Our Universities Have Been Highly Politicized Since Kwame Nkrumah

I don’t know his age – not that it really matters, anyhow – but if Prof. George KT Oduro had been studiously reading up on the history of the unsavory and unhealthy politicization of our universities and colleges, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast (UCC) would have discovered to his utter surprise and, perhaps even horror, that the politicization of the academy began with the country’s first postcolonial leader, Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, later re-designated in a heavily rigged referendum as Executive-President Kwame Nkrumah. Under the highly divisive and morbidly partisan Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP), academic qualifications for teaching at any of the tertiary academies in the country were subordinated to one’s political affiliation or card-carrying membership in a political party; and the only political party membership that mattered, of course, was membership of the Convention People’s Party (See “Extreme Politicization of Our Universities Must Stop” Ghana News Agency / Modernghana.com 9/15/18).

Back then, as now, appointments to the Boards of Trustees and the Academic Councils of our major universities and colleges were made according to one’s political affiliation and ideological orientation. In fact, it was because of his publicly expressed pet aversion for this ungodly and academically and professionally regressive practice that resulted in the crude and summary dismissal of the Anglo-Irish Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana, Prof. Connor Cruise O’Brien, who had been personally invited into the country by President Nkrumah to assume the post. Under the 20-year tenure of the Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), and later the National Democratic Congress (NDC), the situation got progressively worse, with the appointments of Vice-Chancellors, Deans and Directors of Schools, Programs and Departments who were widely and publicly alleged to have been promoted over the heads – no pun intended – of better qualified and more senior colleagues.

Oftentimes, such academic and administrative injustice was tinged with tribalism and party affiliation. I prefer to leave out the details of such academic injustice for Prof. Oduro to figure out the same for himself. Not too long ago, for example, Prof. Richard Amoako-Baah, formerly of the History and Political Science Department at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), then on his way to retirement, reported that he had been deliberately refused a post-retirement routine contractual hiring privilege because he had been marked down for “discipline” by some key operatives of the erstwhile Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress. Prof. Amoako-Baah categorically noted that he had been threatened with such sanction by the career General-Secretary of the then-ruling NDC, Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia. He also claimed that a good friend and colleague of his who had been afforded the aforesaid privilege because he was in the good books of the ruling party, had deliberately and conveniently failed to alert Prof. Amoako-Baah, the former Department Head and creator of a significant number of courses in KNUST’s History and Political Science Department, of his deliberate punitive sanctioning, for not only belonging to the wrong political party, but also for constantly criticizing the Mahama government on policy matters.

I have not studiously followed the leadership crisis at the University of Education, Winneba, which resulted in the recent dismissal of that institution’s Vice-Chancellor, but it was clear from the beginning of the administrative convulsion that rocked UEW that politics had a lot to do with both the irruption and the resolution of the causative or causal conniption. It did not come as much of a surprise to me because the UEW Campus had also originally been the location of the infamous Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute, a hot bed of virulent CPP activism and ideological indoctrination. My late father, a CPP foot-soldier, took a course at the KNII when President Nkrumah dominated Ghana’s political landscape as an Absolute Monarch of “Independent” Ghana. Perhaps we need to exorcize the UEW Campus of the deadly demons of yesteryear who clearly appear to have failed to fully appreciate the fact that Ghana has moved on into a totally different era and a more progressive generation, in spite of the seemingly eerily atavistic reprise of ancient hostilities and animosities.

But, of course, it would be flagrantly naïve to expect that those who flagitiously colluded and collaborated with the previous regime would be allowed the illogical comfort of bumper harvesters who never sowed a single fruitful seed. Nevertheless, at some point in time, sooner than later, somebody more levelheaded and conciliatory, as well as forbearing, would have to step in and stop this seemingly interminable internecine exaction of vendetta.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
September 15, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]