Ghanaian Chronicle (Accra)
Dr. Kofi Dankyi
1 July 2009
opinion
SINCE AD 2003, I have made innumerable attempts to find out from "young citizens" of our Republic, (Ghana), what they may know about a man called Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, referred to in some quarters as "Kwame Nkrumah of Africa and Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah."
If you read "Kantamanto", "Oseadeaoye", Ahunuabobirim," all refer to the same man, who was also the First President of the 1st Republic of Ghana.
The same man had gone through such titles or positions as "Leader of Government-Business." The penultimate station his career stopped at was "Prime Minister." Almost every adolescent at Senior Secondary School (SSS)-Level, (formerly Secondary School), had heard the name at some stage, but not much beyond that.
What is their source of information? Parents, but also school teachers, and a few had read "bits and pieces" about Nkrumah, as one young female put it, who had just emerged from Medical School.
About fifty percent of those at university level had read about the man, whom even ideological opponents agree was pivotal in shaping the pre-and-post independent political history of Ghana, in libraries, including the Library of Congress of the USA.
The summary is that the United Cold Coast Convention, (the UGCC), which had at one time invited the ebullient Kwame Nkrumah to join as Secretary General, saw an opportunity for him to found his own party, the Convention People's Party, (CPP), a lot of which we are expected to hear in this treatise.
The UGCC is the ground-substance of the United Party (UP), and the present day New Patriotic Party (NPP). Eminent names like Dr. J. B. Dankwah, (Barrister at Law), Mr. Koi Larbi, and Mr. Obetsebi-Lamptey are "foundation substance" of the UP, and are of juristic background.
The idea of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah seeking at some stage a one party-system, did take many an intellectual by surprise, and tension began to mount on the political scene, never to abate.
The proposal got consolidated in a plebiscite. Consequently, the First Republic emerged into a one-party-state until its overthrow by elements from the opposition party, working through the military in February, 1966.
Even before this cataclysmic event, there was something else to add to the disenchantment of the opposition elements, the most prominent among whom were personalities like, Prof. Kofi Abrefa Busia, a substance of the Wenchi Royalty and Aboagye da Rocha.
The anathema was called "The Preventive Detention Act", unpopularly "acronymed", the PDA. Under the act, a politician could be detained under suspicion of involving oneself in activities that the state then saw as tantamount to subversion.
In time, not only the opposition members got interned, but surprisingly, members of Nkrumah's own party, the CPP, as well.
They must have been young men, who in time, had run afoul with the system, and the man they had adored for years. They had too many questions, but few answers from anybody, (not even from Nkrumah himself).
Mr. W. A. Wiafe, Member of Parliament (MP), and Deputy Minister from the Kwahu District, suffered under this package.
It was rumoured that some dynamite was used in a surreptitious attempt to blow-up Nkrumah's seventy-five- pounds-sterling monument, in front of the then Parliament House.
Komlah Agbedi Gbedemah, one time close associate of Nkrumah's, a staunch member of the CPP, and flamboyant Minister of Finance, was luckier, in that he got wind of it and escaped to Hamburg , in the country then called West Germany.
He and W. A. Wiafe, (who was later "pardoned" by Nkrumah), never patched up with the CPP. Gbedemah formed his own party, called NAL, and contested in the general elections in 1979, to be Prime Minister, but failed.
Dr. Nkrumah was truly the most outspoken African Head of State, (and that could go for "the most outspoken third-world statesman.) He had been "convinced", so it was rumored, that he stood a very good chance of brokering peace between North and South Vietnam, and the Americans, under the tutelage of Mr. Linden Byrnd Johnson, 36th President of USA, 1963-1968.
Dr. Nkrumah was outside the country on a mission to seek peace in a debacle involving North and South Vietnam, with the Super Power USA allied with the South-Vietnamese. It was all part of the United States universal mission to fight and defeat Communism, using whatever means.
The Vietnam War had reached a phase in which the Americans were not winning, even if they were not losing outright. Rumours had it that it was all a ploy, woven with intricacies, by the Americans, to have the "show boy" out of his country, so that he could be pushed out of power, with less bloodshed.
There was no interest from the White house to meet the brash Kwame Nkrumah, who was, if anything at the time, a thorn in the flesh of American political muscles. Look at it that way. Just eliminate him.
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