Ghana: Opposition party marches to honour Nkrumah as Ghana's Founder

21 Septembre 2017

ACCRA,  Ghana, September (Infosplusgabon) - Supporters of Ghana's main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) on Thursday held a march in the capital, Accra, to commemorate Founder’s Day that honours President Dr Kwame Nkrumah as the Founder of the West African country.

The comes against the background of the ruling centre-right New Patriotic Party (NPP) taking steps to celebrate 4 August as Founders' Day and 21 September, the birthday of Dr Nkrumah, as Nkrumah Memorial Day. Both days will be marked with holidays.

Hundreds of supporters of the centre-left NDC, under whose government the birthday of the Pan-Africanist was designated as Founder's Day, joined the march to protest the move by the government, which they see just to satisfy President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo's political tradition and to honour some of their leaders. especially his father, Edward Akufo Addo and his uncle J.B. Dankwa.

They converged at the Hearts Park close to the Kwame Nkrumah Museum where the party's leaders critisised President Akufo-Addo for working "to distort the history of Ghana".

Former President John Mahama, who was vice president when Ghana started celebrating Founder's Day, said he believed that Dr Nkrumah founded Ghana and must be given the due recognition on his birthday.

He said on his Facebook page that “Osagyefo’s (DR Nkrumah's) emergence as the Founder of modern Ghana and an international symbol of freedom was not by accident.”

He accused some elements of making frantic attempts to revise Ghana’s history in a way to make nothing of Kwame Nkrumah’s efforts.

He said: “It remains a dark irony of our history that, the very political tradition which conspired to truncate his unparalleled vision on 24th February 1966, is today seeking to revise Ghana’s history.”

“It is an indisputable fact that Nkrumah was the critical spark that put Ghana on a high-velocity path to independence.”

Nkrumah was overthrown in a CIA-sponsored coup on 24 February 1966.

The 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 is 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.

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.

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".

FIN/INFOSPLUSGABON/AER/POI/GABON 2017

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