Honouring The Menory Of Ghana's Founding Father - Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah!!

Today is Founder's Day in Ghana. It is to the eternal credit of President Mills and his National Democratic Congress (NDC) regime, that they reserved the title Ghana's "founding father", for Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah - and did not bow to pressure from those who wanted some of Nkrumah's pre-independence contemporaries, whom he worked with during the struggle for our independence, to be given that honour jointly with the Osagyefo.

Nkrumah's conservative contemporaries, most certainly do not deserve that honour.

The kind of post-independence polity they envisioned, would not have benefited ordinary people, who were wise enough - once Nkrumah appeared on the Gold Coast political landscape from the UK, and they started hearing his fiery speeches demanding independence from Britain - to immediately cotton on to the fact that there would be precious little social mobility, in the loose federation of more or less sovereign pre-colonial tribal entities, which those who opposed Nkrumah wanted to see replacing the Gold Coast colony, when the British occupiers of our country, finally departed from our shores.

Were it not for Nkrumah, we would not be citizens of today's proud nation of diverse-ethnicity in which all the tribes in Ghana co-exist peacefully, none superior or inferior to the other, and making up a tolerant society in which there is practically no extended family clan in which - as a result of inter-marriage between people of differing tribal backgrounds - family membership isn't a collection of individuals of different tribal descent, who are united through ties of consanquinity and by marriage.

That is what has made our homeland Ghana so different from all the other nations in the continent of Africa.

Indeed, one only has to look next door, at the current sorry state in which our troubled neighbour to the west, the Ivory Coast, bedevilled by tribal animosities between northerners and southerners, today finds itself,  to see how fortunate we are that it was Nkrumah's vision of a modern and united ethnically-diverse African nation-state - peopled by a well-educated population living in an industrialised society, underpinned by science and technology - that ordinary people chose in all the pre-independence elections, and made sure prevailed in the end.

As a result of their good sense, they adamantly refused the option offered by Nkrumah's arch-conservative, elitist and tribal-supremacist opponents - and consigned their antediluvian vista, of entrenched privilege perpetually lording it over ordinary people, to the dustbin of history.

Kwame Nkrumah is in the Pantheon of 20th century greats, because he was on the right side of history - and dwarfed all his contemporaries.

And as the years roll by, his greatness becomes ever more evident - as the breathtaking scope of what he undertook and the sheer breadth of his achievements - compared to the puny efforts of all his successors - dawns on our people.

Although there are many who say Nkrumah's equal has not yet been born, Samia Yaaba Nkrumah, the most successful, politically, of his children, is a chip off the old block. She has only recently been elected as chairperson and leader of the CPP - for which she is to be congratulated.

Today, she is working hard with other dedicated Nkrumaists, to rekindle interest in the CPP amongst ordinary people in Ghana - many of who wished that the Convention People's  Party (CPP) would be so re-branded and repositioned in Ghana's political spectrum, to enable it provide a credible alternative to the NDC and New Patriotic Party (NPP) - both of which have failed woefully to narrow the ever-widening gap between the rich and the less well-off in Ghanaian society.

Alas, the two major parties in Ghana,  prefer to spend their time engaging in divisive politics, constantly pointing accusing fingers at each other - rather than uniting the nation behind a common purpose: making Ghana a prosperous place for all its people, not just "a powerful few with greedy ambitions", to quote the great Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.

Those who now carry the torch of leadership in the CPP, must take the task of uniting the Nkrumaist family seriously - and intensify efforts being made in that direction nationwide, by CPP and People's National Convention (PNC) party officials. They owe that to the Osagyefo.

They must aim to offer Ghana's younger generation a New CPP, with a winning manifesto, full of original and people-empowering ideas that will be implemented by a government of national unity, were the CPP to win power in December 2012

A government made up of its formidable array of talented individuals, such as: Mrs Susan Adu Amankwah; Prof Edmond Dele; Kwame Jantua; Professor Akosa; Professor Dowunah; George Aggudey; Kossi Dede and Kwesi Pratt Jnr., to mention a few, could work with nationalistic and patriotic individuals, selected from the other political parties, to transform Ghana into an African equivalent of the egalitarian societies of Scandinavia.

That will be one of the best ways of honouring the memory of Ghana's brilliant and visionary founding father, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.

Perhaps a Dr Edward Mahama-Professor Akosa dream ticket for the next presidential election in December 2012, will be just the sort of patriotic and highly-intelligent two-person team, which Nkrumah would have wanted at this juncture of our homeland Ghana's history.

Clearly, the time has come for our nation to turn to a competent northerner, to take his or her turn, to lead Nkrumah's Ghana forward, into the future. Samia Yaaba Nkrumah: "Ohemaa, over to you, Josephine Lartey!" - as one would say in local parlance: were this a nation in which equality of the sexes prevailed. A word to the wise...

Tel (Powered by Tigo - the one mobile phone network in Ghana that actually works!): + 233 (0) 27 745 3109.