“NKRUMAH’S  SON, A STORY AND MOMENTS IN OUR HISTORY.”

Read Time: 4 minutes

In March 1957 when my father, Kwame Nkrumah, with the massive support of the market women, the farmers, the ordinary people of the then Gold Coast, and even the school children, led Ghana to independence, I was a medical student in Germany but I flew home for the celebrations. What I remember most beyond the euphoria and excitement were the hope and pride we all felt for our country and for our countrymen.

My father was a man with a mission with no time to waste. He was not much interested in family life, social events, material comforts or possessions or even food. He was up at 4am every morning and thought nothing of beginning his phone calls before 5am and my tennis dates with him were 6am sharp every Sunday morning. What he achieved in 9 years- the schools, the factories, the agenda to liberate the whole of Africa among others— was due to this drive to achieve the total liberation of Africa not only from colonialism but from neocolonialism and economic dependency.

I was not in Ghana when his government was overthrown by the CIA and the short sighted and deluded Ghanaian tools they used to end this mission but I was informed by the Director of the Children’s Hospital in Boston, USA, where I was doing my Residency in Pediatrics, who had been tasked to inform me by the State Department. Much later, I discovered that they had a thick file on me and monitored all my movements, as was also done by the Busia regime when I returned to Ghana in 1969.

My immediate concern was the safety of my father and my siblings and Fathia, my step mother. Of course, Dad himself was out of the country but the rest of the family faced traumatic scenes and danger, and if Egypt had not rescued them and flown them out of the country I cannot discount the possibility that they would have faced even worse than they did. Sekou Toure’s invitation to my father to come to Guinea as Co-President demonstrates what African Unity is really about and on the two occasions I visited Guinea, when I heard he was seriously ill, but he had already been taken to Romania, where I visited him; and the second time when I brought his body “home”, first to Guinea then finally to his resting place in Ghana — but that’s another story) he and Madam Toure treated me like a son. After my father reestablished contact with me in Boston from Guinea, he made it clear that although we could communicate by mail and telegram no mobile phones or international calls in those days) I must not attempt to visit him in Guinea and lay myself open to the charge of conspiring with him against our country. He was adamant about this and I obeyed, though reluctantly.

I understood better when, after I had completed my Specialization, I wrote to tell him that I had been looking for jobs in Africa and had been offered posts in hospitals in Tanzania, Kenya and Egypt and he immediately wrote back that I should return to Ghana and work for the Medical School. He added that if the Busia regime wished to arrest me at the airport I should let them! I dutifully applied to the Ghana Medical School, was offered a position and on the day we returned every relation of my wife Margaret were at the airport to form a physical barrier to protect me from arrest. In fact, nobody paid the slightest attention to me beyond my welcome committee, but they nevertheless kept track of my movements.

What the coup of 1966 did was to halt Ghana’s progress towards a proud, self sufficient, independent, de-tribalized, educated, industrialized nation in control of its own resources, using nuclear energy as well as its gold and oil to propel every citizen into the so-called middle class. Education was free up to and including university; affordable housing estates were being built; Hospital admission was free, and industries were being built in every region of the country. Silos dotted the landscape to store our agricultural products and there was a coherent, nation- wide planned economic and social agenda to uplift the lives of all Ghanaians. The fact that this was driven and achieved in 9 short years by Kwame Nkrumah is not the issue – you can erase the name from the history books as some have laughably attempted to do but you cannot erase his achievements. You can shout Preventive Detention and I will merely raise my eyebrows and tell you simply— if you throw bombs and kill innocent women and children and any random passerby, you are a lunatic who should be locked up. I asked my good friend Jake Obetsibi Lamptey this: did your father throw bombs at my father? And his answer? Yes. Then we have nothing else to say, but we remained friends till his death.

The coup of 1966 was the greatest mistake GHANA has ever made and its results can be seen in this disorganized, dependent, poor country we are living in, with thousands homeless on our streets, school children 80-100 in a classroom, 82% of doctors in Accra and Kumasi and the rest of the country at the mercy of people selling untested concoctions. Our roads are unmotorable, our forests are depleted, our rivers are polluted by poisons from mining, and foreign vessels are depleting our seas. How many have access to potable water or toilet facilities in their houses? Are we not ashamed by our lack of progress on all these fronts? And by the filth by our roadsides and gutters? Where is our nuclear plant at Kwabenya? Where is our 5-star Korle Bu Medical School and Hospital? Go there now: if you cannot pay for your saline solution you will not get a drip to save your life. If you cannot pay for your diabetic testing strip, you cannot get your blood sugar tested. And the dirt and broken equipment and torn mosquito nets and oxygen lines which carry no oxygen. This is our premier hospital. And the proud, hardworking people of Ghana, who rallied to Nkrumah’s call and liberated their country and thought of themselves as GHANAIANS first, not Ashantis or Ewes or NPP or NDC- where did they go? This is Kwame Nkrumah’s GHANA today, shorn of its vision, shorn of its purpose and pride, interested only in self enrichment, and shouting to God all day in church to perform miracles instead of working their fingers to the bone to build a better future for their children. This is the Ghana that February 24th 1966 built-and may God forgive them because the children of Ghana will not.

Prof. Francis Kwesi Nkrumah

Accra