Who Stole Nkrumah's Dignity? (Part 1 & II)

It has remained posted on the Internet for some time now, except that while its title seemed interesting, if only because of its quaintness, the hectic schedule of yours truly rendered it quite unappealing for him to promptly get to it. Pontifically and rather presumptuously titled “Restore Nkrumah’s Dignity – Prof. Akosa”( Daily Guide 6/23/07), the news article offered pathetically far less than its caption promised. And the blame, in no way, lay at the feet of the proverbial messenger.
And, of course, knowing what he has known about the infamous Convention People’s Party (CPP), or The Party’s, ideologues, having himself had a father who was a staunch supporter of the CPP and an ardent advocate of Nkrumaism, yours truly found the caption of the article to be all too predictable. And before delving into its piddling contents, he had already, and aptly, determined that this was merely about the brazen rantings of an thoroughgoing political opportunist attempting, rather porously and quite ineffectually, to ride on the crest of the late deposed and disgraced dictator’s dubious and mixed achievements to clinch an undeserved political capital.
Of course, the most recent, largely polite gesture of the pro-Danquah-Busia ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) to readily and aptly recognize the remarkable, albeit scarcely phenomenal, contribution of the putative African Show Boy to the development of postcolonial Ghana must, predictably, have been taken the wrong way by many an ardent and outright fanatical Nkrumaist. In sum, desperate to revive the infamous Convention People’s Party regime, but apparently woefully bereft of any creative imagination, an asset that is indubitably indispensable in post-Nkrumah political culture, particularly in the liberalist and democratic Kufuor era, some of yesteryear’s Young Pioneer tin-heads have decided to take the easy way to power, feverishly banking, of course, on the short memories, abject ignorance and sheer youthfulness of the majority of the Ghanaian electorate who had either just been born or had yet to be conceived in the wake of the Show Boy’s auspicious and landmark overthrow on February 24, 1966.
Another interesting aspect of the newsmaker that piqued yours truly’s attention was his name. And after inquiring from some quite knowledgeable informants vis-à-vis the familial background of Prof. Agyeman-Badu Akosa, I learned to both my pleasant surprise and utter amusement that, indeed, the immediate-past Director-General of the Ghana Health Services is the son of the quite well-known Mr. J. C. Akosa, my maternal grandfather’s old student at the Asante-Mampong Presbyterian Primary and Middle Schools, the “Middle” of which was actually wholly founded by the Rev. T. H. Sintim, and the “Primary” of which was partially founded by my grandfather. For when the Rev. T. H. Sintim arrived at Asante-Mampong in either 1924 or 1925, the Mampong Presbyterian School went only up to the Third Grade (or Class Three). And during the seven, long and turbulent years that my grandfather spent, incognito, in his own maternal, ancestral home, the future Rev. T. H. (Yawbe) Sintim, of Akyem-Begoro and Asiakwa, would extend the Mampong Presbyterian School to the Tenth Grade (or Standard Seven) and witness the pioneer graduating class under his tutelage as both teacher and head-teacher of the school.
The interesting aspect – in quite a quizzical way, of course – of my grandfather’s arrival at Asante-Mampong inheres in its wholly accidental nature. The old man had initially been appointed as the first Ghanaian and African head-teacher at the Adum Presbyterian Primary School, but the Asantes of Kumasi found it rather abominable to have an “Okyeni” (or “Akyemkwaa”) for their teacher, much less the head-teacher of the old, glorious Asante Empire. And so, naturally, they threatened him with death by both machete and gunshot; and it was upon the earnest pleas of the European missionaries in charge of the station, as it was then called – I believe represented by the person of the Rev. Ramseyer, or some such missionary – that the Mamponghene, Nana Amaniampong, decided to retain the services of my young grandfather. And for the next seven years, he would be known as “Teacher Sintim, the Okyeni,” until on the eve of his departure when my grandfather would reveal to their bruising shame and anguish that, indeed, the future Rev. T. H. Sintim was the maternal nephew of the Mamponghene via his mother, Mary Akosua Baadua’s Akyem-Begoro Bretuo Clan.
Interestingly enough, my grandfather never told this story to yours truly himself, for it appears, in retrospect, to have traumatized him to no end. In fact, it was my grandmother who regaled me with this painful past (in the teary-eyed) presence of the man who, all he wanted to do was to faithfully and diligently serve his country and his people, regardless of ethnicity, culture or creed.
Now, what does any of this have to do with Prof. Agyeman-Badu Akosa? And the simple answer is that the man who inordinately vaunts of Nkrumah having singularly facilitated the education of virtually every modern Ghanaian is being here called upon to be humbled and sobered by the simple fact that had it not been for the sheer magnanimity and inviolable conscience of the likes of Teacher Sintim, in this particular context, amidst an unhealthy flurry of anti-Akyem aspersions and innuendoes, Mr. J. C. Akosa, Prof. Akosa’s father, would not have attended school beyond the third or fourth grade. And on the latter score, legend has it that the future CPP District Commissioner was forced to withdraw from school for having impregnated a young woman, for “J. C.” was said to be a little advanced for his grade level. It would be then-Teacher Sintim, not Prime Minister Nkrumah, who would intercede to ensure that then-Master J. C. Akosa would go on to complete Standard Seven and be duly issued a Middle School-Leaving Certificate or diploma.
Also quite interesting is the fact Teacher Okoampa, yours truly’s late father, a Serwaa-Amaniampong Technical School Teacher, CPP District Organizer and Young Pioneer Patron had also served as J. C. Akosa’s Campaign Manager (in fact, the very day of my birth, my old man was nearly killed in a motor accident while campaigning for D.C. Akosa).
But, of course, the point I want to make here is that in his mature years, albeit reluctantly, my father would aptly come to envisage the Convention People’s Party for what it had veritably been, an immitigably autocratic, extortionate and outright misguided, albeit an incontrovertibly well-intentioned, political juggernaut.
And so it is rather interesting for Prof. Agyeman-Badu Akosa to foolhardily assert, as reported by the Daily Guide, that “the Preventive Detention Act (PDA)[,] introduced by Kwame Nkrumah[,] was legitimate and necessary[,] considering the scale of destructive nature of the opposition who were at that time bent on assassinating him” (6/23/07).
Perhaps Prof. Akosa would have done himself and his audience better service by explaining exactly upon what evidentiary basis Dr. J. B. Danquah, arguably Ghana’s foremost Constitutional Lawyer of his generation, deserved to be brutally assassinated at the Nsawam Medium-Security Prison, without having been conceded his basic human right to a judicial trial, by then-President Kwame Nkrumah. Likewise, Prof. Akosa ought to have substantively justified exactly what made it legitimate for President Nkrumah to have callously and summarily ordered the removal of Mr. Obetsebi-Lamptey from the Intensive-Care Ward of the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital back to Nsawam and live-burial, reportedly, on the strength of dubious evidence of sedition, which even Nkrumah’s own British Attorney-General and Queen’s Counsel (QC), Sir Geoffrey Bing, acknowledged could not have been scientifically, or objectively, sustained in any legitimately-constituted court of law? (see Bing’s Reap The Whirlwind).
Indeed, a recent editorial published by the Ghanaian Statesman newspaper, and captioned “Prof. Akosa Should Have Been More Politically Surgical” (6/22/07), was dead-on apt in pointing out that while, indeed, he may be a “brilliant” pathologist, as a politician, the former director-general of the Ghana Health Services is fast becoming notorious for speaking out of his league, and thus grossly out of turn. The aforementioned editorial wittily concluded: “Our generous advice to Prof. Akosa is to redefine, redesign and refocus his political approach or he risks making himself irrelevant – and there are so many of them [political charlatans?] cat-walking the corridors of Nkrumaism these days, sadly [enough]. [And] we expect his critique[s] to be deeper than we have so far heard.”

