Get This, Mr. Nelson: You Can't Eat “Vision,” Except the Diligent Fruits of Practical Reality!

I read Mr. Ekow Nelson's rather desultorily desperate article titled “Feeble Defence of a Visionless Party” and felt delightfully amused, albeit on a tenor of thoroughgoing contempt; very much so, because the writer makes absolutely no cogent attempt to address the issue that he sought to rejoin. And the issue has squarely to do with the rump-CPP spokesman on Economic Affairs' recent dubious attempt to throw dust into the eyes of the Ghanaian electorate – perhaps based on what Dr. Nii Moi Thompson has either read or heard – regarding President Kwame Nkrumah's so-called “Africanization” program, by cavalierly suggesting that, somehow, it has only been during the watch of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) that almost every key sector of Ghana's economic development has been dominated by non-Ghanaian and/or non-African technocrats and other professionals. Dr.Thompson's tirade directly devolved from the raging debate over the Government's largely market-oriented decision to offload its 70-percent majority shares in Ghana Telecom to an Anglo-American-owned company called Vodafone.

The thrust of my argument was neither in favor nor against the decision by the Kufuor Governemnt to sell Ghana Telecom (or GT) to Vodafone. Thus, it is rather spacey for the critic to claim that the thrust of Dr. Thompson's argument had, somehow, eluded yours truly. To be certain, the thrust of my argument squarely, and unmistakably, verged on the unpardonably hypocritical grandstanding on the preceding by Dr. Thompson's patently ahistorical assertion that for the first time since independence, the NPP government was engaged in the lurid and unpatriotic business of brazenly supervising the massive surrender of Ghana's most vital cultural and economic development sectors and facilities. To the foregoing effect, this is what the rump-CPP Spokesman on Economic Affairs had to say: “Our national football team has never been entrusted to a Ghanaian, our water is in the hands of the Dutch, our roads are built by the Chinese, Presidential Palace built by Indians, waste [sewage?] by the Belgians, and our Telecom sector is now earmarked for an Anglo-American company” (see Ghanaweb.com Homepage's “Quote of the Week,” accessed by this author on 7/27/08). I therefore cited several sectors of Ghana's political economy that were dominated by non-Ghanaians even under the tenure of the much-touted “Afrocentric” regime of the original Convention People's Party (CPP). What Mr. Nelson, therefore, ought to have done should have been for the critic, a fanatical Nkrumaist propagandist, to have given the proverbial lie to my catalogue of some of the vital sectors of the Ghanaian political economy which were controlled and/or dominated by foreigners at the express invitation of President Nkrumah. Of course, we did not expect that either Dr. Thompson or Mr. Nelson would be able to contradict our counter-assertion.

And so instead and quite predictably, Mr. Ekow Nelson, pinch-hitting for his boss, Dr. Thompson, decided to childishly and incoherently play the proverbial victim by accusing yours truly of a flagrant attempt to “self-indulgently” rewrite Ghana's history.

The foregoing, it goes without saying, is a very serious charge, indeed, even if it also garishly exposes the scurrilous attempt of the critic to deviously pretend that the entirety of postcolonial Ghanaian history entails merely that which rump-CPP propaganda operatives would have their followers and sympathizers envisage as such, which, at best, is unpardonably mean-spirited.

But then, in the opinion of Mr. Ekow Nelson, what constitutes the supposedly nonesuch vision of the CPP is but a statistically insubstantial paean – or praise-song – that Mr. T. M. Kodwo Mercer, Gold Coast Trade Commissioner, faithfully sang before a joint-meeting of the Royal African and Royal Empire societies on October 27, 1955, a confabulation presided over by former British colonial secretary, Sir Reginald Saloway. What a pity! One would have thought that a stentorian and petulant Nkrumaist propagandist like Mr. Ekow Nelson would have revisited with his readers the 1950 or even 1956 Manifesto/Platform of the CPP. Instead, Mr. Nelson chose to expose his abject epistemic bankruptcy by facilely settling for a piddling 6-page propaganda piece published in the journal titled “African Affairs.” What is even more annoying is the critic's condescending attempt to pass off Mr. Mercer's article onto his readers as constituting authoritative scholarship on the history of Ghana's politically transitional period from 1951-1957.

