Feature: Only mad 60-year olds fault Kwame Nkrumah for Ghana’s dev’t quagmire Part 4 – By Prof. N. Lungu

“…I am trained to be objective and resolute…The shrewd Lee Kwan Yew kept himself in power amidst strong opposition at home, just like Dr. Nkrumah, and prevailed upon his enemies to transform his country from a third world to first world country…The question we all should ask ourselves is, how come CPP, a party of that won two elections hands down…has been reduced to a rump spectacle in Ghana politics…Nkrumah failed in many fronts – politically and economically…Where is OAU today? Where is Ghana, Guinea, Mali confederation today? People of Ghana supported the CIA induced coup mainly because of economic hardship at the time…Ghana’s tax structure which was the bait to attract foreign investors was non-existent, and is still the case today…Nkrumah himself never paid taxes as far as we know…Ghana is still losing millions in revenue leakage. Had Nkrumah set the tone for taxation, how could Rawlings have enshrined it in Ghana’s constitution that Presidents are exempt from paying taxes….”, (Kwabena Yeboah, comments to Prof Lungu, May, 2016).

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Dogs can also be trained to be resolute and objective, to dog owner and stranger, alike, practically!

As we’ve said more than once, these essay are for a particular class of individuals and the corrupt institutions they support and champion. As such, it ain’t about Kwbena Yeboah, per se, bizarre and unfair as his arguments are to the work of Kwame Nkrumah.

It is a lot more important than that!

At 60 years old by our rounding privilege, one ought to be more boastful about the number of young ones mentored, those being mentored, the societal and positive effects on transference to others you do not even know, by your deed.

Parading objectivity on your forehead while at the same time ascribing every conceivable Ghanaian problem worth measuring on Dr. Kwame Nkrumah today, even Rawlings indemnity clause, and the high executive tax-free racket, all that do not objective you make.

Never mind, if Kwabena Yeboah was truly objective, he would have reported that those Rawlings schemes are nowhere in the 1957 Constitution, or even in the 1960 Constitution under which Kwame Nkrumah became President of Ghana. But, he never bother to check, he does not care, or he is more interested in propaganda.

And so, Rip Van Winkle has now come full circle!

That is your effective self, now reduced to blaming time for the stuff your “training” never prepared you to conceptualize.

Fairness is a human attribute that even dogs understand.

We present data and facts “trained” dogs can’t even understand, and you refuse to interrogate the data.

And you refuse to present your own, as you dig into your solitary corner hurling all kinds of invectives at everyone.

You are under a contract, yet your words are naturally a poor reflection on whoever awarded you the contract you claim to have won, if you have a modicum of reflection in you. Your “peer-reviewed” paper also informs the world, objectively, that you did not actually write the paper by your solitary damn self, being a reflection of you and your “peers”.

And we have written and reviewed some of those too!

And more important documents and communiqués!

Moving on further, the only significant external challenge that Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore faced was the one from President Sukarno of Indonesia. When Sukarno resigned in March of 1966, Mr. Yew had no hands in that at all. It was a benefit bestowed on Yew, by other forces.

Kwame Nkrumah’s CPP government was overthrown the previous month, in February, the same year.

And we are supposed to understand that the Kwabena Yeboah’s are erudite “intellectuals”, in their attempts to hologram Kwame Nkrumah’s image and record on their wicked, ungrateful, and unforgiving “property owning” screen.

It was colonial over-lord Gordon Guggisberg who built Takoradi Harbor!

But, Kwame Nkrumah never built anything but waste Ghana’s money.

Nice try loving your selves and brains!

Dear reader, many individuals confuse our project for Kwame Nkrumah with support for the CPP of today, or a quarter century ago. One has nothing to do with the other. One does not have to be too intelligent to know that never in our work, not anywhere, have we made a case for today’s CPP.

But, why wise and reflective “intellectuals” the likes of Kwabene Yeboah do not know the reason the CPP of Ghana “has been reduced to a rump spectacle in Ghana politics,” confirms again that the Kwabena Yeboahs are indeed living in the world of Rip Van Winkle.

THE LAST WE HEARD IT UNDERSCORED RECENTLY, IT WAS ADOLESCENT GHANAIAN STUDENTS WHO OBSERVED THAT, AT THEIR AGE, KWAME NKRUMAH IS THE ONLY LEADER FROM GHANA WHOSE IMAGE, RECORDS, AND ACHIEVEMENTS FOR GHANA, HAVE BEEN BANISHED FROM SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS ALL ACROSS GHANA.