Who Stole Nkrumah’s Dignity? Part 2 (Final)

When Prof. Agyeman-Badu Akosa asserts that Nkrumah’s so-called Preventive Detention Act (PDA), a copycat from India, “was legitimate and necessary[,] considering the scale of the destructive nature of the opposition who were at that time bent on assassinating him” (Daily Guide 3/20/07), some far more knowledgeable and levelheaded Ghanaian student of the period ought to point out to this obviously politically misguided Nkrumah fanatic that most of the suspects arrested in the wake of Kulungugu were stalwarts of Nkrumah’s own Convention People’s Party, among them Dr. Ako Adjei, who introduced the Show Boy to Dr. Danquah and mainstream Ghanaian politics; Mr. Tawiah Adamafio, a firebrand editor of the CPP mouthpiece, the Accra Evening News and the man who is widely credited with having conferred the glaringly oversized honorific of “Osagyefo” on the Show Boy; and Kofi Crabbe, another CPP stalwart.

Of course, it also bears recognizing the fact that several members of the ideological opposition were also arrested and convicted in the wake of Kulungugu. Still, what is quite curious and significant to observe here is the fact that although a three-member panel of Supreme Court judges tried and acquitted the aforementioned CPP stalwarts for lack of culpable evidence, President Nkrumah promptly and summarily nullified the verdict of Messrs. Arku Korsah (the Chief Justice), Akufo-Addo and Van Lare, to the unreservedly damnable extent of summarily dismissing Sir Arku Korsah from the highest court of the land. Shortly thereafter, President Nkrumah constituted his own special kangaroo court which promptly returned a verdict of guilty and sentenced the trio – Messrs. Ako Adjei, Tawiah Adamafio and Kofi Crabbe – to life imprisonment. It would be the auspicious and landmark Kotoka-led National Liberation Council (NLC) revolution that would free these innocent but woefully misguided Nkrumah lieutenants from terminal incarceration.

