Two delusions in Kenya and Ghana!

Speculation is good. It exercises the mind and often leads to the discovery of the truth in unintended ways. But it can also mislead with tragic results. It was former President Limann who said that pointless speculation is the pastime of idle academics who more often than not, allow the workings of their overheated imaginations to overwhelm the truth which was the original quest of the speculative enterprise.

I am led into these introductory remarks by two events in the past week reported from far away in Kenya, and right here in Ghana. The victory of President Uhuru Kenyatta in last Tuesday’s election in Kenya has activated an unlikely political buzz in our country, relative to events around our own elections held last December. This is because days before the Kenyan election, it was reported that two Ghanaians have been deported from Kenya as a precautionary measure to preserve the integrity of the election.

Normally, this titbit would be of no consequence because any sovereign country has the absolute right to deport non-nationals for reasons which appear sufficient to that country.

First

Except for the startling fact that the identities of the two Ghanaians were partially disclosed. One of them, Peter Mac Manu, was named by the Kenyan authorities themselves in the news release. Mr Mac Manu is a well-known New Patriotic Party politician, a former party chairman, campaign manager for the 2016 elections and now chairman of the board of GHAPOHA. However, the other Ghanaian deported with him is yet to be identified in any official publication either here in Ghana or from Kenya. Why? It is at this juncture that speculation comes in, taking into consideration the fact of the elections in both Ghana and Kenya, and other countries in Africa and elsewhere in the recent past.

The fruitful speculation has been assisted by the information available from official sources as to the reason for the aborted trip to Kenya. The official Ghanaian line is that the delegation was in Kenya at the invitation of the now defeated presidential candidate, Raila Odinga, and his NASA coalition of parties, to observe the election. It further said that the aborted trip was made under the aegis of the Democratic Union of Africa, an organisation of center-right political parties, whose continental headquarters is revealingly and helpfully, the NPP national offices here in Accra.

All this rather helpful information left out one crucial fact; the identity of the other member of the Ghanaian delegation. Is he a Ghanaian or a foreigner using our passport, a known NPP member like Mr Mac Manu, an insignificant hanger-on, a woman friend, an international pickpocket, or what? Why has the name of this travelling colleague been blacked out in official statements from the two countries? These questions have clouded an otherwise straight story of a jittery country acting in the interest of its peace as crucial elections approached.

My readers may remember that it was Mr Mac Manu who first announced NPP’s victory the night of our own elections, to howls of protest from some quarters. Now that the incumbent Kenyan President has won his second term in office, something our President Mahama could not do last December, there has been further speculation about the likely effect of a Mac Manu-like scenario in Kenya.

There have been reports of after-election violence in Kenya, something we avoided when the NPP rather emerged winners in Ghana. All this may reinforce for some of our compatriots that not all that happened in our elections should be accepted at face-value. Readers know my position on this already; grave doubts about the election we had in which Mr Mac Manu was the campaign manager for the NPP. I can only conclude that if anything untoward happened, I have the patience to wait for it to unravel.

Second

The second subject for speculation begins with a question. Why was the Speaker of Parliament, Rt. Honourable Mike Oquaye, chosen to deliver the lecture on the 70th anniversary of the founding of the defunct United Gold Coast Convention last Friday? His position as Speaker should have made him decline to participate at that level, as if he is a mere partisan footsoldier who happens to know book. He is not.

Last week, I did write on aspects of this fascination by the NPP with the defunct UGCC. I have some credentials in the matter, since I delivered the 50th anniversary lecture 20 years ago on the events and personalities around the launch of the UGCC. Now it is clear to me that the focus of the NPP is to create a non-existent pre-eminence of Dr JB Danquah as compared to President Nkrumah during our independence struggle for reasons I find curious. Yes it is true that before the arrival of Nkrumah from England in late 1947 to take up the post of General Secretary of the UGCC, Dr Danquah was the most well-known Ghanaian politician. But the arrival of Nkrumah and the formation of his Convention Peoples’ Party subsequently eclipsed Dr Danquah in the political imagination of Ghanaians. Nkrumah actually sent a congratulatory telegram which was read at the launch in Saltpond, implying he was not that unknown a quantity.

It is patronisingly insulting and demeaning to always suggest that because Nkrumah was a paid official of the UGCC, therefore he had somehow betrayed his generous employers. It is a fact that all the expenses of the UGCC were borne by the founder and president of the UGCC, George ‘’Pa’’ Grant, and he was even paying the travel expenses of other leading members of the UGCC when they travelled to meet him in Sekondi, Cape Coast, Saltpond and elsewhere. It is also a fact that minutes of the UGCC

Working Committee have been lost long ago, and we now rely on periodic publications, and the incomplete memoirs of contemporaries to reconstruct UGCC’s history.
The most serious political and intellectual mistake made by those who desire the pre-eminence of others apart from Nkrumah and the ideas that underpinned the independence struggle, is to advance the ridiculous and kindergarten argument that somehow, the attainment of independence is linked to other political and social goods which were not the focus of the Nkrumah project. Self-government means exactly that, no more, no less. We are independent today precisely because the people of this country accepted self-government with danger and rejected servitude in tranquillity. Independence as a political idea is indivisible.