Opinions of Thursday, 5 July 2007
Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame
The Political Off Siders
I have never minced words in being immitigably frank in my discussion of the mixed legacy bequeathed his country by Ghana’s first president. I, however, unlike his servile and fanatical disciples, flatly refuse to corrupt and distort history by acknowledging him as “the founder” of Ghana. And neither do I envisage him as “the greatest African,” or even “Ghana’s greatest leader.” A leader, he definitely was, and a significant one at that; but on the question of “founding fathers,” we, officially, have six of them, although I firmly believe there ought to have been at least seven of them, with the avuncular Mr. George Alfred (Paa) Grant being the seventh; seventh but not the least of them, of course, for in reality, Paa Grant, it was who founded and largely bankrolled the erstwhile United Gold Coast Convention, the original “Convention” Party whose name, it must be emphasized, was given birth, reality and shape by Dr. Joseph (Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye Danquah and his equally astute nephew – actually Danquah’s son in Akan culture – William Aaron Eugene (Paa Willie) Ofori-Atta. Consequently, I unreservedly concur with Kenyan scholar and political scientist Ali A. Mazrui, that the Show Boy, while unquestionably “a great African,” was, nevertheless, quite a bad Ghanaian citizen. Nonetheless, it is rather oddly amusing for the man who unceremoniously and ignobly withdrew Mrs. Fathia Nkrumah’s diplomatic passport to be whining about not having been offered prime-time slot to hog the statal funerary rites accorded the late first former Ghanaian first lady recently (Modernghana.com 6/18/07). Those who vividly remember the rhetorical irreverence with which Mr. Rawlings inaugurated the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum would almost definitely not side with the P/NDC kingpin desiring to have laid a wreath on the grave of Mrs. Nkrumah. And here, also, must be added the fact, at least for the proverbial record books, that, indeed, it was the slain General Ignatius Kutu Acheampong who accorded Mrs. Fathis Nkrumah her diplomatic Ghanaian passport. It was also the NRC/SMC I junta that returned Mrs. Nkrumah to Ghana and offered her and her children a decent residential abode.
And so it cannot seriously be the case that the man who singularly and summarily dispossessed Mrs. Nkrumah of her especial symbol of Ghanaian citizenship and dignity would also want to be accorded carte-blanche to desecrate the memory of the same woman – and, once again, I herein vehemently insist that Mrs. Nkrumah was a veritable victim of Nkrumaism – that Mr. Rawlings had so flagrantly slighted and wronged while she lived.
It is also quite amusing for Mr. Rawlings to be fuming that he deserved to have been ceded center-stage at Mrs. Nkrumah’s funeral because had he wanted to, Jato June 4th could well have unilaterally prevented the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum from being erected, even as Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings had used the infamous 31st December Women’s Movement to curiously and greedily acquire the Nsawam Cannery, which was built by the Convention People’s Party government. What, indeed, Mr. Rawlings is not telling his fellow half-Ghanaian citizens is upon exactly what basis he could have peremptorily refused permission to the Chinese Government from building the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum. Could this have been that merely imposing himself on the Ghanaian people automatically gave Mr. Rawlings the preemptive ownership right to virtually every piece of landed property in Ghana? Sounds rather too Scottish for me!
And just whose money was used to build the mausoleum? There appear to be two equally credible narratives on the latter score. One version, which appeared in the Kenya-based “East African Standard” newspaper, claimed that most of the construction money, reckoned on the order of several million dollars, came from Libya Arab Jamahiriya strongman Col. Muammar El-Qaddafy, while the second narrative has Chinese leaders as the major players or contributors. The test of narratological credibility appears to yours truly to lie with Ghana’s National Theater which, I learned awhile back, had also been constructed by the ever-benevolent Chinese government.
But unlike the AFRC/P-NDC capo who tends to envisage national institutions and monuments in terms of ego or individual personalities, the Chinese belong to an ancient-of-ancients civilization; and, here, we are not simply talking about Stone Henge, for instance, if the reader understands just what yours truly is talking about. And that was why, as Professor Mohamed Ben Abdallah once confided to this writer, the Chinese meticulously dismantled the old Ghana Drama Studio, built out of the personal purse of Mrs. Efua Morgue Sutherland and reassembled it across the street from the University of Ghana’s Institute of African Studies and the latter’s School for the Performing Arts.
And perhaps, when all is said and done, Mr. Rawlings may likely want to explain to his half-fellow Ghanaians and the rest of the world, just why and how it appears not to have once occurred to the “professional revolutionary” to re-invite Mrs. Nkrumah to live in Ghana under the protection and upkeep of the Provisional National Democratic Congress, during the twenty protracted years that the Abongo Boys held Ghanaians, literally, by their scruff. Or maybe as some Ghanaians rather sheepishly insisted to yours truly in the wake of Mrs. Nkrumah’s passing, only good things ought to be said about even certified criminals like the P/NDC rat-pack, particularly the latter pseudo-party’s kingpin.
You see, the problem is that Brother Gamal and his siblings are not as cognitively constipated as the P/NDC rat-pack. And to really believe that Mr. Rawlings has been solely responsible for the mnemonic maintenance of Kwame Nkrumah and the latter’s legacy is nothing short of the outright heretical. And just how did Mr. Rawlings single-handedly achieve this?
Indeed, about a decade ago, someone who had a running battle with yours truly right here in cyberspace (Ghanaweb.com, to be precise), and who is a Rawlings lickspittle and tribesman, confided to yours truly that Mr. Rawlings had, indeed, been consulted when the rot set in on the apparently badly embalmed corpse of the late former Ghanaian premier, only to be gruffly told by Chief Jato June 4th to take a hike, for nobody, least of all himself, had time to preserve dead bodies when the living could scarcely afford the proverbial three-square meals per diem. And so, dear reader, in essence, this is the sterling Nkrumaist achievement of the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress.
Interestingly, a few people have written back, directly and indirectly, reprimanding yours truly for telling it like it is: That any Akan-Ghanaian Chief-of-State who returned from elephant-hunting with a maiden the age of his own son for a showcase, or trophy, wife, ought to be told in plain language that as a father (or one old enough to have fathered his bride), he stands guilty of the crime of incest and statutory rape, assuming in the latter case that age were reckoned declensionally. And if so, then what is so difficult about the preceding for any mentally sound any cultured Ghanaian to understand?
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.
Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.
