Chiefs Ask for Return Of Nkrumah's Body

THE ROYAL family, chiefs and people of Nkroful, in the Western Region, have demanded the immediate and unconditional exhumation of the mortal remains of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana for re-burial at Nkroful, his hometown.

A spokesmen for the family, Mr. Francis Baidoo, who announced this at a news conference in Takoradi yesterday, said the demand was in consonance with the lifetime wishes of Osagyefo that he must be buried at his home town when he died.

Francis Baidoo who was flanked by Nana Bruma Twum IV, chief of Nkroful and a host of other chiefs said the request was based on this wish of Nkrumah that President Sekou Toure of Guinea, reluctantly released the body of Nkrumah who was first buried in Guinea for his eventual re-burial at Nkroful, after the family had petitioned Col. I. K. Acheampong, then head of state to help secure the release the body.

According to him, the body was taken away from the chiefs at Nkroful by armed soldiers sent to the place by the then PNDC government at night, without the prior notice of the family.

Giving the background, the spokesmen said some time in 1990, a group of armed soldiers came to Nkroful.

A delegation, which was led by Ben Fordjuor, an Nzema who once worked with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, persuaded the chiefs to allow the body to be taken away for proper attention, be cause the device that had been fixed in the Nkroful mausoleum to resist decomposition had for sometime not been functioning.

According to him, though the youth of the town resisted the delegation, they were eventually scared off by the heavy arms wielded by the soldiers and so they allowed them to take the body away.

Nana and his elders heeded to the government's plea that a new mausoleum was going to be built in accra.

All efforts made to inspect the body to know how authentic the rumours were before its internment, proved futile.

All that the government said was that, the body needed to be buried in Accra because Nkroful was too small to contain such a man of global stature. All citizens of Nkroful and Nzema were enraged.

According to him, though the youth of the town rejected the delegation they were scared off by the heavy arms. They persisted in their request for the body from the government, even up to the last days of Rawlings' rule but all Sto no avail.

During the presidential and parliamentary elections of year 2000, the leader of the NPP and now the national president, Mr. John Agyekum Kufuor, visited Nkroful and made a public promise that if the people of Nkroful would vote for him and he eventually won, he would be in a position to make Nkroful the capital of Nzema East and transfer the mortal remains of Nkrumah to the town.

The records are there to show, "we voted massively for him and even sent him a congratulatory message," they asserted.