I just finished reading the rambling litany of complaints about the problems besetting our country from the fanatically Nkrumah-leaning President of the so-called Ghana Leadership Union (GLU), a largely talk-shopping Internet forum, and found some of his concerns about the abjectly bleak state of our country to be quite interesting and, to be certain, even worthwhile (See “Can President Nana Akuffo [sic] Really Deliver on His Promises?” Modernghana.com 6/21/17).
The GLU leader’s article is based primarily on his “auditing” of a speech that President Akufo-Addo reportedly gave in London recently about his vision for the resuscitation and development of the country. At best, the writer nibbles glancingly at some common concerns that he appears to share with Nana Akufo-Addo; he does not really make any bullet-point analysis of the now-President Akufo-Addo’s electioneering campaign platform, but what Dr. Kwaku A. Danso deems to be the health, environmental, labor, economic and the general development problems of the country. Among such concerns are Ghana’s allegedly being the “5th dirtiest nation on Earth” and the “2nd, after South Sudan, in open defecation.” As well, Ghana is a “modern nation with open gutters” and a culture of the abject dearth of landscaping and a salutary greening of the environment for both beauty and quality-of-life enhancement.
The GLU leader is right, the task ahead of President Akufo-Addo is very daunting. But predictably, Dr. Danso mischievously fail to highlight the fact that most of such leadership neglect has been wrought by left-leaning, if not Nkrumah-leaning, ideologues and political parties and organizations. He may not like President John Agyekum-Kufuor, of whom I also have my own reservations and grievances, but what cannot be gainsaid is the fact that when it comes to the promotion and practice of democratic ideals, the legacy of President Nkrumah decisively pales in significance. Also pretending as if the Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP) was the best political party to ever rule our country, insults the intelligence of critically thinking and politically tutored Ghanaians.
Indeed, it is an open-secret that Nkrumah left Ghanaians culturally, morally and materially worse off, except for a few patches here and there of contemporaneous state-of-the-art development, than he met them upon his assumption of the reins of governance as Leader of Government Business, and later as Prime Minister, in 1951. As well, the sort of corruption that the GLU leader talks about, such as corner-cutting building contractors and professionally untrained carpenters, masons and electricians being hired to undertake taxpayer-underwritten projects was literally invented by the leaders of the original Convention People’s Party. In those days, competitive bidding as the vocabulary of business was virtually nonexistent. For example, to secure a contract from the government, no matter the kind or nature of such contract, one had to be a card-carrying member of the Convention People’s Party. The same pertained to employment opportunities and the securing of bank loans.
Which was why I could not stop my sides from splitting with laughter, when the GLU leader huffed about the patent irrationality of the issuance of a National Identification Card that cannot be tracked to a readily locatable residential address. Then also, who said that merely locking up wrongdoers in jail, rather than retrieving stolen monies and properties with punitive surcharges, is the most productive way of going about the remarkable reduction in the rate of corruption? Maybe somebody ought to remind the GLU leader that when the future President Kwame Nkrumah left the United States in 1943, or thereabouts, after a dozen years of domiciliary, the Social Security Identification System was in existence, as well as the mailing zip-code system. Ghana’s population was also a miserly 5 million or less. What prevented “The Osagyefo” from implementing all these features of civilized modern culture in the country?
Or is it just a facile and hypocritical matter of the shoes’ being on another’s feet? But, of course, I perfectly agree with the GLU leader that President Akufo-Addo needs to use more active and present-tense verbs in his rhetoric and drastically cut down on his use of passive and futuristic verbs. He is now fully in charge of the apparatus of the country’s governance, and not a candidate dreaming about being ceded the democratic reins of governance.
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(Via: Ghana/Accra News)
