Brother Okyere Bonna Has Bitten A Little More Than He Can Chew

In his rejoining article titled “Rejoinder: Kufuor on Scramble for His Seat” (Ghanaweb.com 12/7/06), the above-referenced author makes the erroneous assumption of presuming that Dr. J. B. Danquah, the foremost Ghanaian statesman of the twentieth century, was defeated several times at the polls merely because the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics, somehow, unwisely chartered a conservative political agenda, where his arch-political nemesis, President Kwame Nkrumah, pursued a more progressive agenda. I wish that I could side with Mr. Okyere Bonna but I cannot! In sum, we find, in his assertion, nothing further from the truth.

Needless to say, almost no substantive or major student of the period immediately preceding Ghana's declaration of sovereignty from British colonial rule and the decade immediately following it would agree with Mr. Okyere Bonna. Indeed, it goes without saying that Dr. Danquah was a far, far more progressive political thinker than President Nkrumah could ever hope to become. What the writer appears to be cavalierly presuming to be Danquah's “conservative reasoning” is, in fact, the unbested political genius of the Doyen, sagaciously exhibited in the form of “deliberate” or pragmatically reasoned political agenda. For, where Nkrumah flippantly associated architectural structures with development and modern civilization, the ever-reflective Danquah envisaged the same in terms of “Human Development.”

And just what did Danquah mean when he spoke to the critical and indefeasible notion of “Human Development”? It simply meant the enlightened institutionalization of the democratic rule of law, something which Nkrumah, throughout his decade-and-half leadership at the helm of Ghanaian politics, never learned. Thus Nkrumah, like his ideological avatar, Mr. Jeremiah John Rawlings, would doggedly and sophomorically pursue what mainstream political theorists term as “PERSONAL RULE” or “DICTATORSHIP OF AN INDIVIDUAL.”

Indeed, about the only advantage that Mr. Nkrumah had over Dr. Danquah was what might be aptly termed as “THE ARROGANCE OF YOUTH.” It was this same personality disorder which prompted Mr. Rawlings, at 33 years old, to imperiously presume himself to be more politically foresighted and personally more intelligent than almost every Ghanaian citizen alive between 1979 and 2000. A half-generation later, there are not many enlightened Ghanaians left who firmly and honestly believe Mr. Rawlings to have been the most auspicious phenomenon to have emerged on the postcolonial Ghanaian political landscape. To be certain, most level-headed Ghanaians have come to the conclusion, pathetically and belatedly, that the emergence of Rawlings incontrovertibly rendered Ghanaians, as a people, and their country, almost irreparably poorer.

Interestingly, albeit rather sadly, Mr. Okyere Bonna seems to firmly and honestly believe that: “In the end, Dr. J. B. Danquah never became president as a result of the same conservative reasoning.” And just what “conservative reasoning” is the writer, here, implying? Indeed, those of us who have expended the energy, time and monetary resources studying the period under discussion know the preceding to be very different; and so it cannot be that while he is inviolably entitled to his personal opinions, that Mr. Bonna is predicating his assertion on Danquah's failure to clinch the Ghanaian presidency on historical realities.

Needless to say, it has been routinely maintained by ardent and fanatical Nkrumaists and Nkrumacrats that the Convention People's Party demi-god (Remember the slogan: “Nkrumah Never Dies”?) was far ahead of his people and the times. It is our firm and provable contention, which we hope to have clarified to the reader by the end of this article, that the preceding assessment applies far more to the astute, deliberate and foresighted leadership of Dr. J. B. Danquah than President Kwame Nkrumah. And the fact that it has taken Ghanaians a full fifty years, or a half-century, to come to an auspicious and civilized realization that the most significant way forward for Ghanaian politics is, almost without question, the dogged pursuit of a “Property-Owning Democracy” with a prioritized policy agenda of “Welfarism,” or the critical guaranteeing of the fundamental right of every Ghanaian to attaining and maintaining a decent quality of life, amply vindicates the enduring efficacy of the Danquahist ideology or tradition.

Conversely, under Nkrumah and his so-called Convention People's Party (CPP) which, by 1964, had become flagrantly known as “THE PARTY,” or the only constitutionally legitimate political assembly, under the African Show Boy's Unilateral Declaration of Ghana as a One-Party State, what prevailed was a primitive, crass and brutal, and patently inhumane, policy of “STATE CAPITALISM,” under whose odious and extortionate regime only Nkrumah, the Show Boy's Cabinet and Party hacks liberally enjoyed Ghana's national wealth. Thus, for instance, Mr. Krobo Edusei would be propelled from the marginal status of a newspaper vendor, almost overnight, to being the owner of a £ 70, 000 (British Pound-Sterling) mansion, in 1960 currency.

