Both Legon and National Cathedral Could Be Named after J B Danquah

I almost decided not to answer the latest inane remark reportedly made by the sometime Mahama presidential hanger-on who presently represents the people of the Builsa-South Constituency, in the Upper-East Region, in Ghana’s Parliament on the ticket of the country’s main opposition party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Dr. Clement Apaak. We are reliably informed that in reacting to the long-overdue proposal for the renaming of the University of Ghana, Legon, after the man who singularly and fervidly led the effort resulting in the September 1948 landmark establishment of the country’s foremost tertiary academy, namely, the putative Doyen or Dean of Gold Coast and Ghanaian Politics, Dr. Joseph (Nana Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye-Danquah, the Deputy-Ranking Member of the Parliamentary Education Committee is widely reported to have sarcastically remarked that the man who most recently reiterated this long-debated proposition, to wit, the President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, was egregiously and flagrantly seeking to rewrite the history of Ghana to falsely synch with the desires and the self-interests of the Ofori-Panyin and the Boakye-Danquah clans (See “Complete Your National Cathedral and Name It after J B Danquah – NDC MP to Akufo-Addo” RainbowRadioOnline.com /Ghanaweb.com 8/13/23).

No such rejoinder or reaction could be more inexcusably preposterous. Indeed, if he really knew not only the Standard History or the Received History vis-à-vis the foundation and the establishment of the erstwhile University College of The Gold Coast, the Mahama lackey who once claimed to have been robbed of tens of thousands of Ghana Cedis, so-called, that he kept in his private Accra residence, which money he also claimed belonged to a civil society organization that he was managing at the time, Dr. Apaak would not be making such an obnoxious and a crassly ignorant statement. Now, let no cognitively inattentive reader or National Democratic Congress’ fanatic or sympathizers write to Sincerely Yours bitterly complaining that he only insults Ghanaians of Non-Akyem or Non-Akan descent. What the Builsa-South Parliamentarian said in reaction to Nana Akufo-Addo’s call was not couched in romantically endearing terms; nor did it reflect the remarkably measured reaction of a well-educated and civilized man. Paying this haughty Johnnie-Just-Come-Lately in his own proverbial coin is thus absolutely the most righteous and unimpeachable thing to do.

That the critic also sits on the Parliamentary Education Committee makes his statement all the more ironic and a negative reflection on the caliber of the membership composition of the aforementioned committee. You see, the problem of these Left-leaning opposition party politicians is their apparently pathological and woeful inability to differentiate the historical reality of the foundations of postcolonial Ghana and the foremost or the vanguard protagonists of Ghana’s Independence Struggle and the Intellectual, Cultural and Socioeconomic Development. Then also, matters are not made any less complicated by the fact that Ghana’s first postcolonial leader, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, unhealthily allowed himself to be festooned with an orgiastic Cult-of-Personality Hallow by his largely sycophantic lackeys and hangers-on.

Which is why nearly 70 years later, after the then Prime Minister Nkrumah and a handful of his close associates or henchmen stood on the Old Polo Grounds in our nation’s capital of Accra to declare the country’s reassertion of its sovereignty from Britain’s colonial imperialism, the narrative of Ghana’s history continues be jejunely and sophomorically mired in proxy personality squabbles. I also wanted to add earlier on, at the beginning of the present column, that critic Apaak would equally do himself great good to conduct some serious research into the history of the establishment of both The Achimota School and the country’s oldest and largest healthcare facility, namely, the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital (KBTH), and then publish his findings for all the members of the Global Ghanaian Community (GGC) to read and discuss. You see, we can, each and every one of us healthily maintain a diversity of opinions on practically every single subject or topic of our collective history as a nation and a people. What we are not allowed to do, by the established rules of respectable scholarship and professional ethics, is to create our own facts by scandalously canonizing our private and personal opinions and then presenting the same in the specious guise of scientific proof or evidence.

Now, has this sometime servile Mahama employee and taxpayer-loot beneficiary ever wondered why the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings and his Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) junta erected that magnificent bronze statue in the likeness and the memory of the man who has been universally acclaimed as the foremost scholar, author, philosopher, dramatist, thinker and statesman of the Ghana of his generation? To be frank with the members of the Global Ghanaian Community, the renaming of the University of Ghana after Dr. Danquah would not be the subject of heated and vitriolic debate that it is today, if the President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, a grandnephew of the acclaimed Doyen or Dean of Gold Coat and Modern Ghanaian Politics, had not initially been so curiously tentative about the entire indispensably worthwhile and wholesome proposition and almost bashfully and circuitously gone about it, thereby creating unnecessary suspicion in the minds of even the most progressive-minded and civically responsible and patriotic Ghanaian citizens.

For example, was it really necessary for Nana Akufo-Addo to begin renaming some tertiary academies in the country after other illustrious sons and daughters of the land – actually almost exclusively sons of the land – as if he found the entire idea of boldly and frankly taking steps to speed up the process of the renaming of the University of Ghana after Dr. Danquah in much the same confident and steely manner in which he had gone about the recent ECOWAS Court-approved Agyapa Investment Deal? The latter of which statement is, of course, not the least bit intended to unreservedly support the rather strange decision of the ECOWAS Court, knowing what we already knew about the shady and murky set of circumstances that surrounded the same prior to the apparent decision by the Akufo-Addo Government to take his highly controversial and volatile matter to the ECOWAS Court.

Which, of course, is also not to necessarily imply that the jury is not still out there or still deliberating. Which simply means that, ultimately, the onus of the finality of such temporally and socioeconomically far-reaching decision may still peremptorily lie with the Supreme Court of Ghana, rather than the ECOWAS Court per se.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
August 18, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]