Founder’s or President’s Day for Ghana?

Today, I will touch on matters evoked by this title. The evolving story surrounding this needless controversy in this country is part of my interests today.

This week is actually the fourth year of the epistle and if I remember correctly, my first epistle was a tribute to former President Professor Atta Mills of blessed memory who had died a year earlier. We just celebrated the fifth year of his unexpected death in office. May he rest in perfect peace.

Today, Friday August 4, 2017, also happens to be the 70th anniversary of the founding of the first political party in this country, the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) at the Hammond Hall in Saltpond. This fact has much to do with my title today, whether our country was founded, and if so, by an individual, or a group of persons. But before I go into this, let me delve into the mid-year budget review statement read by the  Finance Minister, Mr Ken Ofori Atta last Monday, and what it meant for me.

An eloquent aspect of the change that we ushered into our political direction was shown us last Tuesday when the relevant parliamentary committee recommended the passage of the towing tax. The committee then went ahead and decided that a private company must be the sole entity to carry out this task. Why? Was it not our parliament which passed the Public Procurement Act and made sole sourcing a last resort emergency choice for procurement of goods and services? Where is the data supporting this sole sourcing by Parliament? We even have the Deputy Majority Leader doubling as the minister of procurement.

 Now this feeds into my reference to the mid-year review read by Mr Ofori-Atta.

The new ideological direction we have chosen preaches and practices the absolute need for macro-economic stability as the only workable foundation for the solution of national problems which are best solved by private sector initiative. Government has no role in jobs creation, education, housing, health and the provision of local government services. Since 2001 when this ideological strain had its first chance in this fourth Republic, no one can point to a single school, hospital, roads and housing projects begun from scratch and completed as part of the responsibility of our government to use our resources for our benefit.

Our new government is bent on continuing this rather popular refrain that get the macro-economic indices right, then let us all wait for the private sector to do the rest. It is not a political choice that has created legacies for this country. It seems we are set to repeat history. To be fair, our new government promised real legacy projects such as the one district, one factory, one village one dam, rail line from north to south, harbours and ports, and a host of others, to persuade voters to buy into the New Patriotic Party (NPP). The truth of the matter is, when the time comes, the non-existent private sector or business friends of the regime would be required to take up the responsibilities of government.

Fortunately for our country, the last elections were not decided on performance so I am at a loss to appreciate the argument that better and more competent government will provide better services and public goods to Ghanaians. In short, the prospect of lower inflation, manageable debt-to GDP ratios, lower deficits, better exchange rates and lower interest rates etc., will avail us nothing.

The UGCC was wiped out of our politics after the first national elections held in this country in 1951, and its leaders and members dispersed into ineffectual factions until after independence in 1957 when these factions came together to form the United Party, the precursor of today’s NPP. But the sizeable Nkrumaist strain in our polity has always maintained that this country was, which in reality, carved out of decisions conjured and defended in Europe, the creation of President Nkrumah. No Ghanaian leader before or after our independence, has been able to add a square inch to the territory of this country.

The concept of Founder’s Day has always been resisted by the NPP and its predecessors because it seems like reading the party out of the history of this country. There is, however, something to be said for the role of Nkrumah in the struggle for independence.  It was the UP and Progress Party stalwart, Victor Owusu, who said in a BBC interview after the 1966 coup that Nkrumah must be credited with straining every nerve to keep this country together in the immediate pre-independence era as the UP sought to dismember it in the name of federalism and secession. He should know. On that narrow, technical ground, the assignment of the honour Founder to Nkrumah can be defended.

With the NPP in power today, another round of empty and unrewarding recriminations is imminent. We might as well celebrate President’s Day rather except this choice too will settle on Nkrumah as our first President. I have already discounted the concept of Founder’s Day but in fact, we can have a Founder’s Day in this country. The person that description and honour best fits is Alfred George ‘’Paa’’ Grant, the timber merchant who founded the UGCC, on the 50th anniversary of the Aborigines Rights Protection Society founded in Cape Coast on August 4, 1897, and at which  he was present.

I am aware of the effort to replace the primacy of Nkrumah with the Big Six concept. It was a phrase coined by a Cape Coast journalist, not a universal assignment of pivotal roles in the independence struggle. They were those the Governor’s orders-in-council specified for preventive detention. Worse, apart from Nkrumah, none of them owned up to the February 28, 1948 riots which occasioned their imprisonment, but they all strangely enough, spoke about it to the Watson Commission.

Paa Grant bankrolled the UGCC, knew Dr Danquah and his colleagues from their prior political exertions, and also knew Nkrumah from the Nzema Literary Society when the latter was secretary before leaving for America in 1935. It is a pity that this excellent patriot has been so little honoured with public monuments in this country. In his politics we see clearly the two strands of thought and action which have energised political mobilisation in this country since 1897. He is the unrecognised founder of the polity we call our country today.