CPP to keep Nkrumah's found diary for national use

The family of Ghana’s first President Dr. Kwame Nkrumah have decided to have Nkrumah’s found diary authenticated after which it will kept at a suitable place as a historical document for the nation.

Last month, Samia Nkrumah, daughter of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah went for her father’s lost diary which has been at the centre of a long legal tussle between an American businessman and an African scholar from Kenya.

The black diary contains personal and public information recorded by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah during his time as President. New York businessman Robert Shulman and Kenyan-born amateur Investigator and Scholar Vincent Mbirika who is based in New York have fought over the diary for years.

Self-named the “Indiana Jones” of Africa, Mbirika dauntlessly tracked down and succeeded in retrieving the diary from the American who had had it for years.

Mbirika managed to convince the Eastern District Court of Pennsylvania in the US that the diary rightly belonged to Ghana and to the Nkrumah family and should be returned to Africa.

The judge ruled that the diary was among the possessions of Dr Nkrumah when he died in Romania in 1972 and thus ordered that it be handed over to the Ghanaian ambassador in Washington for forwarding to Ghana.

The Kenyan invited Sadick Abubakar, a Ghanaian living in Washington and a director of the United African Congress, a US advocacy group for African expatriates, to help in contacting Nkrumah’s relatives back home to provide the necessary backings.

Samia Nkrumah, an MP in Ghana for Jomoro constituency took advantage of a recent trip to the US where she gave a lecture in commemoration with the 40th anniversary of her father’s death to go for the lost diary which dates from the mid-1960s.

A statement issued by the CPP Wednesday, stated that it is worth noting that from the content Dr. Kwame Nkrumah was thinking about his party, his country and his continent till the end.

Speaking to Farida Khailann on Radio XYZ Midday News, the Communications Director of the CPP , Nii Armah Akomfrah said any insight that the document offers to the party , the country and the continent it would be shared as necessary .

“I don’t think that the family wants to share the content of the document”.He added.

Dr Nkrumah’s diary has travelled around the world over the last 40 years from Ghana to Guinea to Romania and America.

The diary entries start from the mid-1960s, when Osagyefo was president, and run to the late 1960s when he had been deposed and was living in exile in Guinea as a guest of President Sekou Toure.**