Prof KA Busia, a legitimate key founder of Ghana – Frema Busia claims

A former Prime Minister of Ghana from 1969 to 1972, Kofi Abrefa Busia, has been described as a legitimate key founder of Ghana, and also the victorious universal symbol of democracy and African intellect and political thought in concrete form.

According to his daughter Nana Frema Busia, her father was the only idyllic African who played the role of a forecaster and conceptual architect of not just Ghana but African independence and beyond.

In a long article captioned “The Danquah versus Nkrumah unreconciled feud; a Ghana problem” Frema indicated that her father stood for the pride of Africa, taught Africa to the world and announced Africa’s readiness for a negotiated colonial exit that did not leave Africa uprooted from its democratic source, as part of the essential processes leading to Ghana's independence on March 6, 1957.

She said in advocating and sanitizing Europe about Dr Nkrumah’s famous "The Black man is capable of managing his own affairs", Prof Busia, on the other hand, stated, “The wisdom of our ancestors lay in their ability to devise political institutions which reconciled sectional interests. Multi interest representation was a fundamental principle of our traditional political institutions…The case for monolithic one-party rule cannot be based in our tradition. It should be noted that the traditional systems provided alternatives from which to choose, and heads, whether of families or tribes or chiefdoms, could be changed by those whom they represented. If we care to learn from our past, we shall find pointers to the solution of our contemporary problems of government, central as well as local. We had foundations for a democratic system of government.”

She added that Prof Busia during the inauguration of the United Party (UP) stated, “It is our firm resolve to resist these dictatorial tendencies and to unite for the achievement of sound democracy and social harmony in Ghana not only for the happiness and freedom of the citizens of Ghana, but also in order to aid the fulfillment of the aspirations of those colonial peoples in Africa and elsewhere who look to the success of Parliamentary government in Ghana for the early achievement of their own democracy”.

Nana Frema Busia reiterated further that under her visionary father, democratic rule was a ripened matter.

She also explained that the challenge of preparatory independence for the continent as an intellectual antidote to the incredulity of Western thoughtlessness of ingrained inferiority of the “Black” man who should be ruled vanished from his horizon.

“Prof Busia's principal focus was not 'When will independence be achieved?' Achieving independence was a foregone conclusion in a Gold Coast African majority parliament under the Burns constitution. Prof Busia's cardinal issue and matter of principled intervention was democratic rule. The African democratic welfare ideology he had presented to Europe was affronted by the Dr. Nkrumah dogma of one-party socialism,” she stressed.

She also averred that Prof Busia was a rare Political Academic who believed, lived and espoused the philosophy and ethics of African democracy from the outset of his academic career by purposeful designation and divine orientation as an exemplary dignified humble public servant.

Read Nana Frema Busia's full article below