Mr. Kufuor Is Darn Right On Busia - Part 2

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

Garden City, New York

October 2, 2014

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

It is also rather disingenuous on the part of those who accuse Prime Minister Busia of being soft on the Apartheid South African regime, by calling for a diplomatic solution to the racist political culture of that country, while flagrantly ignoring the fact that a tough-talking Life-President Kwame Nkrumah was secretly and massively trading with the Apartheid government, even while hypocritically and publicly calling for its radical or violent overthrow. It is no secret that Nkrumah's largest trading partner on the African continent was South Africa (See Kwame Arhin's The Life And Work of Kwame Nkrumah). Now, let's talk about the Real Man of the Millennium!

Indeed, while the application of a remarkable modicum of military force was necessary to bring the hotheaded leaders of the Apartheid regime to the proverbial conference table, nonetheless, Busia was foresighted and astute enough to recognize the fact that such a force was highly unlikely to come from the concerted leadership of the largely ragtag and obsolete military establishments of the various "independent" African governments. In the end, it was a Soviet-/Russian-backed Fidel Castro's Cuba that almost single-handedly forced the Apartheid regime to the diplomatic roundtable, exactly as Prime Minister Busia had anticipated a generation earlier.

As for the summary dismissal of the editor of the government-owned and operated Daily Graphic, it all boiled down to the purely visceral question of political/ideological incompatibility and simply knowing where one's bread was buttered, as it were. In other words, how could the Graphic editor presume to so cavalierly and boorishly and ungratefully, to speak much less of disrespectfully, bite the very hand that provided him with his daily kenkey, black-pepper and fried fish? 

Even more significantly, why hadn't the Graphic editor taken Life-President Nkrumah to task for ravenously trading with the racist South African government at the same time that he publicly pretended to be the Apartheid regime's number one enemy on the African continent? Nkrumah was also known to have at least one South African-born woman private secretary. Reader, you do the math and arrive at your own logically sound conclusions.

At any rate, the Graphic's editor cannot sincerely claim to have been totally ignorant of the Show Boy's deliberate political double-talk. Even this writer's own ardent Convention People's Party (CPP) foot-soldier father used to occasionally lament Nkrumah's depraved and self-serving double-dealings with the racist white South African government. From time to time the old man (now deceased) would sarcastically remark, with barely veiled anguish and a traumatic sense of betrayal, on the fact that nearly every single crate of "English Apples" sold by the Kingsway supermarkets was stamped "Produce/Product of South Africa."

The infamous "Apollo 568" is also a nauseatingly tired and cheap political point-scoring case that is routinely, mischievously and thoughtlessly invoked by his pathological detractors to impugn the democratic credentials of the Oxbridge-educated Prime Minister Busia. And while it definitely constitutes one of the lackluster moments of the Progress Party (PP) administration, nevertheless, the stark fact holds incontrovertibly that at least one member of the Supreme Court panel that presided over the case was the conjugal relative of Mr. E. K. Sallah, the lead plaintiff in this case involving the statutorily legitimate dismissal of CPP political appointees and cronyistic employees.

But here also, at least unlike Life-President Nkrumah, Prime Minister Busia never called for the summary dismissal of any member of the Supreme Bench. Neither did Busia, unlike Chairman-cum-President Jerry John Rawlings, engineer the brutal abduction, torture and Mafia-style execution of any member of the Supreme Court of Ghana. It is also rather boorishly snarky to hear one of these Volta Alliance gangsters exult in the purported "humiliation" of the Busia-led Progress Party in the 1969 polls. 

The fact of the matter is that the Trokosi Boys are so pathetically and pathologically parochial and myopic that even, heavy rigging and criminal ballot-box stuffing and all, President Nkrumah could only garner 10-percent of the Volta vote in the 1960 presidential election. The remaining 90-percent of the Volta protest vote that reportedly went to Dr. J. B. Danquah was indisputably so cast by the Trokosi Boys, primarily because the Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics had staunchly fought for these "potential trouble-makers" to be allowed to join their Togolese kinsfolk to the east.