The Myth of British-Bequeathed Northern-Ghana Development Fund – Part 2

In the same videotaped “bitching session” afore-referenced in Part 1 of this two-part column, the plaintiff also risibly claims that the present-day New Patriotic Party (NPP) was founded by some northern-descended Ghanaian leaders. I suppose the plaintiff was referring to the so-called Northern People’s Party (NPP), which was founded as relatively late as 1954, by the relatively much younger and less well-educated leaders of the then-Northern Region, compared to their southern Ghanaian counterparts, with an agenda more oriented towards a benevolent civic-society association or organization, in much the same way that one might talk about the Fante Confederacy of the mid-1800s and the Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society, both of which were composed of Fante scholars, leaders and elders, the latter of which was founded in 1897, or thereabouts, to fight the British colonialists against the massive criminal expropriation of Akan-Ghanaian landed property by the British imperialists. In other words, the present-day NPP or New Patriotic Party was no more founded by northern-descended Ghanaian leaders any more than was the Limann-led and Nkrumah-leaning People’s National Party (PNP) founded by the antecedent founders of the Jamaica-based People’s National Party.

In the latter instance, the striking nominal linkage is indisputable but, of course, we are all well aware of the fact that the founders of the older Jamaica’s People’s National Party had absolutely no direct hand in the founding of the Limann-led People’s National Party in the Ghana of the late 1970s and early 1980s. About the only thing in common that the present-day New Patriotic Party has with the old Northern People’s Party are the initial capital letters of both political organizations. In reality, the first modern indigenous Ghanaian political party of the erstwhile Gold Coast Colony was the Danquah- and Grant-led United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) in 1947. But even on the latter matter, the decision is split. Some historians and political scientists firmly believe that the credit for the very first modern Ghanaian political party actually belongs to the UGCC-breakaway and Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP), founded in June 1949. But, of course, the present-day New Patriotic Party, which was founded in 1992, or thereabouts, was the creation of both neoliberally oriented southern and northern Ghanaian leaders. The Chief Simon Diedong Dombo-led NPP would merge with the Busia-led National Liberation Movement (NLM), as well as other splinter political parties in December 1957, to form the United Party (UP).

The United Party, Ghana’s first real and formidable opposition party was actually circumstantially, albeit inadvertently, founded by default by then-Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah via his opposition-squelching Avoidance of Discrimination Act. The Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party would eventually be decreed to be the only legally constituted political party in Ghana. The preceding act or law, paradoxically, had the redeeming feature of forcing the largely ethnic-based and/or ethnocentric opposition political parties to healthily become more broadly based. We need to also thoroughly disabuse the minds of some of these grossly misguided northern micro-nationalists that at absolutely no point in history during the last half millennium or 500 years could the level of technological and cultural and socioeconomic development of the present-day so-called Three-Northern-Regions be said to have nearly approached the level of development of such great Akan States as Akwamu, Bono, Adansi, Akyem, Assin, Denkyira and Fante, among a host of others. The very notion that the developmental or civilizational distancing of the Akan people from the rest of the country is the veritable handicraft of Euro-Colonial or British imperialism, simply has absolutely no basis in factual reality.

But, of course, it would be equally absurd for anybody to argue that the Akan of present-day Ghana have absolutely no consanguineal relationship or kinship with any of the ethnic polities that constitute the present-day Northern, Upper-East and Upper-West regions, as the plaintiff of this rejoinder wistfully or imperiously sought to do. What is important to note here is that whether by accident or design, present-day Ghanaians have a common beloved nation and destiny whose progress and material development ought to be doggedly promoted and jealously guarded against the nihilistic tendencies of nation-wreckers like the Mahama-chaperoned and Rawlings-owned National Democratic Congress. The issue that provoked the Social Media tirade diplomatically rejoined here was the dastardly attempt by former President John Dramani Mahama and Mr. Joshua Hamidu Akamba, the infamous NDC Deputy National Organizer, to railroad the recently implemented fee-free Senior High School Policy Initiative by the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party.

It is this inexcusable and patently criminal act of sabotage that these angry northern-descended Ghanaians ought to be addressing, and not the question of whether the Asante Regional Minister has presumed to impugn the common sense and intelligence of Ghanaian citizens of northern descent. Of course, he needs to set things aright, if, indeed, the Asante Regional Minister is guilty as charged. What is even more disturbing is this mischievously calculated pretense that, somehow, unconscionable nation-wreckers like Messrs. Mahama and Akamba are inimitably representative showcases of northern political and intellectual enlightenment.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
October 18, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]