Who Is Ghana’s “Founding-Father,” Mr. Mahama?
African-Americans have a saying that runs as follows: “The only good white man is a dead one.” Those who know a little bit about the harrowing African-American experience, as it were, know that the unmistakable reference is to Mr. John Brown, the famous rabidly anti-slavery American white man who, in 1859, led a small armed band of largely African-descended men at a place called Harper’s Ferry, in the Maryland-Virginia area, with the noble mission and objective of effectively dethroning the Peculiar Institution (apologies to Kenneth Stampp) that rendered African-Americans proverbial Beasts of Burden in the eyes of most White-Americans.
By the time that the authorities in the staging area were able to put down John Brown’s Revolt, the group had reportedly massacred at least 80 white plantation owners and slave holders and traders. And today, the name of John Brown rivals those of African-American leaders and scientists like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass, Asa Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, George Washington Carver, Fannie Lou Hamer and Richard Drew, the inventor of the modern blood bank system, among the choice names given to public schools located in predominantly African-American communities and other public institutions.
By logical and practical extension, it could fairly equally aptly be said that: “The only good judges in the Ghanaian judicial system are the three Akan-descended Accra High Court judges who were abducted and brutally and summarily executed by soldiers in the employ of the Chairman Jerry John Rawlings-led Provisional National Defense Council half-junta on June 30, 1982.” The slain judges are about the only good judges left in Ghana, because they were the only judges in recent Ghanaian history who fearlessly put the principle of democratic justice above all else, including their very lives.
And so when President John Dramani Mahama, in his first national address in the wake of the patent travesty that was the verdict delivered by the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court panel of nine judges that heard the New Patriotic Party’s Election 2012 Presidential Petition, rather cynically observes that: “It is with the utmost respect and highest regard that I commend the Supreme Court of Ghana,” one cannot help but be readily reminded of Justices Koranteng-Addow, Sarkodie and Agyepong.
There is absolutely no need to quarrel with President Mahama as to whether, indeed, the judges who constituted the Atuguba panel were genuinely imbued with the eudemonious spirit of patriotism, “dedication, integrity and professionalism.” That aspect of public opinion clearly belongs to posterity. I was, however, intrigued by Mr. Mahama’s paradoxical description of President Nkrumah as “our founding father and a member of the Big Six” The fact of the matter is that the legendary Big Six are incontrovertibly synonymous with the accolade of Founding Fathers of Modern Ghana.
And so, really, President Nkrumah cannot be accurately described as Ghana’s Founding Father and at the same time a member of the Big Six. It is a patent contradiction in terms. In other words, one cannot accurately call Gen. George Washington “Founder of the United States of America,” he was actually America’s first president, and at the same time describe the great warrior-president as one of the Founding Fathers of America. This is the level of preposterous political disingenuousness in which Ghanaians find themselves these days.
What intrigued me, though, is the apparently final realization by Mr. Mahama, an ardent second-generation Nkrumacrat, that, in fact, when it comes to the subject of our Fourth Republican Constitutional Democracy, Dr. J. B. Danquah is far and away more relevant than Mr. Kwame Nkrumah. On this score, this is what President Mahama had to say in his post-Supreme Court verdict speech: “Dr. J. B. Danquah, another member of the Big Six, once said, ‘The freedom to express an opinion, and to act in terms of that opinion, is not an abuse of power in democracy…. Free exercise of opinion on a political issue is the maximum expression of liberty and is never an abuse of power.”
We hope Justice William Atuguba, the criminal contempt of court bully boy in recent months, has highlighted the foregoing quote from Dr. Danquah. Vis-a-vis the equally legendary African Show Boy, this is what Mr. Mahama had to say: “‘We are going to demonstrate to the world, to other nations,’ Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, our founding father and member of the Big Six, declared at the dawn of our independence, ‘that we are prepared to lay our own foundation. Our own African identity.”
Well, our foundation clearly appears to have been laid by the constitutionally democratic spirit of Dr. Danquah and his scions; but as of whether such foundation is uniquely African, rather than ideologically global in reach and thrust, is indisputably moot.
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