Three of Nkrumah’s Unpardonable Sins.

Three of Kwame Nkrumah’s cardinal sins are as follows:

1. Imprisonment without trial for ten years.
2. Life presidency.
3. One-party state.

It takes an extremely viscous wickedness to contemplate all these evils within the context of a republican state, let alone perpetrate or perpetuate these horrible crimes on Ghanaians. What is more, it takes a high density of inferiority complex for any people to accept this palpable insanity as sanity.

Nkrumah was fifty-seven years when he was overthrown, far younger than many of us here. But he has taught us to worship his evil deeds and accept a veritable scoundrel as our God. He has been very successful in contaminating

our logic, altering our moral compass and abominating our reasoning through his brain-washing institutions and activities. The fact that we can gobble his phlegm from the spittoon of authoritarianism with the unclean tongue of our conscience is ample testimony of Nkrumah’s overwhelming success in burning our brains into ashes from the altar simmering with the searing fires of his hollow ideology.

But to some of us with a healthy philosophical and inquisitive mind, unless we can deny these basic claims of his dictatorship, we cannot even consider him as a leader of any caliber. Neither can we begin to accept any other

presumptive leadership narrative about him. For no amount of counter- narrative will obviate Nkrumah’s evil deeds or whitewash his misleadership.

To measure the degree of our error in judgement about Nkrumah and to expose the errors of his ways, let’s reflect on how we will all feel if Akuffo- Addo were to declare one-party state with himself as life President; or to promulgate imprisonment without trial. How will we feel about him?

So why are we here rationalizing and defending evil deeds just because they were done by Nkrumah? Our moral and ethical compass has missed the true North. And we march on into the abyss of ignorance like lobotomized zombies at the clarion call of his enchanting name.

The first principle of leadership, according to John Locke, is the affordment of liberty to the people. Nkrumah sacrificed that fundamental principle. That fundamental principle has finality and absolutism in the general ingredients of leadership, and is neither curable, supplanted, obviated, or substituted and ameliorated by the provision of infrastructure for a people. Infrastructure is not among the basic elements of elemental governance and the primordial requirements of its true nature.

Based on the above, Nkrumah cannot therefore be artificially imported into the sanctum of competent leadership by some artificial fiat that exorcises and excises or excuses his evil deeds. He was elected to bring independence,

freedom and justice to the people. There is no contention here that he failed this basic task. Everything else he is credited to have accomplished is secondary, irrelevant and of no moment.

And unless we realize this, our inchoate democracy and survival as a country will be impossible, because we will be rendering as valueless and worthless our fundamental freedoms and liberty and mortgaging them on the profane and ephemeral altar of material albeit transient and perishable infrastructure.

Life is a journey towards the sacred order; it is an expedition to be guided by an unalterable compact and compass designed to point to the true moral and ethical North. Our responsibility as a nation with vision is to make that journey as coequals, whether we lead or follow. We cannot bend, and we cannot alter or change our moral compass to accommodate error. And we cannot use a different counterweight for the moral and ethical principles because of the pilot at the rudder of the ship of state!

We cannot consider evil as good and good as evil. We cannot pretend not to know the difference. We cannot offer a palliatory offertory to transmogrify or ratify patent evil into righteousness, and we cannot leave the stained sea of sin unincarnadine, to change its blueness into whiteness. Or on account of our sacrosanct desire to sanctify into Godhood a mortal man who once misgoverned our nation. Nkrumah is the worst President Ghana ever had, and there will be none after him to be worse than him.

In the final analysis, he died ignominiously of poisoning in exile without having seen his wife and children again after his overthrow. He was so disgraced and afraid for his life that he couldn’t travel to Egypt to visit them;

and they also, for reasons best known only to themselves, abandoned him to his fate for the remainder of his miserable life.

So it was that in the literary fashion of poetic justice, his evil deeds caught up with him and followed him to the grave within a short spate of five years, at the age of only sixty-two, my present age!

My only sin is in my intrinsic joy and jubilation of his great suffering and misfortune after he was overthrown and efficiently poisoned. But for once, grant me reprieve to enjoy in his evil fate.

The evil that men do will follow them wherever they go, and no ancient blood will grant any pardon for those who commit unpardonable sins against their fellow citizens.