It Is the NDC that Suffers from a “Phobia of Progress,” Not the NPP, Trust Me - Part 1

As usual, I read Atitso Akpalu’s characteristically pedestrian and desultory rehashing of the trite, jaded and patently false historical propaganda guff about the widely purported vehement opposition of Britain’s decision to grant Ghana her inalienable sovereignty and the right to self-determination, which is called “Independence,” with amused and obstreperous contempt, as Nigeria’s Nobel Literature Laureate Professor Wole Soyinka would have even more eloquently, mellifluously and felicitously characterized the same (See “The Phobia of Progress: Exposing the NPP’s History of Sabotage, the 1992 Amnesia, and the Crucial Role of Civil Society,” subtitled “From Postponing Independence to Blocking Constitutional Evolution - The Unbroken Lineage of Danquah-Busia-Dombo Obstructionism” Modernghana.com 9/18/26).

Indeed, if any ideological camp or school of Ghanaian leaders could be aptly accused of sabotaging Ghana’s postcolonial progress and sociopolitical integrity, there can be absolutely no gainsaying that the most guilty and/or culpable group of Ghanaian politicians and political-party establishment is none other than the strategically misguided praise-singing hoodlum gang of thuggish opportunists that was led by the carpet-crossing turncoat, namely, the thoroughgoing corrupt and kleptocratic Mr. Kojo Botsio, and the vaultingly ambitious future President Kwame Nkrumah, the “British-Knighted” Head of Government Business in the Transitional Era of the erstwhile Colony of the Gold Coast and, subsequently, Prime Minister of The Gold Coast and a Newly Independent Ghana.

You see, to be able to forensically unimpeachably make the rather inexcusably absurd and intellectually quixotic argument that, indeed, the Danquah-Busia-Dombo camp of the pioneering leaders who led the erstwhile Gold Coast to Independence as Ghana had actually sabotaged Ghana’s Epic Journey to Independence, as Dr. Joseph (Nana Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye Danquah put it at the time, Mr. Atitso Akpalu has to, perforce, credibly inform his obvious captive and ideologically fanatical audience from the camp of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), about precisely which group of Ghanaian leaders founded the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), the very first mass modern political organization and movement that most significantly approximated the institutional and the functional status of a National Political Party (See Dennis Austin’s “Politics in Ghana: 1946 to 1960.” Oxford University Press [OUP], 1964 & 1970).

You see, merely imperiously and jejunely passing off such historiographical apocrypha, as “Senior Citizen” Atitso Akpalu attempts to do in his aforereferenced pabulum of make-believe exposé, does not only scandalously betray the author’s screaming lack of even the most basic and readily accessible knowledge about the intricate concatenation of the factors and the set of volatile circumstances that culminated in Ghana’s most significant political achievement and historic milestone in the 20th Century; equally significantly, it unpardonably insults the intelligence of Ghanaians as a people and a nation, irrespective of ethnicity, gender and ideological proclivity.

Then also, the most logical question for any reasonably well-educated and critically thinking Ghanaian citizen and/or resident to ask is as follows: Was the arrival of the future Prime Minister and President Kwame Nkrumah from London, UK, at the express invitation and the sponsorship of the pioneering leaders and the seminal founders of the George Alfred “Paa” Grant and the J. B. Danquah-led United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), aimed specifically, expressly and systematically to ensure that the then-Gold Coast’s bold and fierce struggle for sovereignty and political self-determination would be “obtusely” and “cretinously” regressed or retarded indefinitely, as the evidently psychologically dislocated Mr. Atitso Akpalu supposes?

You see, cynically and mischievously parading such abject and patent falsehood in order to deliriously “hagiographize” or apotheosize the image, reputation and the stature of Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, later festooned with several Honorary Doctorates by both foreign and local colleges and universities, does not do any significant or special favors for the man whose own phenomenal achievements did not need any wholecloth of mendacities by such self-proclaimed “Senior Citizens” of the ilk and warped ideological suasion as the author of the aforereferenced prolix to make the same any better or more credible and especially appealing to the global community of civilized nations.

To be certain, it is the scholastic acumen and the credibility and the intellectual and the moral integrity of the critic that are pathetically and scandalously at stake here and absolutely nothing else. Indeed, if Mr. Akpalu had been a mature “Senior Citizen,” as he would have the rest of us believe, and had patiently allowed himself to watch or been present at the widely televised inaugural ceremony or the commissioning of the completion of The Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum in Ghana’s capital city of Accra, a regal and a colorful ceremony that witnessed the graceful presence of dozens of African American dignitaries, including the then-widow of the legendary and the immortalized Black Human and Civil Rights Leader, Activist and Muslim Minister Malcolm X, Dr. Betty Shabazz, the insufferably vitriolic, even if also quite understandably desperate critic, would have heard the late President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings (1947-2000), the man who officially presided over the ceremony, categorically and unreservedly declare that in as much as the great stature and the pioneering leadership caliber of President Nkrumah could not be objectively controverted or denied, on the critical question and the subject of the salutary promotion of Universal Human Rights and Administrative Justice, the general conduct of the American-educated first postcolonial leader of Ghana and the so-called Sub-Saharan Africa was not the least bit as emulative and exemplary as it could have been,

The equally legendary and immortalized Busumuru Kofi Atta Annan, Ghana’s sole Nobel Prize Laureate and the first Indigenous Continental African to be Secretary-General of the United Nations Organization (UN), also had a similar morally and politically unflattering remark to make about how President Nkrumah had been a scandalous and an epic failure in the progressive practice and the promotion of an exemplary democratic political culture worthy of emulation by the overwhelming majority of the entire leadership of the African Continent and well beyond.

It is with the foregoing forensically verifiable foibles of Dr. Nkrumah smack in perspective that Yours Truly noted at the beginning of this column that the “most guilty” or culpable of our first generation of pre- and post-independence Ghanaian leaders belonged, for the most part, to the “Eleventh-Hour” breakaway institutional establishment of the Nkrumah and the Botsio and co. led tautologically named Convention People’s Party. In short, as Americans are fond of saying, there was, and is still, enough blame to go around. All Our Vanguard Pioneering Ghanaian Leaders made their own fair share of mistakes and blunders, some of which flagrantly contradicted their officially and publicly proclaimed values of conduct; neither are their descendants completely bereft of a legion of these same foibles.

If, indeed, Our “Senior Citizen” Critic really cares to see Ghanaian leaders foreground the collective good and interest of Our Beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, ahead of their own selfish and parochial socioeconomic and political advantages, then “Senior Citizen” Atitso Akpalu ought to put his metaphorical money where his mouth is by unflinchingly promoting Truth and Balance in his largely one-trick-pony formulaic propaganda potshots.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]