And regarding the tired and vacuous Nkrumaist contention that “Dr. Nkrumah created jobs for the youth and that [for the first time?] in the history of the country, there was a shortfall of workers to take up one million jobs during 1964 and 1965,” our simple answer is that such characteristically Nkrumaist vaunt is outright poppycock and totally devoid of substance. First of all, Prof. Akosa ought to have provided relevant statistical figures regarding the magnitude of the country’s labor force during the period in question, and also the kinds of jobs available, the minimum qualifications required to perform each and every job description and how long the CPP could guarantee those so employed perennial job and economic security.

Then again, just what sort of government is wont to creating jobs far in excess of its labor force, but a government without a good sense of focus and direction? A wasteful government, in essence, which is exactly what the Convention People’s Party was renowned for.

But even more significant is the fact that most of the high-end jobs created by the Nkrumah government had to be taken up by the very same “expelled” British expatriates whom Nkrumah claimed had no role, whatsoever, in his retrospectively bogus “Africanization” program. And once these British expatriates had been, literally, recalled to Ghana by the now-groveling Nkrumah and his CPP, they ended up being paid twice, and even in some cases thrice, the salaries for which they had performed these same tasks prior to the Show Boy’s so-called Africanization program. Indeed, many Ghanaians may not be aware of this fact, but more Europeans had, in fact, been imported by the CPP with overly attractive benefits to take up jobs which the Nkrumah regime had myopically not prepared Ghanaians to perform than had been the case during the undeniably invidious British colonial administration (see Dennis Austin’s Politics in Ghana: 1946-1960).

And to be certain, just about the same time that Nkrumah was vociferously denouncing Apartheid South Africa, and even calling on his fellow African leaders to marshal their forces in order to drive the white settlers into the Atlantic Ocean, if these settlers would not voluntarily vacate their ill-gotten landed property, more than 50 percent of Ghana’s trade with other continental African countries was actually transacted directly, as well as indirectly, between Nkrumah’s Ghana and Apartheid South Africa (see Nkrumah’s Foreign Trade Policy in Kwame Arhin’s The Life and Work of Kwame Nkrumah). And so in terms of bold-face hypocrisy among postcolonial Ghanaian leaders, the African Show Boy stands in a class by himself!

Indeed, contrary to what Prof. Akosa would have his audience believe, on the eve of his overthrow, the country was so bankrupt that then-Col. E. K. Kotoka, the man who spearheaded the NLC revolution which auspiciously ousted the CPP, is reported to have lamented that had he known of the dire straits into which the splurging Show Boy had unconscionably plunged Ghana, he, Kotoka, would have held his proverbial peace for a few more months, at least, to enable popular indignation to cause the logical and timely ouster of Nkrumah and his CPP lackeys. And so it could not be that Prof. Akosa is talking about the same Ghana that the rest of us levelheaded Ghanaians have gotten to know and experience (see L. H. Ofosu-Appiah’s Lieutenant-General E. K. Kotoka; also Okoampa-Ahoofe’s When Dancers Play Historians and Thinkers). Now regarding Nkrumah’s educational policies, what needs to be instructively pointed out is the fact that in his zeal to egocentrically lay false claim to having “founded” virtually every worthwhile institution in postcolonial Ghana and thus deserving of being called “Founder of Modern Ghana,” Nkrumah promulgated a blanket policy of nationalization of all educational institutions, particularly those owned and operated by such major Christian churches as the Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans and Roman Catholics which, for much of colonial Ghanaian history up to the eve of the country’s independence, had operated the bulk of the nation’s schools. These cannibalized schools then became known as “Government-Assisted Schools” (see Kwame Arhin’s The Life and Work of Kwame Nkrumah).

Remarkably enough, those privately-owned institutions that did not seem to be resourceful or possess a proven educational track-record, as it were, got promptly proscribed through harassment. Consequently, when he cavalierly talks about the prime beneficiaries of Nkrumah’s educational policies being hell-bent on “distorting history,” perhaps somebody ought to remind Prof. Akosa of the fact that his political hero was no pioneer at all, and that, indeed, it was illustrious traditional Ghanaian rulers like Osagyefo Sir Nana Ofori-Atta I who had facilitated the landmark establishment of the Achimota School (the former Prince of Wales School), for example, for Nkrumah and his ilk to rise to the level and stature that they ultimately achieved.

Finally, it is rather amusing to hear Prof. Akosa make the at once hyperbolic and outrageous claim that “some political opponents have over the years tried without success to associate Dr. Nkrumah with ruthlessness and draconian laws, let’s give credit where credit is due.” Perhaps his apparent tone-deafness prevented Prof. Akosa from hearing Prof. Francis Nkrumah’s recent desperate plaint that the “revisionist” likes of yours truly were threatening his father’s legacy. Of course, this was Dr. Francis Nkrumah’s visceral way of acknowledging the excruciating nature of historical truth and accuracy, particularly where studied mendacity has been the hallmark of Nkrumaist historiography.