And it does not take a rocket scientist to understand the linkage to the question our Kwabena Yeboah wants answers to. All they need to do is take a look outside, at the Texas School Board in the United States, and the adoption of “text” in public school textbooks.

And of course, the outlawing of the CPP itself by the original coup plotters, and those who followed, for generations.

Yes, Kwame Nkrumah is the only leader from Ghana whose image, records, and achievements have effectively been banished from school textbooks all across Ghana.

So, sir, go mentor those adolescents, and many more like them, and promise to do right by those conscious and intelligent adolescents.

Go fetch that, “trained” Kwabena Yeboah!

Take your case elsewhere.

Still moving forward, our group of 60-year olds (some promoted to “age” by rounding privilege as we’ve noted), are arguing as if the “CIA induced coup” (this is the first time our Kwabena Yeboah has mentioned the “CIA” in almost a month of back-and-forth), was broadcast as such. It is as if the event was broadcast all over Ghanaian and African radio, television, and newspaper headlines, when Kwame Nkrumah’s government was overthrown in 1966.

Obviously, that was never the case, unless you are Rip Van Winkle!

The Ankrah-Harlley-Kotoka-Nunoo traitor bunch did not announce to Ghanaians that the “CIA induced coup” was in fact “induced” by the Johnson CIA. And they had every opportunity to do that the same week, even in Addis Ababa, just as the OAU was getting ready to meet, in 1966.

But they didn’t!

And there are official records that prove that the Johnson government cajoled many African Heads of State, from Liberia, to Ethiopia, to swiftly support publicly the coup plotters, before the US did, just so the People of Ghana, Africans, and the World, would not know that, that original coup on Ghana was actually a “CIA induced coup”.

With respect to Singapore, if we must repeat, Lee Kwan Yew, brilliant as he was, owned his successes in part to the resignation of President Sukarno, which he did not have a hand in. Yew owned his success in part to the fact that the first most critical aggressive actions taken against the Singapore opposition, against so-called communist and socialists, against even members of Yew’s own PAP party, were actually conducted and accomplished by another individual, before Yew even won an election. Yew owned his success in part because of the location of Singapore (i.e. geo-political factors). Singapore was an “island”. Ghana never was. Yew owned his success in part to the idea the British built a more substantive military and industrial base in Singapore, and the almost 50% higher GDP per capita for Singapore at the start, compared to Ghana, is a testament, as we’ve discussed previously. (How does that mean we said Singapore was “industrialized” those early years?).

But, the United States already had Liberia, in West Africa, and their Informer-Head-President!

So, what use, Ghana, to President Johnson’s CIA?

What use, even as Johnson battled racists in the south of the United States as he expended capital to help enact the Civil Rights act; as Martin Luther King and his conscience prodded him on, lost in the twilight of the Vietnam War he would soon escalate, after Nkrumah’s fall?

Village idiots appreciate those differences and nuances!

Ankrah lied to Ghana, to Africa, and to the World!

That truth, that Ankrah-Harlley-Kotoka-Nunoo traitor bunch lied to Ghanaians has never been fully adjudicated for every Ghanaian, woman, man, and child, to know and understand.

But, it ought to be!

From Akosombo Dam to the estate farms, to VALCO, to the factories and refineries, to Accra-Tema Motorway, to Adomi Bridge, to Kumasi GEE Hospital, to the first class education system and secondary schools, to the doctors educated and trained, to support for Ghanaian/African culture, Kwame Nkrumah provided a solid foundation for Ghana, even after his overthrow.

It is people like the Kwabena Yeboahs whose feigned objectivity and impartiality is as hollow as straws made of funky-rotten peanuts, whose praise of that coup “induced by the CIA” with the support of external governments, it is they who sold and still are selling for a song all the blessings Providence has allowed Ghana, including Kwame Nkrumah assets worth in the billions of dollars, as they’ve practiced military dictatorships and “property-owning democracy”.

They are the first to banish people from any substantive policy discourse because others “stifle debates about Dr. Nkrumah’s government”. So, it is those people who are “enemies of the country”.

Nice try!

Surely, the records show the Ankrah-Harlley-Kotoka-Nunoo gang banished, imprisoned, and shot a lot more people than Nkrumah ever did.

