A Quaesitum to the Nkrumaists

Mr. Francis Kwabena Nwiah Kofi Kwame Nkrumah is a man of many false identities. The man’s birthday which is September 21, 2009 falls on Tuesday, hence his day name ought to be Kwabena. But he was named Nwiah-Kofi Ngoloma for some unknown reasons, implying that he was born on Friday. In 1947, he changed his name while in UK and appeared on the Ghanaian political scene with the brand new name Kwame Nkrumah. Such a person with such multiple names ought to raise hackles about his true identity and personality.

It is therefore fitting for those of us staunch Danquists to recall his repugnant deeds to countermand the vacuous cacophony of his numerous town-criers and action troopers who seek to deify the man. Our position is that Nkrumah was an impostor and a veritable fraud. Period!

Of the true founding father, Dr. J.B. Danquah’s prison death, much has already been written for the record, but many Ghanaians are still struggling to make sense of exactly why a so-called hero like Kwame Nkrumah could incarcerate his benefactor and fellow freedom fighter and watch him die a horrendous death. But naturally, on any day set aside to recall his questionable deeds, Nkrumah’s followers want to sweep these dark deeds under the carpet, going to great lengths to rationalize, sanctify and pacify the man’s evil deeds, and passionately imputing that those who criticize him are unpatriotic. This article exposes Nkrumah’s evil deeds and answers some of the fake claims by the Nkrumaists, asserting the valuelessness of their arguments in the context of Nkrumah’s heinous crimes.

Nkrumaists claim Nkrumah founded Ghana, but Ghana had already been created long before Nkrumah was invited to come and help in the struggle for independence. He came to claim that he was giving the people freedom, liberation and justice; and that is where the whole deception lies. He could have vividly put before the people the proposition that he was going to imprison them without trial and abolish all opposition parties and declare himself president for life in order to build Ghana into a great nation. And if the people had accepted him and his message, then he would have been considered an honest broker under the circumstances. But he promised freedom and justice from colonial oppression, only to turn around to inflict a worse form of oppression on the people. How can we say that Nkrumah gave us freedom and justice and liberation when he abolished all these forms?

And if all he accomplished were the huge infrastructural developments minus the freedom thereto, the colonial masters could have achieved more with these same resources and kept us under less oppression than Nkrumah. Indeed, we should think about it: If we had asked for industries and huge buildings and roads and schools in order to agree to remain in bondage, our colonial masters would have done far better with the millions they left with Nkrumah. What is more, they would not have oppressed us as much as Nkrumah did. At least, in their time, due process existed from which Nkrumah himself benefitted. He was afforded due process of law before his incarceration for instigating public disturbances; and he was permitted to contest for a parliamentary position while confined in prison. Thus, the notion that Nkrumah’s provision of infrastructure and industry should varnish and burnish and excuse his dictatorship is totally untenable.

Nkrumaists also quote injustice in the USA and elsewhere to justify Nkrumah’s injustice and oppression against the Ghanaian population. This is a fallacy of argument characterized as Tu Quoque. ("You Do it Too!"; also “Two Wrongs Make a Right”). This is a corrupt argument from ethos. It is no sign of intelligence to excuse one's own bad action by pointing out that one's opponent's acts are perhaps even worse than one's own. Such a fallacy of false equivalence has no substance in law or logic!

Nkrumaists are also fond of using the bomb-throwing incidents to justify his atrocious treatment of his political opponents. But the first bomb-throw occurred at Kulungugu in 1963, while the Preventive Detention Act (PDA) was passed in 1958. Thus the Nkrumaists are guilty of the fallacy of circular cause and consequence, where the consequence of the phenomenon is claimed to be its root cause. Truly, the fact of Nkrumah’s tyranny, as capsuled in the passage of the PDA, was the cause of the armed struggle for freedom undertaken by certain patriotic citizens who clearly saw their freedoms whittle away according to the whims of a brutal dictator.

When he became too intoxicated with power, and openly portrayed his communistic and socialistic ideations, Nkrumah would not tolerate any dissent neither from the official opposition nor from even his own party members. After the PDA was enacted in 1958, his finance Minister and chief crony, K.A. Gbedemah who introduced the bill in Parliament, had to eventually escape into exile in the USA, fleeing from the Act he gleefully spearheaded. When the people were overfed with Nkrumah and were suffering under his tighten-your-belt socialist policies, the bombs from his own camp became an option just as he himself was advocating violence as a strategy for freedom fighters elsewhere.

