Captain Smart was on national television and as usual, he celebrated his stark ignorance with such pomp and pageantry. This time and as usual he spread falsehood about Dr. J.B. Danquah. He exhibited before him a library, quoting without referring to any pages and contents and he attempted to make us accept his lies as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Let us begin with his attack on the Okyenhene. He said the Okyenhene should rather go by the title, Abuakwahene and not Okyenhene because there are two other Akyem paramountcies. If this is the case then he must ask the Ga Mantse not to use that title, because there are at least four other Gaparamountcies, which are autonomous and not under the jurisdiction of the Ga Mantse. They include, La, Teshie, Nungua and Tema.
Captain Smart is telling us that because the US embassy gave financial assistance to the Danquah family when he was in jail meant he was a CIA agent. Danquah and Nkrumah made their respective diverse contributions in our history. Danquah supported the kind of democratic culture growing in Africa and Nkrumah, the pan-African dream of a united Africa. This resulted in the hatred Nkrumah and the socialists had for J.B. Danquah.
Danquah was pro-Western and certainly with the height of the Cold War, the USA would be interested in him, just as the East led by the Soviet Union took Nkrumah as their pet. So, if the family of J.B. Danquah was left without a breadwinner, it would not be out of the place for the USA to support them.
J.B. Danquah never wrote any letter to the West, condemning Nkrumah, Captain Smart and all who think like him, should produce certified true copies of such letters.
J.B. Danquah only constructively criticised Nkrumah’s policies of experimenting in communism and socialism, that strayed away from the indigenous Ghanaian way of life and business. For example Danquah wrote to the Clerk of Parliament, stating: “Sir,I personally see nothing traditional in the idea that Ghana should with her eyes open, or her eyes half-closed, repeat this soul-searing experiment in Marxist-Socialism, by leaving Ghana’s big business in the hands of foreign privately owned firms, aided and abetted by a Ghana Capitalist Government in no way experienced in trade or business, whilst the Ghanaian himself … is to be restricted and confined to ‘small trade’ or ‘small business’ in a ‘small way’.”
Nkrumah’s economic drive only reduced the Ghanaian to the lower levels of society and business while the expatriates were the lords.It was back to colonialism, when the White Man came down and lord it over us, living in wealth and luxury while our people became servants and lived in poverty in their own land.
The reasons why Nkrumah hated Danquah, include speaking out the truth andusing constructive criticisms to offer correct alternatives for him to govern the nation. But unfortunately, Nkrumah never wanted to be contested in his views and opinions.
Dr Danquah saw in the American or Western model the path to Ghana’s prosperity. “For evidence,” he wrote, “there is to hand the incontestable fact that the three great nations which have achieved an industrial marvel after World War II, namely Western Germany, Italy and Japan, did so not on a Socialistic or State Capitalist economy, but on the basis of individual initiative and free enterprise, guided by the free and intelligent hand of their respective governments.”
This approach is very evident today, as socialist and communist nations like China and Russia, which Nkrumah saw as the best model for the Black Man, only became powerful economies after converting to capitalism and adopting free market economies. Nkrumah was so endeared to state managed economies of the East, that he had to replace his finance minister, K.A. Gbedemah, who strongly objected to his idea of the Seven Year Development Plan, which was going to make Ghana go into an Industrial Revolution, where her products would not get ready market at home and abroad.
Nkrumah was so obsessed with everything Soviet and socialism, that between1961 and 1966, the economic landscape became littered with multiplicity of state enterprises state farms. He got rid of K.A. Gbedemah, in September 1961, by driving him into exile and he got rid of Danquah by jailing twice without trial, first in October 1961 and got him released in June 1962; then again in January 1964 until he died in prison in February 1965. Meanwhile the state enterprises and farms yieldedvery poor returns.
Ghana’s economy tumbled from 1962 to 1966. Our Trade Deficit registered $138 million in 1961 and by December 1965 it went further down to $199 million. Before the economy went state managed in 1961, Ghana’s GDP growth rate was 6.2% with inflation rate of 1%. By December 1961 inflation soar to 3.5% and by end of year, 1965 it shot to 17%. Just by the way, Ghana highest annual inflation was during the Rawlings’ PNDC regime in 1983 when it registered 122%.
