September 21 should be celebrated as Founders’ Day, not Founder’s Day, staunch Nkrumahist Vladimir Antwi-Danso has argued.
“…We need to re-craft the Founder’s with an apostrophe. This is controversial, but I’m being honest, I’m a CPP man, [but] there can’t be one founder. It is divisive. Founder’s”, the Senior Research Fellow at the Legon Centre for International Affairs and Diplomacy (LECIAD) said Wednesday.
“There was a platform upon which our Nkrumah built [Ghana]”, he said when he delivered a lecture on Wednesday to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the investiture of Hilla Limann–Ghana’s only president of the third Republic.
“Limann wanted that. That’s what he wanted. He wanted a situation where we are all one. The unity of the country. We can’t be factional and say one Founder’s Day…we are very happy and lucky that his [Nkrumah’s] birthday has been chosen to represent all the Founders”, Antwi-Danso said.
Late President John Mills instituted Nkrumah’s birthday as a statutory national holiday to commemorate the pan-Africanist leader’s role in founding the former British colony as an independent country.
However, the positioning of the apostrophe in Founder’s Day has always been a source of intense ideological and political debate. While some intellectuals and politicians like Prof Mike Ocquaye of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo tradition believe Ghana has more than a Founder, others of the Nkrumahist stock always argue that Nkrumah alone deserved the founding crown.
