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

During a recent electioneering campaign rally in the Anloga district of the Volta Region, Mr. Sekou Nkrumah, son of former President Kwame Nkrumah, was reported by the Ghana News Agency (GNA) to be claiming that the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) was woefully out of touch with the abjectly poor and destitute citizens of our country. The younger Mr. Nkrumah reportedly also explained that he decided to join the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC), because the latter was palpably more sensitive to the needs and aspirations of the Ghanaian underclass.

What appears to have provoked the son of the deposed first president of Ghana into making such reckless remarks, according to the GNA correspondent who covered the event, regards the Kufuor Administration’s momentous decision to contract a $ 50 million interest-free loan from the Indian government, in order to renovate, expand and reconstruct the Flagstaff House, the official residence of the President of Ghana. And here must significantly be pointed out that it was Sekou Nkrumah’s father who first occupied the Flagstaff House with his wife, Mrs. Fathia Nkrumah, the Egyptian-born mother of the critic. Originally the Flagstaff House, as we recently learned from Brig.-Gen. Nunoo-Mensah, the retired Ghanaian Army Chief of Defense Staff (CDS), had been earmarked for the official residency of the CDS of the Ghana Armed Forces. Legend has it, however, that President Nkrumah, presuming the Flagstaff House to be better fortified than his own official residence of the old slave Castle at Osu, decided to preempt the Chief of Defense Staff of the Ghana Armed Forces. And so, it would have been quite in order for the younger Mr. Nkrumah to have frankly discussed his father’s widely known and acknowledged egocentrism, rather than cavalierly assuming a self-righteous stance against the auspiciously “welfarist” Kufuor Administration.

The younger Mr. Nkrumah would also have sated the curiosity of his audience better, if he had further explained why his father, President Kwame Nkrumah, caused the profligate construction of the Independence Arch, Kwame Nkrumah Circle, Peduase Lodge (built hurriedly with sea water, the legend has it) and the State House, including particularly the “elitist” Banquet Hall, when most Ghanaians living between 1957 and 1966 had no clean piped water and ready access to electricity from the equally extravagant Akosombo Dam, both of which amenities Mr. Sekou Nkrumah and his family took for granted.

Interestingly, not quite awhile ago, the founder of the National Democratic Congress, Mr. Jeremiah John Rawlings, whose 20-year dictatorial governance of Ghana the younger Mr. Nkrumah has shamelessly described as “people-centered,” confessed that the water that services the cistern of his water-closet toilet was ten times cleaner than the water available to most Ghanaians. In sun, by his very admission of the foregoing reality, Mr. Rawlings had eloquently contradicted the scandalous encomium concocted by the younger Mr. Nkrumah well beforehand.

It is also predictably naive for Mr. Nkrumah to reductively characterize the newly renovated, expanded and reconstructed Flagstaff House as a “presidential palace” when, in reality, most of this executive edifice, unlike under his father’s tenure, has been earmarked for the critically functional use of cabinet appointees as well as the use of other key government officials. It is also rather disappointing, albeit none too surprising, that the younger Mr. Nkrumah had woefully failed to explain to his captive Anloga audience, party supporters and sympathizers precisely what makes the National Democratic Congress’ cynical and abjectly insensitive “Cash-and-Carry” health policy more “people-centered” than the New Patriotic Party’s National Health Insurance Scheme, including free pre- and post-natal care for all Ghanaian women, regardless of class status, ethnicity or ideological suasion, as well as free medical treatment for children not past their eighteenth birthday.

Then again, precisely why would Mr. Sekou Nkrumah rather have had the Kufuor Administration distribute the $ 50 million capital earmarked for the renovation, expansion and reconstruction of the Flagstaff House among “25 senior high Schools to serve as ‘models’ to give quality training to many Ghanaians [in order for them] to become assets to themselves and the state,” if the Atta-Mills and Rawlings lickspittle were dead-set against the purportedly elitist policies of the ruling New Patriotic Party? Or is it simply because Sekou Nkrumah is so cognitively challenged that he finds sound reasoning in such abject moral contradiction?

The critic also claims, rather funnily, that the $ 50 million loan contracted for the renovation, expansion and reconstruction of the Flagstaff House “could train brilliant students from poor homes in their education, but not for the pleasure of one person.” Fair enough; but then, if one may pertinently ask: Precisely what motivated President Nkrumah to casually donate, gratis, $ 10 million of the Ghanaian cocoa farmer’s hard-earned foreign exchange reserves to Mr. Ahmed Sekou Toure’s Guinea, when the literacy rate of Northern Ghanaians at the time left so much to be desired? Or is it just that President Nkrumah stood far above the law of national leadership responsibility?

Maybe somebody ought to remind the apparently woefully misguided Mr. Sekou Nkrumah that on the eve of his father’s overthrow, in 1966, the Convention People’s Party was best known for its neo-fascist one-party dictatorship, cronyism, rank corruption and cultural and moral decadence, as well as that notorious and murderous landmark at Nsawam called the Kwame Nkrumah Holiday Inn, officially known as the Nsawam Medium-Security Prison. And does the younger Mr. Nkrumah know that it was the original, tautological CPP that canonized the backdoor political scam of 10-percent contractual bribery? (Did I hear somebody mention Ackah Blay Miezah’s Oman Ghana Trust Company?) And has the P/NDC journeyman ever heard of the celebrated JIBOWU COMMISSION?

Also, talking about elitism: Has Mr. Sekou Nkrumah bothered for a second to study the shameless apartheid residential arrangements at Akosombo and Kwabenya, for two striking examples, both of which were blithely approved and personally supervised by President Nkrumah and his Convention People’s Party minions? In brief, it is scandalously unwise for those who live in proverbial glass-houses to indulge in a precarious contest of stone-throwing. Did not the younger Mr. Nkrumah learn this one while growing up?

*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 the author of 18 books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005) and “Reena: Letters to an Indian-American Gal” (Atumpan Publications/lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.