And by the way, at the time of his overthrow, there were more CPP members in prison under the PDA than UP folks, just as Danquah had warned Gbedemah and his gaping sycophants. You can say this for Nkrumah that when it came to his mass incarceration, he did not discriminate between friend or foe, the opposition or CPP members, benefactors or enemies, and supporters and non-supporters. He was fair to everybody. Insofar as he dreamed that anybody needed to go to prison without trial, that person languished in jail without trial, for up to ten years!

Nkrumaists also raise negative sentiments against the glorious coup d'état that overthrew Nkrumah’s ignoble dictatorship by associating it with the negative image of the CIA, as if the mass support and thunderous applause for the coup was also stage-managed by the CIA. If the CIA overthrew Nkrumah, then they merely fulfilled our sacred national aspiration embodied in our national anthem to "resist the oppressor's rule with all our hearts and minds forever more" and therefore are they our national heroes deserving of our eternal respect. But saying that Nkrumah's overthrow was the work of CIA merely turns our people into lobotomized idiots who did not have the courage to get rid of a crass dictator!!

I do not subscribe to the idea that the colonial masters were responsible for giving us back our freedom which Nkrumah took away from us under the guise of independence. The gallant men and women like Kotoka and Afrifa who overthrew Nkrumah should be credited with the greatest act of patriotism for our country. And if Nkrumah was so sure of the unpopularity of his overthrow, nothing prevented him from launching a triumphant return to reclaim his power. Unlike him, the new rulers would have given him a fair trial before shooting him dead! So this whole idea that the CIA engineered Nkrumah’s overthrow is giving too much credit to foreigners instead of those gallant soldiers who saw tyranny destroying the country and put their lives on the line to get rid of it.

Nkrumaists also claim that J.B. Danquah was a CIA agent. My question is, how can you prove this allegation when the man was never allowed to defend himself in a proper court of law? J.B. Danquah was incarcerated without trial and without due process, and as such, one cannot establish his guilt or innocence through inadmissible hearsay!! But more importantly, how does Danquah being a CIA asset answer the question of the brutal dictatorship of Kwame Nkrumah himself? Today, if anybody were to impose Nkrumah's type of dictatorship on Ghana, I myself will be working with the CIA to ship arms to Ghana to fight to restore democracy. And who will blame me for working assiduously with a foreign government to fulfill the aspiration in our national anthem "to resist the oppressor's rule with all our will and mind”? After all, throughout history, people have been provoked to fight more for far less.

Nkrumaists are always saying that Nkrumah does no wrong, and go ahead to rationalize and justify all his patent crimes against humanity, summarily condemning all his opponents as nation-wreckers and extolling him as our Messiah; and when we raise the man’s faults, they turn around to say that fairness demands us to be balanced by discussing the man’s greater qualities. What are these qualities? Ingratitude, lies, blackmail, jealousy, dishonesty, deception, greed, betrayal or overweening ambition? And, by the way, when have Nkrumaists said anything positive about the other great men who invited Nkrumah over to help in the independence struggle? What have these people said about J.B. Danquah that will let us reciprocate by seeing any merit in Nkrumah?

Ironically, Nkrumaists state that Nkrumah gave us freedom from the colonial masters. We should only be proud of our independence if it truly gave us true freedoms and justice. But what do they mean by "freedom from colonial masters"? Are they here accepting oppression from our own kind as a good substitute for "oppression from colonial masters"? Do they again narrowly define "self-government" as Nkrumah's singular right to impose a totalitarian regime on our people? I believe that the only better task for Nkrumah, as the first President of Ghana, was to have sought first the solid principles for democratic and just governance and to propagate these across Africa as a shining template for a conceptual African Union . All others would have naturally followed to bring the nation and the continent into political stability and prosperity.

Instead, his simplistic faith in dictatorship and his infantile effort to spread same across Africa accounted for his failure to unite the continent of Africa. What was the model of his own governance in his own country to which the African continent and its people were expected be attracted to?

Finally, Nkrumaists concoct in their own minds a juggernaut of imaginary national crises to which Nkrumah needed to respond with overwhelming power, hence his imposition of a brutal dictatorship on the nation. But Nkrumah was not ruling any different population than those over which the colonialists ruled; and to whom he promised freedom and justice. And those disturbances he cited for his imposition of dictatorship existed long before he even returned to Ghana; and he himself used the same instruments of public agitation for his own political ends. After all, that is how he managed to become president in the first place.