Now the question to be answered is: “Then why did Dr. Danquah lose the 1960 presidential election to Mr. Kwame Nkrumah?” And the grim and almost wistful answer lies somewhere between the Doyen's foible – all-too-human, of course – of naively assuming that every one of the executive membership of the seminal United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) was solemnly possessed of the same missionary zeal of statesmanship as the likes of the Doyen, George Alfred “Paa” Grant, Messrs. Eugene Aaron William Ofori-Atta, Edward Akufo-Addo and Obetsebi-Lamptey, among several others. In sum, Dr. Danquah lost the contest for the premiership of postcolonial Ghana because certain opportunistic elements who were, in hindsight, mistakenly inducted into the executive membership of the UGCC stealthily but brazenly and doggedly pursued a “personal agenda,” even while deviously pretending that the geopolitical landscape of Ghana was woefully undersized and thus the appropriate rage had to be some geopolitical Leviathan called “Pan-Africanism.”

In sum, if in the half-century that Ghanaians have wandered the wilderness of socioeconomic, political and citizenship crisis Dr. Danquah has not been shown to have been far in advance of his traitors and assassins, then Ghanaians, we are afraid, are not likely to learn anything meaningful and purposeful during the next half-century. And then whose fault would that be?

While we cannot cavalierly presume to speak for President J. A. Kufuor, nonetheless, we firmly believe that when the Chief-Constable of the New Patriotic Party exhorts prospective contenders for Presidential Candidacy of the NPP to “join the queue,” Mr. Kufuor knows exactly what he is talking about. For, needless to say, in nearly almost no advanced democracy around the globe do prospective presidential nominees spring out of the boondocks, or the proverbial blue, come “Convention Day,” to lead their parties and nations into the proverbial Promised Land. It has never happened, here, in the United States, the political Vatican of Western Democracy, contrary to what Mr. Bonna would have his readers believe. And it has never happened in Great Britain, Ghana's former colonial overlord; and neither has it ever happened in Germany, India, Australia, France and Japan.

In brief, it is very painful to have to acknowledge this, but it is becoming increasingly transparent, and intolerably nauseating and morally and cerebrally insulting, that postcolonial Ghanaians appear to be the only people in the democratic world who believe in substantive achievement devoid of diligence. The-Monkey-Work-Baboon-Chop approach to political leadership. And this is precisely what President Kufuor means when he pragmatically admonishes all would-be-Kings of the NPP to humbly and patiently serve their turn and term of apprenticeship before presuming to preside over the momentous affairs of the Party and the country.

In fine, I absolutely agree with Mr. Okyere Bonna that seniority per se, as significant as it definitely might be, is no absolute determinant of successful leadership. And to be certain, I am, myself, quite fond of routinely reciting the following proverb which I picked up from my late father: “Ye[r]ewo Ohene no na Opanyin Wo [O]fie,” loosely translated as: “When the sitting King was being born, there were already adult-males in the palace.” Still, who may dare to gratuitously contradict the fact that no experiential, political toddlers ever successfully ran a nation? [For Mr. Okyere Bonna, the example may be substantive U.S. President George W. Bush, of Iraqi infamy]. But even more relevantly, if the Rawlings minstrelsy is nothing to go by then, I am afraid, I know not what else is!

Finally, the truth needs to be unreservedly told to Ghanaians and the rest of the world: “Dr. Danquah never became president of Ghana because he was brutally assassinated by President Kwame (Kofi) Nkrumah at the Nsawam Medium-Security Prison, in the very town where a generation before the Doyen had been knighted 'AKUAFO KANEA,' the Farmers' Guiding Light.' Then also, during the 1960 Presidential Election [see Peter Omari's Kwame Nkrumah: The Anatomy of an African Dictatorship (1972)] Nkrumah issued a peremptory edict prohibiting Dr. Danquah from using campaign vans owned by the United Party, not the CPP or even the Ghana Government! Likewise, Danquah was prevented from being interviewed by the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, or having his campaign commercials carried by the GBC.”

So now you see, Barima Bonna, why Dr. Danquah immitigably detested the cavalier parading of personal opinions as historical facts or evidence?

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., teaches English and Journalism at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of twelve books of poetry and essays, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana.” E-Mail: akoampaahoofe@aol.com.

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