It Is the NDC that Suffers from a “Phobia of Progress,” Not the NPP, Trust Me - Part 2

The patently degenerate apocryphal fallacy that, somehow, against the sacred rules of common sense and fair play, the organized opposition to President Kwame Nkrumah’s tautologically named political establishment of the Convention People’s Party (CPP), namely, the Dr. Kofi Abrefa Busia-led Ghana Congress Party (GCP), subsequently consolidated with other splinter opposition political parties into the United Party (UP), following the strategically catastrophic, if also politically mischievous split and the departure of the Nkrumah faction of the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), had fiercely fought against Britain’s granting of Independence or Sovereign self-determination to the then-Gold Coast in the 1950s, on March 7, 1957, to be precise, is an unconscionable and a scandalous farce that ought to tell readers of the goofy propaganda hatchet bullet-point fraught article, captioned “The Phobia of Progress: Exposing the NPP’s History of Sabotage, the 1992 Amnesia, and the Crucial Role of Civil Society” (Modernghana.com 9/18/26), more about the pathologically mendacious mindset of the author of such academically and intellectual hogwash, to speak much less about a psychologically unhinged temperament that seriously requires a major critical psychiatric examination and a comprehensive therapy, perhaps for the rest of the life of our self-described “Senior Citizen,” namely, The Honorable Mr. Atitso Akpalu.

First of all, there is absolutely no forensically credible evidence that points to the fact of the Busia-led United Party, of whose most critical component was the Simon Diedong Dombo-led Northern People’s Party - the original NPP, as one critic facetiously reminded the rest of the nation not very long ago - had fiercely fought to morally and politically regressively to obtusely prolong the long nightmare that was Ghana’s era of the devious occupation and the effective colonization of the precolonial independent multi-states of the erstwhile Gold Coast and what became known as the Northern Territories. Not such strategic mischief, such as being perpetrated presently by Mr. Akpalu, could be more inexcusably insulting to the intelligence of the average Ghanaian citizen, irrespective of ideological suasion and/or political party affiliation.

You see, what villainously sophistical detractors of the present-day main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) are clearly hellbent on doing or achieving is to hope, hopelessly against hope that, somehow, a critical mass of Ghanaian citizens and the electorate would unreflectively latch onto such patently asinine tack of self-serving ratiocination. It is almost as if the prime target audience of Mr. Akpalu was the President Donald John Trump-led Make America Great Again (MAGA) wing of the United States’ ruling Republican Party, the very ideological and political establishment that the leadership of the critic’s affiliated party, to wit, the President John Dramani Mahama-led ragtag juggernaut that is the late President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress (NDC) did not have to deal with or do business with a pathologically tariffs-addicted and neocolonially oriented Herr Trump.

Had our “Honorable Senior Citizen” been studiously following the morally unsavory events on the ground, vis-a-vis the Trump Administration’s widely reported Neo-Aryan attempt to recently cannibalize the Genome Data Bank of the Ghanaian Citizenry, he would not have so brazenly and downright criminally fabricated such morally and strategically reprehensible story such as the future Prime Minister Busia’s leading an official delegation to London, UK, to inadvisably or damn foolishly reverse the then clearly irreversible and the historically inevitable course of Ghana’s onward march towards Independence or the epic and glorious reassertion of Ghana’s Sovereignty from Britain’s colonial imperialism.

Which, of course, makes it logically imperative to promptly highlight the fact that what the politically and the ideologically contemptuous and criminally contemptible Mr. Atitso Akpalu seeks to and/or achieve here is to abjectly gaslight his political opponents by disingenuously conflating truths with half-truths into a veritable patchwork of wholecloths of incredulous mendacity aimed at portraying his main political opponents as being wholly and woefully bereft of any remarkable sense of dignity, a critical lack of any sense of enlightened and/or moral and political self-awareness and native intelligence or wisdom.

Of course, it is widely known and documented that, indeed, an Oxbridge-educated Dr. K. A. Busia, the very first indigenous Ghanaian scholar to be appointed a professor on the academic faculty of the University of Ghana, had led a delegation of United Party stalwarts to London in 1952, or thereabouts, in order to discuss with the British colonial authorities some thorny issues regarding the latter suzerain’s decision to cede Ghana its long-anticipated reassertion of its inalienable sovereignty.

Not surprisingly, however, what is often and almost contextually and deliberately and invariably not highlighted or honestly pointed out in the self-preening propaganda narratives of the Pro-Nkrumah and Pro-CPP “rhetorical outriders”, as it were, is the unignorable fact that Dr. Busia’s London Delegation had been charged with the foremost and the sole agenda of ensuring perspicuously or foresightedly, in retrospect, that an Nkrumah-led “Journey to Independence,” as a politically more mature and visionary Dr. Danquah premonitively envisaged the same. And it was the fact that a pioneering Nkrumah leadership of an Independent Ghana was more highly likely not to redound to the long-term benefit of both Ghana and its neighbors, especially the emerging postcolonial democratic countries and republics in the West African Subregion and, to be certain, the African Continent at large. It is downright pathetic that fanatical Nkrumaist critics like Mr. Atitso Akpalu rather uncritically, or perhaps deliberately, confuse the political temperament of a vaultingly ambitious but gravely exuberant and woefully inexperienced President Nkrumah with the geopolitical entity of Ghana.

The latter blunder is quite understandable, in view of the fact that Nkrumah own autobiography metaphorically or figuratively sought to synonymize the life of Ghana’s first postcolonial leader with very emergence of Ghana as a modern geographical and geopolitical entity with the Nkroful-born former protégé of Dr. Danquah, namely, “Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah” (New York: International Publishers, 1957). Some 70 years later, even the most progressive scholars of Ghana and African History and Political Culture, including Dr. Vincent Bakpetu Thompson (1930-2021), the British-Nigerian Makerere and British-educated author of “The Making of the African Diaspora: 1441-1900” (London: Longman’s, 1987), one of the most authoritative tomes on the subject and an avuncular friend of this writer, would confide to the latter, in a phone conversation towards the end of his life that, on a balance, Dr. Danquah had turned out to be the far more visionary in his deliberate and systematic approach to the African Liberation Struggle.

On the latter account must also be emphatically underscored the fact that among the African scholars of his age and generation, Professor Thompson had very few rivals in his “fanatical” devotion to the proverbial “African Showboy.” Busia’s much-maligned Mission to London was, contrary to what many of his most ardent detractors and some of the most grossly misguided relatives and descendants of these yesteryear’s inveterate enemies and detractors would have the rest of us believe, absolutely not aimed at either regressing or reversing Ghana’s onward and logically and politically irreversible or inevitable “stride” into the heroic phase of our collective struggle for sovereignty, but to ensure that the most astute and psychologically and intellectually mature Ghanaian statesmen and women, for that matter, assumed the reins of governance from our physically departing British colonial overlords.

Now, the proper and the most relevant question to ask at this juncture ought to be the fact of such approach, as adopted by the Busia-led Ghana Congress Party (GCP) and, by logical extension, the United Party (UP) was the most constructive and effective way to go about the aforementioned problem of Nkrumah’s austere and dictatorial leadership tendencies. The future results of the latter question or conundrum is presently right here with us. And the proper and the most logical thing to do now is to humbly and modestly learn from the steps and the missteps of our yeomanly forebears in order to more wisely and progressively forge a relatively more informed, enlightened and effective way forward.

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