Ghana Needs Responsible And Creative Leadership

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

I don't know why Mr. Sekou Nkrumah seems to believe that the most pressing need for the country presently is "strong leadership" (See Radioxyzonline.com/Ghanaweb.com 11/12/13). I question the younger Mr. Nkrumah's observation, because the example that he gives, of former President Jeremiah John Rawlings, is rather flimsy, a striking case in point that the Mahama critic himself promptly acknowledges.

For example, Mr. Nkrumah significantly observes that out of the nineteen-and-a-half years that Mr. Rawlings occupied the country's seat of governance, the former Ghana Airforce's flight-lieutenant could only be said to have creditably acquitted himself in only two of those protracted years. What the critic, in essence, is implying is that for seventeen years, Mr. Rawlings was practically as bad a leader as his personally groomed and obliquely minted successors, namely, Messrs. John Dramani Mahama and John Evans Atta-Mills, before the former.

Mr. Nkrumah has also had occasion to lambaste Vice-President Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur for abjectly bankrupt leadership skills. And so one is left wondering if, indeed, there are any persons of worthwhile leadership qualities left among the top echelons of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC). If there is any iota of credibility in the observations of the half-Egyptian Mr. Nkrumah, then the most logical question to ask is as follows: Why does the son of Ghana's first president continue to truck with the roguish and rascally NDC operatives and apparatchiks?

And, of course, the most logical answers appear to be that either the critic is mentally unbalanced or he is simply a political cynic who prefers to characteristically truck with those with access to power and pelf. We make this observation because in the lead-up to Election 2012, when it became glaringly apparent that Nana Akufo-Addo, the presidential candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), was headed for a landslide victory, Mr. Sekou Nkrumah literally switched horses by publicly declaring his support for the dauphin of former President Edward Akufo-Addo. Once the latter's fortunes went awry, Mr. Nkrumah quickly rounded up his heels, made for the exit door and insisted, to absolutely no one's surprise, that he had always been a bona fide NDC member in both principle and practice.

The younger Mr. Nkrumah has also invariably maintained that ideologically speaking, the Rawlings-minted National Democratic Congress is the one major Ghanaian political organization that most closely reflects the ideals and aspirations of the old Convention People's Party (CPP). But as of whether the political ledger of the original CPP bears laudable scrutiny has yet to be credibly and publicly articulated by the younger Mr. Nkrumah. In the past, the critic has rather maturely and pragmatically observed that his father's long-defunct political organization has long outlived its usefulness, and that the old CPP died a natural death with the demise of its notoriously dictatorial and extortionate founder.

What peeves me quite a bit, though, is the younger Mr. Nkrumah's apparent insistence, against the glaring facts of historical reality and common sense, in equating the so-called National Democratic Congress with the Democratic Republic of Ghana itself, thus his obviously crass confusion of the poor leadership of the NDC with the general lack of responsible leadership in the country at large.

On one significant score, however, I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Sekou Nkrumah; and it is on the ineluctably embarrassing fact that except for an insignificantly brief moment or two, Ghana has not been blessed with any enviable crop of progressive leadership, Sekou Nkrumah's own father included, of course.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Nov. 22, 2013
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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