Ghana: Ghana marks Nkrumah's birthday, but gov't says he's not the sole Founder of the country

21 Septembre 2017

ACCRA,  Ghana, September 21 (Infosplusgabon) - The West African Ghana is on Thursday celebrating the 108th birthday of its first president and Pan-Africanist Dr Kwame Nkrumah with a holiday.

But instead of it being marked as the Founder’s Day, it is now dubbed Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Day. President Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo issued an Executive Instrument last week to commemorate this year’s celebration of Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Day Thursday as a public holiday.

According to the presidency, President Akufo-Addo has now proposed 4 August as Founders’ Day to honour all those who were involved in the struggle for independence. In line with that, he will push for legislation of the two dates as public holidays.

The centre-left National Democratic Congress (NDC), under the late President John Evans Atta Mills, instituted Founder’s Day to celebrate Dr Nkrumah, whose dynamism, charisma, foresight, among other things, accelerated the pace for independence from British colonial rule.

He was seen as the person who was the leader of the independence project that saw him being elected as Prime Minister when Ghana achieved independence from British colonial rule on 6 March 1957. Indeed, Ghana was the first country south of the Sahara to gain independence.

But the tag, Founder's Day, has since irked the centre-right, which has felt that its heroes had been snubbed by the action of the late President Mills and has long sought to "correct" this error.

Now that the centre-right New Patriotic Party (NPP) has returned to power, and it is taking its boldest step yet to change this.

The proposal of President Akufo-Addo, ironically, one of the most ardent followers of Nkrumah in his school days, for a legislation to celebrate 4 August as Founders' Day and September 21 as Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Day, is a done deal given the overwhelming majority of the NPP in Parliament.

But the centre-left is branding it a project by the President and the centre-right the history of Ghana.

The presidency for its part says it is unfortunate that 60 years after independence, the history of the events leading to Ghana’s independence continued to be "embroiled in unnecessary controversy", due largely to partisan political considerations of the moment.

“It is clear that successive generations of Ghanaians made vital contributions to the liberation of our country from imperialism and colonialism. It is, therefore, fitting that we honour them as those who contributed to the founding of our nation.”

The government says the most appropriate way to honour them is to commemorate the day on which "the two most significant events" in Ghana’s colonial political history that led us to independence occurred – 4 August.

“On that day in 1897, the Aborigines Rights Protection Society (ARPS) was formed in Cape Coast. The society did a great job to mobilise the chiefs and people to ward off the greedy hands of British imperialism to ensure that control of Ghanaian lands remained in Ghanaian hands.

“It represented the first monumental step towards the making of modern Ghana, enabling us to avoid the quagmire of land inheritance that our brothers and sisters in southern and eastern Africa continue to suffer from the seizures of their lands by White minorities.

”In a deliberate act in the continuum of Ghanaian history, exactly 50 years later, on August 4, 1947, at Saltpond, the great nationalists of the time gathered to inaugurate the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), the first truly nationalist party of the Gold Coast, to demand the independence of our nation from British rule at a gathering which included ‘paramount chiefs, clergymen, lawyers, entrepreneurs, teachers, traders and men and women from all walks of life in the Gold Coast.'”

This inauguration, it said, set the ball rolling for Ghana's attainment of independence and for the dramatic events, including the birth in 1949 of Nkrumah’s Convention People's Party (CPP), that ushered Ghana into freedom.

"That day, 4th August, is thus, obviously the most appropriate day to signify our recognition and appreciation of the collective efforts of our forebears towards the founding of a free, independent Ghana.”

The presidency said it was equally clear that the first leader of independent Ghana and the nation's first President, Dr Nkrumah, played an outstanding role in helping bring to fruition the works of the earlier generations and "leading us to the promised land of national freedom and independence".

But the centre-left NDC and supporters of Dr Nkrumah vehemently disagree saying Nkrumah stood tall among all those who were involved in the independence struggle and nothing can diminish his stature.

A Deputy General Secretary of the NDC, Mr Koku Anyidoho, has charged that the government should not destroy the peace and harmony of Ghana with “the fruitless attempts to distort the history of Ghana”.

He is quoted by the state-owned Graphic newspaper as saying it is an established fact that Dr Nkrumah fought for the independence of Ghana and not Edward Akufo-Addo or Dr J.B. Danquah, who are respectively President Akufo-Addo’s father and uncle.

“There is no denying the fact that Osagyefo Dr Nkrumah blazed the trail and fought for the independence of Ghana. The fact that the African Union has also adopted September 21 as a special day on its calendar attests to the fact that Kwame Nkrumah blazed the trail for the independence struggle not only for Ghana but for the African continent,” Anyidoho said.

Journalist Kweku Baako, an ardent supporter of President Akufo-Addo but also a strong Nkrumaist, is quoted as saying Kwame Nkrumah remains a "global icon" and the "only founder of the modern state of Ghana", thus any attempt to have another day to celebrate the founding fathers of the country is utterly baseless.

Ghanaians may not have seen the end of this debate as both sides are entrenched in their opinions.

FIN/INFOSPLUSGABON/ZER/GABON 2017

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