Speaker Michael Oquaye Cannot Be Contested On Republic Day Argument

Other than his wrongful contextual usage of the verb “exert,” which ought to have been “assert,” Speaker Michael Aaron Oquaye’s move to have Ghana’s Republic Day commemoration changed from July 1 to January 7, can only be fruitlessly contested by two categories of Ghanaian citizens, namely, Nkrumah- or Left-leaning fanatics, on the one hand, and those who are totally innocent of the facts of the landmark events that led to the country’s reassertion of its Sovereignty from British colonial rule on March 6, 1957 (See “Prof. Oquaye on Changing Republic Day to January 7” Modernghana.com 1/9/18).

And, oh, Speaker Oquaye also makes what clearly appears to be a genuine mistake when he observes the U.S. Declaration of Independence to have occurred in 1789, which really pertains to the French Revolution and the radical abolition of Monarchical Tyranny. Actually, the American Revolution occurred some 13 years before its French copy. My African-American Studies specialist background tempts me to make a few critical comments here, but I would rather reserve my comments for another topic and a different context altogether. Indeed, if I had my own way, and I have actually written and published several columns about this in the past, Ghana’s Fourth Republic Day would be observed or celebrated on January 7, with calendrical reference to the year 2001, rather than 1993, as the former marks the beginning of genuine democracy in the country under a civilian administration that respected the fundamental human rights of the average Ghanaian citizen.

Speaker Oquaye is also dead-on-target in his all-too-rationalistic argument that as a nation, Ghanaians cannot claim to have undergone or experienced three discrete periods of Republican Political Cultures or Epochs, none of which ended successfully, and then adamantly and illogically refuse to celebrate the most mature, productive and successful of all our Republics, namely, the Fourth Republic. That is plain lunacy! We perfectly appreciate the fact that our First Republic fundamentally had to do with the unfettered freedom of one individual Afropean to lord it over the rest of us. That individual, of course, was Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, who combined both the titles of Prime Minister and President or Head-of-State, once Sir Charles Arden-Clarke, the Governor-General and Her Majesty’s Personal Representative, departed our shores in January 1961.

Nkrumah was also a Napoleonic Emperor who had no lieutenant or Vice-President. In declaring Ghana to be a Republic in July 1960, Nkrumah simply wanted to get the British out of the way as well as the Westminster System of Governance, which required the Prime Minister to render periodic accounts of his stewardship to the people before Parliament and their Representatives. In reality, none of Ghana’s first three republican regimes were real Republics in the practical sense of the periodic transitioning of power through the ballot box.

And so, in practical terms, those who want the commemorative status quo of July 1 to be maintained are actually calling for the statutory abrogation of the same. If the latter sounds like a contradiction in terms, that is the reality of the logic of these Left-leaning “radical conservatives.” The fact of the matter is that our first three so-called Republics merely existed in name, not in practice. This is how Speaker Oquaye’s argument can be best understood or appreciated.

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