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Opinions of Sunday, 30 December 2018

Columnist: Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

Only a pathological Trokosi charlatan thinks like this

This veritable fraudster cum a charlatan has been making up stories about how the white man is responsible for just about every predicament militating against the progress and development of the post-slavery and postcolonial African, almost as if the latter species of humanity has absolutely no responsibility for his/her own destiny. The irony here, though, is that this fraudster relishes the company of some two white-male scientists who have been feeding him, ad nauseam, with the sort of half-baked poppycock that no self-assured, sensible and progressive African has the temporal luxury for.

You see, long before Ebola and Aids caught his/her attention and that of global humanity, most of the problems of the African was not the doing of anybody else but the African her-/himself. You see, even as the great Senegalese thinker and scientist, Prof. Cheikh Anta Diop, after whom the former University of Dakar was renamed, frankly and forthrightly remarked in one of his landmark tomes, it was the blighted culture of the continental African, the creator of the oldest of human civilizations, that facilitated the massive enslavement of African humanity. This was centuries before the incubation and culturing of both the Aids and Ebola viruses. And so it would be rather stupid to cavalierly suppose that any African smugly ensconced in the creature comforts of European civilization and far removed from and hopelessly out-of-touch with the cradle of his own humanity or moorings could actually have anything significant or meaningful to apprise us of or knee-jerkily presume to enlighten us about something that he clearly has absolutely no first-hand understanding or appreciation of.

Needless to say, any bona fide Ghanaian-born Diasporic resident writer who thinks and believes that the sole distinguishing qualities about President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo are “plagiarism” and “a bloated government” had better have his own head examined as well as the track-record of Ghana’s first postcolonial leader and his idol or hero or god, to wit, President Kwame Nkrumah, from the latter’s so-called Seven-Year Development Plan, which the American-trained Mr. Nkrumah shamelessly lifted hook, line and sinker from the Russians; and his putatively greatest political treatise, namely, “Consciencism,” whose diction and authorship unmistakably reflect the mastermind and literary and philosophical hallmarks of a genuinely brilliant and genius 20th-century Ghanaian philosopher and Oxbridge-schooled educator, namely, Prof. Willie Abraham.

You see, just the other day, the same Trokosi Nationalist Fraudster was impudently and fatuously claiming that no present-day Ghanaian leader was qualified to polish the shoes of Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, to which I chuckled and riposted as follows: “Precisely at which point or period in his life, compared to Dr. JB Danquah, for example, did Mr. Kwame Nkrumah begin to wear any footwear or shoes?” Well, I riposted in the preceding manner because I was quite certain that during his youthful Accra Teachers’ Training College and Achimota School Days, when Dr. Danquah was already an established legal light or luminary and a beacon of Ghanaian political prowess and global enlightenment, the future President Nkrumah would have loved to not only polish the shoes of his sometime mentor, Nkrumah would also have loved to heartily wash the car of the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Modern Ghanaian Politics. Indeed, Nkrumah very likely did an errand or two for Dr. Danquah as a newly appointed General-Secretary of the Danquah- and Grant-founded United Gold Coast Convention, the first serious freedom fighting indigenous political establishment of colonial Ghana.

Read More: Two Mistakes That Have Given Nana Akufo Addo International Recognition

It is also pathetically clear that the pathological charlatan who wrote and published the article captioned “Two Mistakes That Have Given Nana Akufo-Addo International Recognition” (Modernghana.com 12/23/18) is not even aware of the fact that Mr. Nkrumah shamelessly and opportunistically plagiarized the “Convention” of his risibly tautological Convention People’s Party (CPP) from the “Convention” of the United Gold Coast Convention, a name that, according to Dr. Danquah, was coined by his nephew and astute lawyer and Oxbridge-educated economist, namely, Mr. William “Paa Wille” Ofori-Atta. You see, you can hate all you want, but when it comes to the critical subjects of “mistakes” and “plagiarism,” President Nkrumah has absolutely no peer in Ghanaian political culture. I mean, whoever said that the very definitive concepts of the “African Personality,” “Pan Africanism” and the “United States of Africa” were originally mooted or propounded by the Lincoln University and U-Penn-educated Mr. Nkrumah? The list goes on and on and on.

The fact of the matter is that President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has been uniquely blessed with a pedigree that President Nkrumah could scarcely have fathomed and, indeed, greatly envied. Which, of course, is not to take anything away from the indisputable achievements of the great Akan-Nzema native and the equally remarkable still-in-the-making sterling achievements of the Akan-Akyem-descended Nana Akufo-Addo.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York