Nkrumah! Even his clothes were state-owned

Kwame Nkrumah was a human being. Being human, he sinned. So those whose family members and friends perished under the Preventive Detention Act will (may) never forgive him. Ghanaian politicians of his era who harboured presidential ambitions will also condemn him for imposing a one-party state on Ghana. 

So why is he still the only former Ghanaian President in whose honour a day has been set aside? Among all the pioneering Presidents of Africa, why is he the only one to whom later generations of African leaders were to agree to give a reverential bow, to wit, erect his statue in front of the African Union (AU) headquarters in Addis Ababa? Why is he still so much revered and adored 50 years after his overthrow? 

Perhaps it is true: Nkrumah never dies. 

That was my conclusion as speaker after speaker paid tribute to Africa’s Man of the Millennium at this year’s Memorial Night held by the Board of Governors of the Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah African Genius Awards at the forecourt of the African University College of Communication (courtesy Honourable Kojo Yankah, the founder) on September 20 on the occasion of Nkrumah’s 107th birthday. 

The main speaker for the night was Professor Kofi Asare Opoku, a man consumed by a passion for African culture. 

For me, Nkrumah never dies, a man who, after 15 years in power (from 1951 when he became ‘Leader of Government Business’), didn’t leave even a block for himself; he did not own a house (not to talk of mansions). Everything he had, including his clothes, were owned by the ‘Republic of Ghana’! They were stamped as such. Worldly possessions did not define him. Besides President Nyerere of Tanzania, I dare any former or present African President to make such a claim. 

Asare Opoku, after decades of teaching African Studies to students of Lafayette University in Pennsylvania, Northern Carolina State University, Queens College of New York and University of Iowa – after retiring from the University of Ghana – has come to the conclusion that what actuated Nkrumah, propelling him to do what he did and to believe what he believed, was simple: “Nkrumah stood on a stone” and that stone was his knowledge of Africa’s past and values. 

With this priceless knowledge of Africa’s glorious history and those time-tested African values etched on his soul, Nkrumah was to proclaim tha “I am not an African because I was born in Africa; I am an African because Africa lives in me”. His conviction in the African genius culminated in his putting an African at the cockpit to pilot an airplane and at the Captain’s Bridge to sail an ocean liner; a Ghanaian to head an African medical school. These values backgrounded his setting up of an Atomic Energy Commission, a manifestation of his dream of using nuclear energy to power our industries, and to establish a glass factory (note: all in the 1960s – can you imagine!)

I remember Nkrumah because I still miss him. I don’t see him in any other African leader. Otherwise, how come Africa (Ghana) has so many faculties and departments of engineering and yet cannot boast of engineers who are building our roads and bridges, power converters and solar plants?

Not that African scientists are incapable; they have been rendered unable and been disabled by bad policies of presidents and prime ministers without vision; Presidents and Prime Ministers who, having no confidence in themselves, excel only in the confidence to steal the verdict during elections and show their ingenuity in how to steal state funds. 

Lacking confidence in themselves, they cannot place confidence in an African scientist to do what other Africans are doing at America’s (NASA) and other scientific laboratories in foreign lands. Simple; over there, the system works! Over there, in those lands, there are Presidents and Prime Ministers who are not in office because they are hungry.

I can’t see Kwame Nkrumah today. What I see are African leaders (are they really “leaders”?) who are confirming Liberian President Johnson Sirleaf’s observation that “Africa is poor because she is poorly governed”. I cannot see African presidents and prime ministers determined to prove wrong. Professor Patrick Lumumba’s conviction that, The african politician is africa’s curse”. 

Did you listen to this learned Kenyan Law Professor’s three-day Kwame Nkrumah lectures at  the University of Cape  last month? Get a copy. You’d be blown away, if you don’t end up crying – for Africa’s soul.

Politics without Papa Kwesi Nduom?

About Nkrumah, more anon. 

For now, a few words in relation to the Electoral Commission’s(EC’s) decision disqualifying a number of presidential aspirants. Why should we set aside two days for both the submission of nomination forms and correcting of all errors?

It is this way of thinking that sees a policeman jumping out of nowhere into the middle of the street to stop a vehicle because its driver has broken the law. Couldn’t this exercise, so important on the electoral calendar, be conducted over a period of say, 20 to 30 days? 

It’s a shame that Ghana should, by dint of such a flawed system born of a warped mentality, disqualify one of the quality materials this country has been blessed to have – Dr Papa Kwesi Nduom.