Ghana is Hopelessly Aligned, Mr. Agbee

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Jan. 13, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP) regime was widely known to be staunchly aligned ideologically with the erstwhile Soviet Union, Communist China and Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia and the so-called Eastern-Bloc Countries, especially during the turbulent period in which Ghana was declared a one-party state with Kwame Nkrumah at its sole and life-president. And so I don’t know what Mr. David Agbee, the so-called security expert, means when he asserts that Ghana’s foreign policy since 1957 has uninterruptedly been one of non-alignment either to the West or to the East. I, too, am very familiar with the tired Nkrumah quote that runs as follows: “We neither face East nor West; we face forward” (See “ ‘Mahama Erred in Disclosing Location of Ex-Gitmo Detainees’” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 1/3/16).

Then also, the curriculum of the so-called Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute (KNII), at Winneba, now the campus of the University of Education, which yours truly’s own late father attended, on a brief party-scheduled course (the Oldman was the patron of the Young Pioneer Movement in the Sekyere District of Asante-Mampong – as well as Campaign Manager for District Commissioner J. C. Akosa), was not known to have been designed by professors from Harvard or one of the Oxbridge academies. It was thoroughgoing socialistic in thrust and orientation, with the central curricula swath, or plank, being something narcissistically called “Nkrumaism.” Likewise, the overwhelming majority of the lecturers and professors were personally hired and/or recommended to the institution’s head, Mr. Joe Adisson, or some such personality, by King Kwame Nkrumah, “The Osagyefo,” the eponymous institutional founder himself.

To be certain, it was largely out of desperation, mainly borne out of the studied unwillingness or the practical inability of the Eastern-bloc chieftains and dictators, after whose political and ideological crafts he had blindly fashioned his country and himself, to fund his relatively massive capital-intensive projects, such as Akosombo and the Tema industrial township, Sir Albert Kitson’s brainchildren, to be certain, that forced the proverbial Show Boy to wistfully turn to the West, even as he paradoxically and unapologetically and prolifically penned several pontifical book-length polemics and reams of articles and position papers virulently lambasting the “Western Imperialists.” By the way, Mr. Agbee, isn’t it rather curious that Nkrumah never published a single article focused on the treacherous relationship between Ghana or Africa and Eastern Imperialism?

It would be only the Busia-led short-lived Progress Party (PP) and the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) that would studiously and pragmatically, as well as foresightedly, pursue a salutary market-oriented democratic political engagement with the West, even while also constructively forging cordial diplomatic relations with the East. Limann and his Nkrumah-leaning People’s National Party (PNP) would dither somewhere in-between the two global ideological poles, perhaps a little closer to the more financially forthcoming or magnanimous West. And here also, I am thinking about President Limann’s U.S.-predetermined 1980 refusal to allow Ghana to participate in the Moscow-hosted Olympic Games.

Of course, the London and Paris-trained Dr. Limann had, shortly upon his assumption of the democratic reins of governance, made it crystal clear that he was far less interested in either of the bipolar ideological camps than the massive and rapid infrastructural development of his country. “My ideology is Ghana,” Dr. Limann had quipped in a memorable interview with the editor of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana-owned and operated Christian Messenger bi-weekly newspaper, Mr. G. B. K. Owusu, if memory serves yours truly accurately. We must also credit the short-lived Limann-led People’s National Party for being the first postcolonial Ghanaian government to seriously prospect for oil off the coast of Saltpond, in the Central Region. On this front, it was a Canada-based oil company called AGRIPETCO.

Presently, the Mahama-led and Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress (NDC) is widely known to be unabashedly faux-socialist in orientation. Its political praxis of “create, loot and share,” however, is another matter altogether, particularly as of whether its key operatives actually are in the productive business of creating any form of national wealth, short of their inordinate penchant for foreign borrowing, particularly and ironically from the Euro currency zone and unconscionably divvying them up among its top-echelon operatives.

For the avoidance of any doubt, vis-à-vis the thoroughgoing Eastern-alignment of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress, we recall the legion international socialist-oriented confabs regularly attended by General-Secretary Johnson Asiedu-Nketia and his associates and minions from party headquarters, even as the same group has been conspicuously absent from participation in democratic liberalist ones. Also the oil-industry policies of the Mahama government have been known to be heavily skewed in favor of the East, particularly Beijing.

Indeed, not too long ago, for instance, Mr. Asiedu-Nketia and several of the NDC stalwarts paid a “working visit” to China’s capital which was widely publicized by the Ghanaian media, at the end of which visit the NDC scribe, so-called, reportedly initialed a “technical agreement” with his Chinese counterparts aimed at having the latter establish an Nkrumah-like ideological institute at Kasoa, Greater-Accra Region, for the schooling of youthful party apparatchiks.

Interestingly, though, while he may, indeed, be direly bereft of “common sense,” as Bishop Osei-Bonsu recently put it, vis-à-vis the backdoor importation of some two former Guantanamo-incarcerated Al-Qaeda- and Taliban-affiliated terrorists into the country, (the Americans who apprehended and imprisoned them for 14 years without trial would have no trucking with them within their vast territorial boundaries), nevertheless, I strongly believe that President Mahama practiced savvy politics when he publicly alerted the media to the fact, I hope, that these terrorism suspects, that is, Messrs. Bin Atef, 36, and Al-Dhuby, 34, were being hosted by some national security operatives and thus were being closely monitored around the clock.

Well, I don’t know what kind of “security expert” Mr. Agbee is to think that assuaging the anxiety of Ghanaians by the President’s poignantly assuring them that, indeed, they were far removed from harm’s way was, somehow, “a major breach of [national] security.” It goes without saying that Ghanaians have an inviolable right to know the whereabouts of these potential epic trouble makers within our territorial space.

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