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Opinions on Tuesday, September 22, 2020
Columnist: Oswald azumah
2020-09-22
Dr. Kwame Nkrumah is the first president of Ghana
Voted African of the millennium in 1999, little else can be added to Nkrumah’s story that hasn’t already been told.
It is more than an icon of the pan-African movement. It is an objective to be pursued, all the values that he defended and his vision for the African continent are an urgent need that must guide the state leaders of the continent.
As we celebrate the anniversary of his birth, the man’s warning to the continent’s leaders in case they don’t join is what I feel in my reflections.
The balkanization that Nkrumah warned about in his book Africa Must Unite is here with us and, sadly, merely cosmetic approaches are being applied to solve the problem for political reasons.
Ghana and Nigeria are still at a standstill on how they will resolve the trade dispute; A visit by the leaders of the Nigerian House of Representatives to the leaders of the Ghanaian Parliament has done little to end the relentless attacks on Nigerian merchants in Ghana.
Nigeria’s land border with Benin remains closed to the entry and exit of goods, one of the biggest affected by the policy, the merchants of Ghana.
The blatant neo-colonialism that is sweeping across the country is more disheartening. The takeover of mines, oil fields, and even state institutions by China, France, the United States, and other great powers is just a drop in the bucket, far more disastrous than outright colonialism, as Osagyefo predicted.
African Leader Kwame Nkrumah
All this plus the inherent greed and lust for power that has gripped the continent’s most incompetent leaders are just plain annoying.
People like Alpha Conde and Faure Gnassingbe, who arbitrarily amended the constitutions of their respective countries to perpetuate their permanence in power, moved to Ghana at the request of Nana Akufo-Addo, newly elected president of a discredited ECOWAS to force the coup plotters to Mali that they overthrew an incompetent president who lost his popularity to hand over power in one day is laughable at best.
The desire to appease foreign powers outside the continent is evident.
Nkrumah never dies, his followers say. His belief that Africa must come together in an attempt to protect itself from Balkanization and neocolonialism while pursuing a common goal lives on.
The new struggle for Africa reaffirms Nkrumah’s call for an African identity. The mentality of Africans must once again look for solutions within themselves; if greed is put aside, it would be possible.
It is a dream bigger than man himself, because “The forces that unite us are intrinsic and greater than the overlapping influences that separate us” – Africa Must Unite.
Happy birthday, Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah
The writer, Oswald Azumah, is a Ghanaian journalist and political analyst for the consulting firm IntelAfrique, an avid lover of autobiographies.
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