Samia, Your Father Left Sawdust In Our Mouths!

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

In a recent interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) at Dzodze, in the Volta Region, Ms. Samia Nkrumah, a daughter of former President Kwame Nkrumah and newly-elected chairperson of the rump-Convention People’s Party (CPP), reportedly lamented the steadily “dwindling fortunes” of her tautologically named party (See “Samia Disappointed By Low Support For CPP” MyJoyOnline.com 10/3/11). I have said this before and here again repeat the same: and it is the incontrovertible fact that the CPP has yet to regain even half of the appeal that it had mustered under Mr. Kwame Nkrumah. I have also highlighted the fact that his one-party cult-of-personality is highly unlikely to capture the imagination of an extremely enlightened and cosmopolitan Ghanaian electorate in the global age of the Internet.

The fact that the African Show Boy had no deputy, but a variable three-man presidential council that deputized for him anytime that Mr. Nkrumah left the country for foreign engagements, significantly underscores a very psychologically insecure personality that brooked no possibility for the salutary grooming of a confident and trusted deputy who could readily replace THE SUPREME COMMANDER. This largely explains precisely why since February 24, 1966, the followers of “The Osagyefo” have been having an extremely difficult time in uniting fellow travelers under a single political banner. And despite the expedient and opportunistic election of the Show Boy’s half-Arab daughter as the face of the rump-CPP, there are no signs that the self-centered bickering among those who would be named the avatar of Mr. Kantamanto are ready to subdue their egos in order for a consensual/consensus leader to emerge around whom to rally the splintered claimants to the Nkrumaist legacy.

On a more intimate and personal level, as I have had the opportunity to learn from quite a remarkable number of Nkrumah partisans, the fact that Ms. Nkrumah does not even passably speak any major Ghanaian language, may well be an electoral drawback for an increasingly nationalistic Ghanaian citizenry. It is also true, even as Ms. Nkrumah has herself observed, that her late father had “ushered Ghana into independence with a strong economic foundation.”

On the latter score, however, what is often not adequately emphasized and ought to be repeatedly highlighted, is the fact that the preceding observation is only half of the entire narrative. The historical reality painfully points to the fact that Nkrumah’s vaulting pan-Africanist ambitions dictated capriciously, albeit paradoxically predictably, that the first Ghanaian leader in the postcolonial era would profligately dissipate our limited national resources in short order. On the latter score, we know from Mr. Jonathan (H.) Frimpong-Ansah, deputy-governor of the Bank of Ghana from 1965 to 1968, that by 1961, Ghana’s national treasury was totally bankrupt. It clearly and tragically appears that in all his advanced studies abroad, largely here in the United States, notwithstanding, Mr. Nkrumah had unwisely allowed his flamboyant political rhetoric and personal ambitions to pathetically and unduly dwarf his resource-management skills.

He would end up stampeding his own Finance Minister, Mr. Komla Agbeli Gbedemah, the man who had staunchly held the fort for the “Osagyefo” while the latter was in prison, over “Afro-Gbede’s” indubitably wise counsel and critical carping of the Supreme Commander over the latter’s financial profligacy. To the mainstream of Ghanaian society, however, Afro-Gbede would be accused of grand larceny of the national treasury and shady dealings with the ideological and political opposition.

Anyway, those of us who have a remarkable knowledge of the modern Ghanaian electoral landscape, are well aware of the fact that Ms. Nkrumah’s choice of Dzodze as a venue in which to lament the steadily dwindling fortunes of her party, was grossly misplaced. For it is an open secret that throughout his 15-year tenure, Mr. Nkrumah and his Convention People’s Party never garnered more than a tenth – or 10-percent – of the Volta ballot. Thus it must have come across as nothing short of the utterly comedic for Ms. Nkrumah to have implied that the CPP was in any way, whatsoever, highly regarded by the residents of Antor-Ayeke’s erstwhile Trans-Volta Togoland stronghold.

In essence, this is what Mr. Nkrumah’s daughter is reported to have opined to the people of Dzodze: “Who would not be disturbed when an entity you so cherished loses its vim and glory?” Maybe those of us who know a little better than those jaded and pimping sexagenarian “professorial” opportunists who championed her chairmanship, had better let on to Ms. Samia Yaba Nkrumah, that the pseudo-socialist and effete pro-Moscow copycat of a “lofty seven-year’s development plan” lacks the kind of imaginative traction demanded by a progressive, twenty-first century Ghanaian electorate.

Besides, these days, the constitutionally stipulated and mandated governance term is four years; and the current Ghanaian national temperament is too sophisticated, jealously democratic and simply too impatient to suffer any mischievous hints of creeping dictatorship. In short, the Ghanaian people have a bounden obligation to admonish the Libyan people not to shed too many tears for a fallen dictator and an impenitent tyrant. It does not matter whether that dictator or political monster professed pan-Africanism.

*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 Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@Optimum.net. ###