If, indeed, the attempt was to insult the intelligence of both yours truly and the Ghanaian electorate, for Mr. Nelson makes the following pontifical observation: “Since the good Associate Professor sought to impugn the integrity of the first CPP government [Was there ever a second CPP government, by the way?] I thought it would be useful to share with your [yours truly's?] readers, in defence of the most successful government Ghana has ever had, the address by the former Gold Coast Trade Commissioner, Mr. T. M. Kodwo Mercer in October 1955 (a) to advance the discussion and (b) to repudiate the self-indulgent attempt by Dr. Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe to rewrite Ghana's postcolonial history,” then Mr. Nelson has definitely achieved his aim. If, on the other hand, the rump-CPP media outrider presumes himself to remarkably advance the raging cybernetic discourse on postcolonial Ghanaian history, then the writer had better be promptly apprised of his need to do so with sound and respectable scholarship, not the largely anecdotal speech of an Nkrumah lieutenant on a thankless propaganda mission abroad. Maybe it was the fact that Mr. Kodwo Mercer's speech was published in the Oxbridge-sponsored journal “African Affairs” that fooled Mr. Nelson into assuming that he could cheaply and readily pass it off to his readers and the Ghanaian electorate, at large, as respectable scholarship.

Indeed, if Mr. Nelson is on the lookout for what truly constitutes “visionary leadership,” then he had better read both the Proceedings of the Gold Coast Youth Conference, as poignantly and meticulously documented by Dr. J. B. Danquah, the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian Politics as well as Dr. Danquah's celebrated political pamphlet, The Voice of Prophecy. We have already detailed, elsewhere, Nkrumah's flagrant pilfering of the comprehensive manifesto of the seminal United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) and therefore find it absolutely unnecessary to reprise the same here.

We must also hasten to highlight the grim irony of the fact that although the extortionate and nihilistic economic policies of the twin governments of the Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC) had found critical popular expression in Monsieur “Rawlings's Necklace,” a term for a protruding collar bone primarily induced by avoidable starvation, in his diatribe against the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), Dr. Nii Moi Thompson had the temerity to glowingly laud the governments of the P/NDC for having supposedly raised the life expectancy and living standards of Ghanaians over and above any socioeconomic and cultural achievements remarkably registered by the Kufuor Government. For his part and all-too-predictably, Mr. Nelson decided it to be quite expedient not to broach this aspect of his master's abject mendacity.

It is also interesting that Mr. Nelson would mention the founding and development of the University of Ghana as being salient and integral to the “visionary” leadership of the CPP and then turn round to accuse yours truly of “self-indulgently” attempting to rewrite postcolonial Ghanaian history. Mr. Nelson, try as you have, you can never, ever erase Dr. J. B. Danquah's indelible imprint on both the founding and development of the University of Ghana, as well as the founding and development of postcolonial Ghana and the Cocoa Marketing Board (CMB), so don't waste your time and your breath!

In the end, the problem with the period that Mr. Nelson chose to highlight the supposedly “visionary” achievements of the Nkrumah-led CPP, is that most of the projects initiated then were actually the brainwork of the colonial government, including the founding of the erstwhile Kumasi College of Technology (now the so-called Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology). And while, indeed, at his own personal request, Nkrumah's initial designation as Leader of Government Business was re-designated as Prime Minister, in reality, the British Colonial Governor was effectively Ghana's premier, for it was the Governor who both ran Ghana's foreign policy and the military. And while, indeed, Nkrumah ran most of the economic policies, the substantive Finance Minister was British, with a Ghanaian understudy, Mr. Komla Agbeli Gbedemah, I believe, deputizing as Minister of State at the Finance Ministry.

Indeed, the best pictorial index to Nkrumah's effective political subordination to the British colonial administrators may be gleaned from the toadying voting pattern and record of the CPP members of the Legislative Assembly. Ironically, it was the UGCC members of the legislature who voted independently and with the inviolable interests of the Ghanaian people and their collective destiny at heart. The CPP “boys” simply played a “go along to get along” game of expedient ingratiation with their British colonial masters (see Dennis Austin's Politics in Ghana: 1946-60 and David Apter's Ghana in Transition; also Fitch and Oppenheimer's Ghana: End of an Illusion). And when he speaks of the unprecedented “visionary” leadership of the Nkrumah-led CPP, Mr. Nelson could not be meaning anything more than the “co-opted visionary leadership” of “The Party.” Did I hear somebody say “Neocolonialism on shameless display”?

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of 17 books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: [email protected].