Opinion: Kwame Nkrumah Never Owned Ghana, Buster! – By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jnr., Ph.D.

The unpardonably preposterous idea that, somehow, Ghana was the bona fide property of its first elected postcolonial leader is inescapably just that – a scandalously preposterous illusion. The fact of the matter is that Mr. Kwame Nkrumah only hailed from a tiny part of one of the smaller Akan states of the erstwhile Gold Coast Colony. He would deviously betray the trust and loyalty of his former political mentors and benefactors and successfully campaign for power against them and be ceded the democratic reins of governance by the departing British colonialists. Needless to say, as an elected ruler, Nkrumah woefully and scandalously failed to hold his part of the modernist democratic bargain with his own people. This is an all-too-well-known narrative that needs no retelling here.

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What I briefly want to make loud and clear here is that if any critic of the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II, is going to pretend to grandstand on the postcolonial question of “Sovereignty,” that critic had better be intelligent enough not to invoke the painful memory and name of Mr. Nkrumah into the fray. In the immortalized words of Dr. J. B. Danquah, the globally acclaimed pan-Africanist scholar, lawyer, philosopher, poet, dramatist, journalist and the indisputable Doyen of Gold Coast and Modern Ghanaian Politics, under the extortionate and dictatorial tenure of Prime Minister Nkrumah – later Executive President Nkrumah and Life-President Nkrumah – Ghana’s sovereignty did not reside or inhere in the electoral mandate of the people. Indeed, like an eighteenth century French monarch, the State of Ghana came to be literally envisaged to be synonymous with the very identity and personality of President Nkrumah. “L’état c’est moi,” Danquah once jabbed his former protégé.

And so how can any anti-Osei-Tutu critic muster the chutzpah to impugn or question the sovereign status of the constitutionally elected Sovereign of the august Asante Federation in the democratically inglorious name and contextually poisonous memory of Mr. Nkrumah? That brazen and noetic critic had better read up on the history of the Restoration of the Asante Federation by the British colonial administrators, as well as how the globally renowned and respected Asante Federation came to be a part of Independent Ghana, and stop fatuously pretending as if the Asantehene has any coequal monarch within the geopolitical confines of Modern or Postcolonial Ghana.

That blubber-mouth critic would also be grossly mistaken if he, for a split-second, believes that a different king (actually, there are roughly only about 10, perhaps even less, real kings deserving of the latter title or designation in the country, even as I write) from Ghana would have been afforded the same “royal treatment” by the Crown courts, if his name had so jarringly appeared in the Daily and Daily Telegraph newspapers. But even more importantly, the uppity and patently uncouth critic who recently dared to impugn the sovereignty and integrity of the Asantehene, and who shamelessly flaunted his slavocolonial Afropean byline, had better find out about the nonesuch relationship that even currently exists between Manhyia and Buckingham Palace, before presumptuously making his nonsensical “Leviathan” malarkey about his mendacious proscription of the sovereignty of the foremost Ghanaian Sovereign of our time.

Buddy, be warned: We take no prisoners nor hostages; neither do we defer to any political beast or juggernaut sporting the long-broken mythology of Nkrumaism.

The opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views or have the endorsement of the Editorial Board of www.africanewsanalysis.com and www.zongonews.com