Our GDP growth rate dropped from 6.2% to 3.5% in 1961 and by 1965 it was 1.4%.
These retardation in the economy had negative effects on the lives of the good people of Ghana. Cost of living shot up and there were shortages of essential commodities resulting in long queues, coupled with hoarding.
Ghana started with £240 million credit in 1957, without any debt, but by 1965, she was in debt of over £357 million ($1 billion) with no credit balance on any account.
J.B. Danquah’s constructive criticisms were viewed as attacking Nkrumah, which at that time was sacrilege where offenders could pay with their lives. And so, it happened when denied his privacy and freedom, J.B. Danquah died in his prison cell. He had left his cell clean and tidy only to come back to see it in complete filth and mess. It caused him a heart attack from which he died. This was induced from powers above.
I dare Captain Smart to produce all those letters he has been alleging was written by J.B. Danquah which intended to betray Ghana or he should apologise and retrack those irresponsible statements. He knows nothing about Ghana’s history but will always come like a decorated ignoramus to celebrate his ignorance with pomp and pageantry.
Desirous to make J.B. Danquah appear very immoral in nature, he suggested that the doyen of Ghana’s democracy took his friend’s girlfriend from him butended up not marrying her. He said she was a Ga, but could not give her name. After insulting J.B. Danquah, he turned around to honour Nkrumah for cheating on his wife with an American envoy.
By making attempts to cover-up Nkrumah’s immorality, he rather opened up the past of our first president. In 1935, while teaching in Amissano, near Elmina, Nkrumah met a young beautiful lady, calledFanny Miller who was from Elmina. They started a romantic relationship which resulted in the birth of Nkrumah’s first child, a son called Francis Nkrumah, when he was 26 years.
Nkrumah abandoned mother and child and went abroad to study. He never came back to them on his return and even rejected all Gold Coaster women he had relationship with, considering them unworthy.
He sent his friend, Alhaji Said Sinare, a student studying in Egypt, to find him an Egyptian wife. He got him a young beautiful Coptic Catholic Egyptian, twenty-three years, Nkrumah’s junior, called Fathia Helena Halim Rizk. He married her on New Year’s Eve of 1957 when Fathia was 24 years and Nkrumah was 47.
This is what Captain Smart should come and justify.
J.B. Danquah’s contribution to the struggle for independence cannot be wished away by Nkrumaists and the NDC who have vowed not to give him his rightful place of honour in Ghana’s history. He began as a protege of Joseph Ephriam Casely Hayford, a member of the Gold Coast Aborigine Rights Protection Society, which was the first to lay the foundation for the struggle for independence. J.B. Danquah sat at the feet of the old man from 1915, when he was 20 years and Nkrumah was only six, till 1930, when Casely Hayford died. At that time Nkrumah was 21 and chasing young ladies around.
Casely Hayford, put J.B. Danquah in charge of the Youth Movementwhich he took full charge of after the old man died. J.B and the movement registered positive results in the Gold Coast and West Africa, that the time for self-rule was about to happen.
For one thing, J.B. Danquah and the Youth Movement persuaded the British government to establish a university in the Gold Coast, which it did. That is how we had the University of Ghana. And for those ignoramuses who doubt this, the information is on the University of Ghana’s website (https://www.ug.edu.gh/about-ug/history).
No amounts of lies can wash away the great works and contributions J.B. Danquah did for this country.
I always say that when a thief is persuaded, thieves join in the pursuit. If J.B. Danquah is said to be a traitor, then what was Nkrumah who among many other decisions that failed this country, he went on to sell our electricity very cheap to Kaiser, when he established Valco but decided not mine bauxite in Ghana to feed the factory? If J.B. Danquah is labelled a CIA agent, then what about Rawlings and the Nkrumaists who betrayed our democracy in 1981and brought in Libyans to help overthrow a constitutional government led by the only united Nkrumaist party after the first republic
Captain Smart and his colleague ignoramuses must stop disgracing themselves and misleading Ghanaians.
By Hon. Daniel Dugan
