The Convention People’s Party (CPP) has accused Professor Ali Mazrui of postulating an extreme and biased view of Ghana’s first President and founder of the CPP, Dr Kwame Nkrumah. The party says Professor Mazrui’s lectures delivered at the Aggrey-Fraser-Guggisberg Memorial Lectures of the University of Ghana portrayed Dr Nkrumah as a dictator.
The National Chairman and Leader of the CPP, Dr Abubakar Al-Hassan in a statement also accused Professor Mazrui of presenting a one-sided analysis to a mainly youthful audience, who had no direct experience of the realities of the Nkrumah era, except what they have heard and read from sources hostile to the Nkrumah’s political heritage.
The statement challenged Professor Mazrui to reconcile his negative assessment of Dr Nkrumah as a failure in Ghanaian politics, with the phenomenal resilience of his legacy and its remarkable enduring capacity in the Ghanaian political experience. Professor Mazrui, who is a renowned African International Cultural Historian and Political Scientist had argued that although Nkrumah was successful in Africa, he was a failure back home in Ghana.
The CPP is particularly unhappy about this analysis, arguing that the potency of Nkrumah’s legacy is such huge that political parties including the People’s National Party (PNP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) won elections in 1979, 1992 and 1996 by merely claiming the Nkrumah heritage.
The CPP’s statement expressed surprise at the fact that Professor Mazrui could have ignored the transformation that took place “under the short regime of the CPP”.
The CPP further took on Professor Mazrui for talking about Nkrumah’s overthrow by the Ghana Army, but failing to make reference to the assistance of Western intelligence. “For Professor Mazrui to assert that Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown by the Ghana Army without making reference to the assistance Western intelligence, especially, the CIA gave to the coup makers, Afrifa and Kotoka, is to ring down an iron curtain on the truth,” it said.
The CPP, in conclusion said it is no wonder Professor Mazrui made those comments since “the Aggrey-Fraser-Guggisberg Memorial Lectures are sponsored by multinationals, who represent a power catalyst to imperialism, presently renamed, globalisation.”
Source: GhanaWeb
