It Is the NDC that Suffers from a “Phobia of Progress,” Not the NPP, Trust Me - Part 3

President Kwame Nkrumah and US President Lyndon Baines Johnson

It is scandalously obvious that Mr. Atitso Akpalu knows infinitesimally little to absolutely nothing about the history of both the funding and the construction of the Volta or the Akosombo Dam; else the hip-shooting National Democratic Congress’ goon would not be making such unpardonably noetic bullet-point accusatory statement as the following: “Sabotaging the Akosombo Dam (1960s): The Tradition [United Party or the so-called Danquah-Busia-Dombo Tradition?] fiercely resisted the construction of the Akosombo Dam - the literal lifeblood of Ghana’s energy sector. They aggressively lobbied international lenders, including the World Bank, to block funding for the project under the guise of fiscal prudence” (See “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).

It is rather damn pathetic that the critic makes absolutely no logical attempt to provide his audience/readers with the sources of his claims and assertions because, somehow, he appears to have figured out that the fanatics of his political and ideological camp are just as shallow-minded and intellectually effete and pathologically bankrupt as himself. Mr. Akpalu would do himself and his fellow ideological truckers and political party associates great good by reading David Apter;s first-hand and authoritative treatise on the subject of the construction of the erstwhile Volta Dam, currently more popularly known as the Akosombo Dam, particularly that portion or aspect of the late Professor Apter’s discussion of the heated parliamentary debates that transpired in the Gold Coast Legislative Assembly through much of the 1950s, and not the 1960s, as the NDC propagandist falsely claims.

The title of Dr. David Ernest Apter’s book is “Ghana in Transition,” originally published in 1955 as “The Gold Coast in Transition,” and then subsequently reissued in 1963, 1966 and 1972 by Princeton University Press. Professor Apter, it is important to note, taught History, Sociology and Political Science at Yale University for more than 30 years and before the latter Ivy-League Institution at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University and the University of California at Berkeley. Indeed, had the critic even casually acquainted himself with Professor Apter’s “Ghana in Transition” - and by the way, the Brooklyn-New York native authored several other books on the transitional era leading to the massive granting of geopolitical sovereignty by the Western Colonial Imperialists to dozens of African countries between the 1950s and the 1960s - Mr. Akpalu would not be making such an oaf and an arrant fool of himself as he does with reckless abandon in his aforereferenced article.

You see, in “Ghana in Transition,” Professor Apter promptly and premonitively and definitively puts paid to such mendacious malarky as luridly and orgiastically indulged by our self-styled “Senior Citizen,” when the author categorically, preemptively and authoritatively asserts that absolutely no Ghanaian leader from Ghana’s political and ideological opposition protested the construction of the Akosombo Dam, except regarding the issue and the critical question of the most cost-effective funding source or sources for the project. Mr. Akpalu, if, indeed, our “Senior Citizen” really cares about the salutary progress and the development of Our Beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, as he so pontifically claims that, indeed, he does in his turd-expectorated prolix under discussion, he may also take even the most glancing or tangential look at Yours Truly’s historical biography titled “Dr. JB Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse, 2005), where the same subject is also extensively discussed with historiographical and narratological anchors woven around the equally authoritative works of longtime British-born political observer and midwife of the erstwhile Gold Coast’s epic transition from the unsavory status of a British Colonial Suzerain to a proud and a Sovereign Politically Self-Governed Independent Republic of Ghana, namely, Professor Dennis Austin, in particular the seminal treatise of the latter titled “Politics in Ghana: 1946-1960.”

There are, of course, much later Dennis Austin works that ploughs/plows through the Faux-Revolutionary Era of Acute Decadence under the Veritable Reign-of-Terror of the Rawlings-Tsikata Diarchy of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) Junta and the very first terms of a “democratically elected” President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings’ political juggernaut of the National Democratic Congress (NDC). If, indeed, there had occurred what may be aptly termed as a “Funding Drought” or a “Funding Famine” for the construction of the Akosombo Dam, this was almost wholly and decidedly engineered by the then Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah himself, who had strategically inadvisably resorted to taking jejune rhetorical potshots at the globally and the economically dominant “Aryan West,” especially the United States of America and the United Kingdom of Great Britain, well before the increasingly hardline Marxist-oriented American-educated President Nkrumah had found firm footing, as it were, in the geopolitical and the socioeconomic spheres of global influence or firmaments.

Mr. Akpalu may have either conveniently forgotten or simply elected to ignore the fact that in prematurely throwing morally and strategically poisoned ideological darts at good, old “Uncle Sam,” Mr. Kwame Nkrumah’s truculently Anti-Western dissertative tirade, titled “Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism” (1965), had definitely not been aimed at endearing his country or attracting the cordiality and the generosity of the major Western-controlled banking and lending institutions. The publication of the latter book, for example, had provoked US President Lyndon Baines Johnson to promptly call for the author to immediately withdraw his “Animal Farm”-like attack on predatory Western Capitalist Culture or risk irreparably damaging the hitherto cordial diplomatic relationship between the United States and Ghana, all to the “Water-Over-Duck Feathers” avail.

To be certain, absolutely none of his political opponents at home could have done more to hamper President Nkrumah’s funding solicitation capability or capacity for the construction of the Akosombo Dam than our politically suicidal leader had done himself. A critical examination of such gross strategic indiscretion, one that inescapably verged on plain naivety and, even some of his most ardent critics both within the ranks of the Convention People’s Party and outside of the latter institutional establishment, would say such strategic puerility did not require the cranial capacity of a proverbial rocket scientist.

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