Akufo-Addo’s Crowning Glory

It has been a resonant success in ways that could certainly not have occurred under the thoroughgoing corrupt tenure of the terrorist-coddling Candidate John Dramani Mahama, who has exhibited inexcusable contempt for the more than one-million voters who showed him the exit in the December 2016 General Election. The presidential aspect of that general election, I mean. He insists on re-imposing himself and his gross incompetence and wanton acts of kleptocratic savagery on Ghanaian voters, once again, so, of course, we have absolutely no other choice but to permanently seal his doom by ensuring that this time around, Candidate Mahama loses Election 2020 with at least Two-Million Negative Votes or Electoral Deficit. But that is not really the intent and thrust of the present column, which is squarely focused on the landmark festivities marking the “Year of Return,” the Quadricentennial commemoration of the survival of the Great Deportation or the beginning of the massive criminal enslavement of continental Africans in the Diaspora, or the New World, as the Americas were then called, starting from 1619.

We all know that the first batch of the captive group of Africans marked down and bound for chattel slavery most probably came from present-day Angola. But it was President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, arguably the most visionary and progressive Ghanaian leader, since the immortalized President Kwame Nkrumah, who decided to readily and aptly assume the leaden mantle of continental African leadership by ensuring that the year-long commemoration of the wanton dehumanization of the African and the African Personality was marked in a comprehensive manner that went far beyond the mere ritual act of commiseration to fully encompass a healing process that not only celebrated the reunification of the global African Personality and the momentous forging of social and economically sustainable networking ventures that would ensure the long-term survival and prosperity of the global African Personality. Which is why already, the official organizers and hosts of the Year of Return, notably President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, are already talking about Beyond the Year of Return, which essentially has to do with the necessary establishment of a structural policy mechanism and agenda aimed at ensuring that the landmark reunification of Africa and the African Diaspora becomes a permanent cementation of the cross-oceanic linkage of the global African Personality with its multiplicity of African Diasporas.

The irredentist commercial aspect of this seismic event cannot be downplayed, as some otherwise well-meaning critics on both sides of the Atlantic have attempted to do. For, let’s make absolutely no mistake about the stark fact that the massive and protracted enslavement of African by Europeans was first and foremost an economic enterprise that was systematically geared towards the economic development and salvation of Western Europe and the Europeans who permanently settled in the so-called New World of the Americas. Consequently, it is inextricably and inevitably imperative that the healing process has at its front and center, the ways and means for global Africans to intensely begin to focus on our collective interests and aspirations as well as the most constructive and productive means of making such a collective socioeconomic salvation become the immutable rule rather than the exception.

Indeed, as of this press preparation, at least 200,000 Africans born in the Diaspora of enslaved African ancestors were estimated to have physically reconnected with their moorings (See “Boris Kodjoe, Beyonce’s Siblings and Mum Arrive in Ghana” Ghanaweb.com 12/28/19). I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that in our time, no other Ghanaian leader than President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo could have so laudably made all the proverbial pieces come together in the way that they have. In the end, however, it cannot be gainsaid that the resonant success of the landmark celebration of the Year of Return was a collective biographical postcolonial Ghanaian achievement and ought to, perforce, be envisaged as such.

Of course, it is equally imperative for Ghanaians to recognize the collective continental African achievement that is the successful and therapeutic celebration of our global African unification and our humanity. For, ultimately, together, all African people are one and the same.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
December 28, 2019
E-mail: [email protected]
*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs