing and
gasping for breath in the Condemned Cell Block at
Nsawam.

In sum, those cynical Ghanaians hell-bent on
criminally contorting the objective facts of
history in order to advance their selfish
interests had better been warned of what awaits
them. You see, political opportunism among the
ranks of NDC and CPP operatives has dictated the
unconscionable moral white-washing of Mr. Kwame
Nkrumah, the allegedly single-handed inventor of
postcolonial Ghanaian sovereignty. In the process,
naturally, Nkrumah’s children have come to
envisage Ghanaians for the most part, with the
possible significant exception of Dr. Francis
Nkrumah, the late dictator’s dauphin, as bumbling
idiots. Perhaps in the dopey imagination of Mr.
Sekou Nkrumah, ex-President Jeremiah John Rawlings
handily passes the ideal leadership test because
like his own father, Togbui Avaklasu I presided
over the most flagrant abuse of human rights.
Rawlings also believed in a one-man dictatorship,
thus his invariable irritation whenever political
agitators fed up with his gross mismanagement of
the Ghanaian economy called upon the half-Scottish
upstart to hand over the reins of governance.” To
whom?” Mr. Rawlings was often heard to say.

As for Mr. Sekou Nkrumah’s description of Mr.
Rawlings as the best leader, compared to Messrs.
Kufuor and Mills, perhaps somebody ought to remind
the dismissed NDC National Youth Coordinator that
it was, indeed, Togbui Avaklasu Rawlings who both
politically minted and proffered “Tarkwa Atta” to
Ghanaians.


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


*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 the author of 21 books,
including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern
Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail:
okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.

Source - Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe

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