And the destruction of all those public assets and resources, including those they freely gave away to the United State, to haul out of Ghana at nightfall!

Did they ever sit down to calculate the loss they caused, or that who actually paid what to support other Africans fighting colonialism in time?

No, it is Kwabena Yeboah parrot boxes and the Ankrah-Harlley-Kotoka-Nunoo traitor-gang, and those latter day leaders who destroyed more, and sold even more without transparent accounting, and their CIA handlers, it is they who are directly responsible for Ghana’s development quagmire, and their nonsensical Singapore GDP today this, Ghana GDP today, that, comparisons.

Where is the symmetry and the fairness, Mr. trained “intellectual”?

Look yourselves in the mirror and answer you own illogical question(s)!

Directly responding to Kwabena Yeboah and his ignoble attempts to tag YAW as just “ANOTHER CPP APPARATCHIK ?”, YAW provided the following response which ought to be instructive for all. It is instructive to the extent YAWs’ response is historically grounded, unlike the suppositions, inventions, and bunkum interpretations of those “foundation events” of crucial importance to the development of Ghana by sycophants who think merely claiming objectivity make them so.

Here is YAW:
“…When Ann San Su Kyi, faced the wrath of the Burmese generals, she did not jump to a foreign power to come and do her bidding, she toughed it out!…When Ferdinand Marcos, unleashed the army on the defenceless people in the Phillipines, they did not beg the French or the British to come to their rescue…JB Traitor Danquah and his bomb throwers did more harm to us than Nkrumah. Finally, When the US government refused Nasser of Egypt, a modest loan of 70 million dollars to build the Aswan Dam, he turned to the Soviets and the result,…Aswan Dam which has been the backbone of Egypt’s industry since it was completed…”

In closing, YAW added this to the record, “…Let me make it clear to you (Kwabena Yeboah), that you do not hold monopoly on insults!…”.

That, we know to also be true!

In closing Part 4, we are offering Kwabena Yeboah and his type another opportunity to interrogate real data, precisely the data they normally neglect to present or to interrogate when it is the only rational and “intellectual” thing to do. But one must actually believe what one is trying to communicate to others.

The figure, again….(Figure 3)

GDP Per Capita
By 1964, within four years, from a low $182.98, through the efforts of the CPP government, Ghana’s GDP per capita was $230.44, compared to $485.36 for Singapore. That suggests Singapore’s was now just 110.62% of Ghana, (versus 133.84% in 1960). This is a reduction or catching up by Ghana, of approximately 23.22%.

The next year, in 1965, through further development efforts by the CPP government, the difference in GDP per capita between the 2 countries had shrunk to approximately 93.86%, from a high 133.84% in 1960.

TO THE POINT, LOOKING AT THE RATE OF GROWTH OF GDP PER CAPITA, GHANA IN FACT OUTPACED SINGAPORE DURING THE YEARS 1963-1965. IN OTHER WORDS, GHANA WAS ACTUALLY ON TRACK TO PERFORM EVEN BETTER IN LATER YEARS THANKS TO THE INDUSTRIALIZATION PLAN, IMPORT SUBSTITUTION PROGRAMS, AND EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM THAT WAS BEGINNING TO BEAR FRUITS FOR ALL IN GHANA, UNDER THE NKRUMAH GOVERNMENT.

Under these facts and condition, it is surely absurd and illogical, actually the mark of old mad men, to attempt to ascribe development problems in Ghana in 2016 to Kwame Nkrumah, more than 2 generations removed. In addition, it is absurd and illogical, to think you are smarter when all you are communicating is that Lee Kwan Yew was a better strategist when you do not present any data that supports your thesis.

To be continued…..

SOURCES:
1. Prof Lungu. Only mad 60-year olds fault Kwame Nkrumah for Ghana’s development quagmire (1) (2)(3). Ghanaweb (http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/features/browse.archive.php?date=20160515/)
(http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/Only-mad-60-year-olds-fault-Nkrumah-for-Ghana-s-development-quagmire-440970/)
(http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/Only-mad-60-year-olds-fault-Nkrumah-for-Ghana-s-dev-t-quagmire-Part-3-442516).

2. David Meredith. The Construction of Takoradi Harbour in the Gold Coast 1919 to 1930: A Case Study in Colonial Development and Administration. 1976, Transafrican Journal of History, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1976), pp. 134-149.