Wake Up, CPP-USA!!!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
April 3, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

He claims to be the Vice-Chairman of the North-American Chapter of the tautologically named Convention People's Party (CPP), and so I would not bother to burden Mr. Kweku Manful with far more intellectual, political and historiographical grist than this woefully alienated Afropean-Ghanaian is capable of masticating. If memory serves me accurately, the first time that I crossed swords with this patently uncouth and impudent and stiff upper-lipped political jester, he had heretically presumed to impugn the moral and intellectual integrity of Archbishop-Emeritus Akwasi Sarpong. To be certain, so crass was Mr. Manful in temperament that he had also presumed to lecture the Oxbridge-educated prelate in his own academic specialty of the New Testament.

Now, I don't care what Mr. Manful thinks of Dr. Richard Amoako-Baah, Head of the Political Science Department of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), but I am deeply offended by the CPP-USA Vice-Chairman's sly and mischievous attempt to belittle Dr. Joseph (Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye-Danquah, even while also pretending to revere and celebrate the memory of the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Modern Ghanaian Politics (See "CPP North America Replies Professor Amoako-Baah" Ghanaweb.com 4/2/15).

What, for example, does Mr. Manful mean when he brazenly asserts that President Nkrumah offered Dr. Danquah a cabinet position in his Convention People's Party? What specific cabinet appointment was it? And upon what basis was such appointment offered? And what was the response of Dr. Danquah to such an admittedly statesmanly gesture? And what was the reaction of the key operatives of the Nkrumah-led Convention People's Party? We must also promptly point out that Ghana was not colonized in 1821. Rather, it was the ancestors of woefully misguided people like Mr. Manful who reinvited our future British colonial-imperialist overlords to "protect" them against Asante military and political aggression. The British coastal merchants and traders would offered them the country's first colonial governor, Sir Charles McCarthy, who would be summarily executed by the Asante military within three years of having been reposted to the erstwhile Gold Coast from Sierra Leone in 1819 or thereabouts. Sir George McClean would be later brought in after an initial withdrawal of the British. It would be this astute and tactical merchant-politician who would slap the slavo-colonial manacles on the wrists of the unsuspecting Fante chiefs, and subsequently the rest of the so-called Gold Coast Colony.

All this is high-school stuff, and not the first-year university curriculum that Mr. Manful would have his readers and misguided sympathizers believe. We must also quickly point out that most of the key operatives of the Rawlings-fangled Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) and, subsequently, the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC) are left-leaning Nkrumacrats. And for Mr. Manful's information and edification, it was these operatives who obtusely dismantled and quartered up the erstwhile Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), the laudable seminal industrial base established by the Nkrumah-led Convention People's Party.

Consequently, I find it insufferably offensive that Mr. Manful would so disdainfully and cavalierly attempt to blame adherents of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo Tradition for regressing our country's industrial development. Did the likes of the CPP-USA Vice-Chairman lodge any protest when the now-late President John Evans Atta-Mills, a publicly avowed ardent Nkrumacrat, decided to make the Show Boy's officially fabricated birthday a statutory national holiday? What I am clearly and directly suggesting here is that it is flagrantly hypocritical for the likes of Mr. Manful to suppose that they can heartily celebrate the "achievements" of the NDC, where the apotheosizing of the icon and memory of Mr. Kwame Nkrumah is concerned, but somehow blame what the CPP-USA Vice-Chairman terms as "Danquah-Busia-Dombo Elitists" for NDC policies that are clearly and criminally regressive to the well-being and development of our nation at large.

Then also, what is really remiss with Dr. Amoako-Baah's decrying the fact that President Nkrumah had uncreatively packed his cabinet with intellectual and political basket cases, even as the Show Boy intensified his nihilistic alienation and persecution of well-educated and professionally qualified Ghanaians who could have helped him far better manage the affairs of the nation? I mean, weren't Messrs. William "Paa Willie" Ofori-Atta, K. K. Kurankye-Taylor and K. A. Busia, among a remarkable number of others, parliamentary opposition members and astute policy wonks when Nkrumah decided to ignore these first-rate Oxbridge-educated savants while he foolhardily and single-mindedly bungled the Akosombo Dam contractual agreement - which cost the Ghanaian taxpayer three times what it was really worth - with a far more business-savvy Kaiser group of negotiators? (See Apter's Ghana In Transition).

And this is what you, Mr. Manful, would have your readers envisage as the genius trait of an embarrassingly novice and exuberant Prime Minister Nkrumah that put the megalomaniacal dictator light years ahead of his intellectual and professional superiors? Indeed, if the moderators and media operatives at MyJoyOnline.com afforded more time and rhetorical space to Dr. Amoako-Baah at the Independence-Day Debate than to Prof. Agyeman-Badu Akosa, the reason was very simple. Those of us avid scholars and students of postcolonial Ghanaian politics who have been closely following the rambunctious political career of Prof. Akosa are shamefully aware of the fact that the medically trained pathologist and former Director of Ghana Medical Services waxes far more nosily than sensibly, when it comes to holding forth on Ghana's political culture and history. And it is quite certain that the MyJoyOnline.com operatives nervously recognize this uncomfortable fact, thus their all-too-savvy decision to minimize as much as possible the annoyance and aggravation that the hip-shooting Prof. Akosa might have caused their audience.

And now, on the question of who made enemies of whom, it is significant to observe that there was a Danquah on the Ghanaian political landscape long before there was an Nkrumah. And if there was any Ghanaian leader who preferred to drink tea and dance waltz with the Queen of England and her colonial representatives than sedulously managing the affairs of the Ghanaian electorate, that leader was definitely none other than Mr. Kwame Nkrumah. Not only does he brag about dancing with Queen Elizabeth II, as even the immortalized Prof. Ali A. Mazrui remarked with implacable disappointment and embarrassment, the then-Prime Minister Nkrumah actually thought and believed that dancing with Queen Elizabeth II marked the seismic height of modern African civilization and cultural enlightenment! And guess what, Mrs. Fathia Nkrumah was the Show Boy's trophy for heroically championing the quixotic cause of Pan-Africanism.

I have said this before and hereby repeat the same: If Mr. Kweku Manful sincerely believes that the Western-European man is the worst species of humanity to have been encountered by the infallible African personality, then why is this fanatical Nkrumcrat living here in the United States and ranting his farcical effusions about the supposedly carcinogenic anti-African Western imperialist white man? Why doesn't he relocate to Russia, North Korea, China or Cuba and practice his more godly and providential religion of socialism and communism? Or, better yet, why doesn't Mr.Manful move back to Ghana and flush out the Western white man, so that he can have his kosher and Nkrumcratic paradise?

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