He was extracted from prison to become Prime Minister! And yet, all of a sudden, these disturbances were blown out of proportion to require a permanent emergency rule justifying mass incarceration, one-party state, abolition of free speech and life presidency. How come anytime catastrophe arose in the country, Nkrumah became the eventual winner and beneficiary, adding to his overwhelming power? Who was he kidding?

And in the context of all these dictatorial posturing, his supporters still cast him out as the greatest African leader! Now somebody explain to me how he became the greatest African leader.....By doing what exactly? Uniting Africa under the worst leadership template he concocted in Ghana or bequeathing to the continent a legacy of totalitarianism?

What did Nkrumah do that is a good example in leadership anywhere in the world? I don't care who worships him or who builds a statue for him or who says what about him. But I can tell you why he is the worst leader anywhere and everywhere in the world.

Nkrumah was a man without character, full of destructive hatred and jealousy, deviousness, dishonesty, moral turpitude, ingratitude, greed, selfishness, self-aggrandizement, megalomania, paranoia, mendacity, covetousness and ruthless cunning and chicanery. His propensity for dictatorship began right from the early days of independence until his glorious overthrow on February 24, 1966. The man entered the corridors of power with the sole purpose of perpetuating his power and turning himself into a tin god.

Those ready to make him a supreme god and fountain of honor should note the following salient facts: The “Great Leader” built what was then the largest prison in Africa not to accommodate criminals but to incarcerate his political opponents. The “Redeemer” declared the nation a one-party state with himself as life President, taking the sovereignty from the people and leaving just men with no alternative for a peaceful change of government except through his violent overthrow. Therefore was Nkrumah a fountain of horror, not of honor….a veritable dog and not god.

In these and many other state actions, freedom of speech became anathema to the Ghanaian populace, and the court system which was initially seen as the guardian of the people’s rights came under siege when the Chief Justice was fired for failing to return a verdict favorable to the Great Redeemer. Nkrumah took away the natural right of habeas corpus by causing to be enacted the Preventive Detention Act (PDA), the power to imprison his political opponents without trial. He banned all competing political parties and declared Ghana a one-party state. He created a personality cult by putting his effigy on Ghana's currency and establishing brain-washing institutions whose residual effects are still found in some of our scholars and journalists of today. He neglected the business of the state in pursuit of his over-weening ambition to rule Africa and to turn the continent into a communistic or socialistic dictatorship which he had already begun to experiment in Ghana.

For all these dastardly deeds, Nkrumah deserved to be overthrown; because freedom and justice are fundamental and inherent rights of all humankind, and no known physical monuments, infrastructure or industry will ever trump these universal human rights.

While Nkrumah may well be the most popular leader Ghana ever had because of his unique place in our history, he is also the worst dictator Ghana ever had because of the untrammeled power he exercised over the people. Academic dunderheads who were purposely trained en masse may choose to apotheosize the man without mentioning his faults, but they neither educate nor fool anybody. Nkrumah made sure to screw up their brains for all time, until they can only shout the empty slogan “Nkrumah never dies” and “Nkrumah does no wrong”. But to some of us, the man epitomizes our political tragedy and that of Africa since he is so unsurpassable in his dictatorship, tyranny, autocracy and totalitarianism.

Fortunately, Nkrumah’s misrule has led to the present constitutional changes wherein the one-party system and life presidency have been constitutionally abolished, and wherein the people have been given the right to take up arms and rebel against any government attempting to take the sovereignty from them. No Ghanaian President can make himself President for Life. And today, by law, every Ghanaian has the right and duty to take up arms and overthrow any government that tries to repeat Nkrumah's brutal dictatorship.

In view of this fact, one could conclude that the total and permanent repudiation of Nkrumah's brutal dictatorship is the only good legacy Nkrumah left for Ghana, just as J.J. Rawling’s brutal dictatorship has the unintended consequences of establishing our presently solid democratic credentials.

Samuel Adjei Sarfo, JD, MA, BA (English Major) etc. is an Attorney and Counselor at Law, a Teacher of Lore, Certified High School English Educator, Researcher and Scholar. He can be reached at [email protected]