Why Is Former President Kufour Still Fawning Over Western Politicians Presiding Over Racist Systems?

Not too long ago I decided that I would no longer allow myself to be upset by the revisionists of our nation's history who use half truths, twisted facts and pure lies to denigrate President Nkrumah.

I came to that decision, because it struck me one day - whiles listening to a diatribe against Nkrumah being broadcast during a morning current affairs discussion programme - that despite the best efforts of his political opponents, in the main, the vast majority of the ordinary people of Ghana now accept that Nkrumah was indeed a truly great and selfless leader, who devoted himself to ordinary people and transforming Ghanaian society.

They have also accepted that Nkrumah was neither corrupt nor self-seeking - and that he did not amass wealth whiles serving as Ghana's leader. Consequently, it no longer bothers me when I hear Nkrumah's detractors spewing their many untruths about him.

However, one can understand those Nkrumahist politicians who still feel compelled to respond to such unfair criticism of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, whenever it is made by anti-Nkrumah politicians.

When members of the International Democratic Union (IDU) called on former President Kufuor whiles in Ghana for the first meeting in sub-Saharan African of the IDU's Executive and Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, the former president surprisingly launched a verbal attack on Nkrumah.

The irony for me, is that reading through some of the declassified National Security Security documents about President Nkrumah, from the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson eras, one notices that whiles American officials were contemptous of the childlike fawning of Nkrumah's political opponents, clearly, all the Western leaders understood that Nkrumah was the one African leader who posed a real threat to their nations' continued hold on Africa's resources and their perpetual preying on the colonised minds of many Africans.

Thus, getting rid of Nkrumah was a top priority security matter for them in Africa.

Sadly, in telling his visitors that Nkrumah destroyed Ghana's economy, what escaped former President Kufuor was that it was the political forebears of the selfsame Western members of the IDU, who deliberately brought Ghana's economy to its knees - simply to create public disaffection against Nkrumah's government: and make his overthrow more likely and possible.

It also seems to have escaped former president Kufuor that his own party is today adopting Nkrumah's import substitution industrialisation policy to boost growth in the economy and create jobs for young people - something that his political forebears criticised as white elephant projects. Incredible.

And it is also instructive that former President Kufuor developed a severe case of amnesia about his own anti-democratic political antecedents - regarding the fact that in 1958, despite the fact that Ghana was a functioning multiparty democracy, his party's political forebears plotted to overthrow Nkrumah's Convention People's Party (CPP), and that it was only the death in a plane crash of the leader of the coup plotters, Brigadier Michel, that aborted that planned coup.

And worst of all - in an age when terrorism has spawned draconian laws in the Western democracies, which severely curtail individual freedoms, and which are far more anti-democratic (and all of which one supports, one must hasten to add, being someone who always strongly condemns the cowardly extremists who engage in acts of terrorism around the globe), than all the anti-terrorism laws enacted by Nkrumah's government - former President Kufuor alluded to those anti-terrorism national security initiatives of the CPP government as if they were abominations. Such is life.

Poor man. Wake up, Ghanaman. Haaba. The question is: Why, in the 21st century, is a black African politician still fawning over Western politicians presiding over racist systems - and many of whom are more likely than not secretly contemptuous of the black race? Ebeeii.