The haste to remove Nkrumah and the reward

E. Ablorh-Odjidja

September 25, 2010

As one would assume, you don’t reward a person for consummating a reprehensible act.  But such is the depth of self-hatred in Ghana that we did, with the Kotoka example. 

In 1966, Kotoka, the man whose act virtually conjured a train wreck of governance in our country, has been awarded our most visible landmark, the Accra International Airport.

This edifice that has so much global visibility has been named after Kotoka. 

Today, there is vigorous debate as to whether his name should remain as the signage for the erstwhile Accra International Airport.

  
At the center of the debate are those who seek its removal as an honor to Nkrumah and others who want to keep the name to buttress justification for the 1966 coup.

This debate aside, there is the towering need for clarification as to why and how we name monuments after citizens.  In other words, who we point to as our heroes.

Naming national monuments after illustrious citizens is an honorable act. It sets them up as worthy examples of citizenship, in high esteem and an act of civic obligation for the rest of us.

The naming and the entire act of service by these citizens provide a narrative aspect of the better part of our history. 

Thus, people of good sense do not set up traitors, the Benedict Arnolds amongst them, as worthy of emulation.

But with Kotoka, the opposite is what we have done.  We have set up a Benedict Arnold as a worthy example of citizenship and named Accra International Airport after him.

No wonder that since Kotoka’s coup of 1966 to 1992, we have had about six successful coups and several failed ones. And with each coup, successful ones or not, good governance suffered and untold human rights abuses resulted. 

Yet the name Kotoka stands at the Accra International Airport, the most globally visible, monumental dedication to a name in Ghana; never mind the fact that there are far more deserving citizens of the past and present that could have qualified for that honor. 

A deserving citizen would have affirmed our pedigree as a nation of sensible people, rather than turn us into a derisive spectacle of a nation, as Kotoka’s name on the airport currently does.

Kwame Nkrumah, PA Grant, J. B. Danquah, Kwegyir Aggrey, Sgt Adjetey, Nii Kwabena Bonney, and many more - could have been excellent candidates in the naming contest because of their historic achievements.  

Moreover, what is wrong with honoring the people and the city of Accra with the name, since the land belongs to them?

Instead, we have offered an honor to a man who was paid to subvert our nation’s constitution and our political will. 

We know this by courtesy of the CIA, the main architect of the 1966 coup against Nkrumah.

Neither Kotoka nor Afrifa, the two leaders of the coup, came by their decision to subvert Ghana through honest and collective consultation with the people. Nor was the coup an outcome of a spontaneous outrage.

Kotoka, Afrifa and others were prompted to act by bribe and stealth. A CIA operative, John Stockwell, revealed the plot in his memoir, In Search of Enemies, published in 1978.

There was no politician alive in 1966 who readily admitted or would today that he was part of the conspiracy to subvert the Nkrumah regime. None!

February 24, 1966 coup was not an act of patriotism. It was an enterprise inspired by profit. 

It would be sincere on our part to reappraise, in the light of Stockwell’s revelation, the notion some have maintained that the coup on February 24, 1966 was a “glorious revolution.”

Instead, the 1966 coup was to impose on us a worsening of our governance – a military rule that set in chain the chaotic course of events, that pushed our nation onward from one stage of political instability to another.

And for this unsavory state of our affairs, we have chosen to honor Kotoka, the man who brought about the worsening of our affairs! The Accra International Airport is our reward to Kotoka.

Image wise, the Accra International Airport is the most visible point in Ghana from abroad. In this sense, it is readily visible than any edifice in the country today, including the Nkrumah Mausoleum, the Osu Castle or the Jubilee House. 

As an international airport, it is the doorway through which people come to know Ghana.

The name is displayed at airports around the globe as a destination point.  And thus, visibly and audibly the name is announced daily, thereby amplifying the negative aspect of our nation’s history while burying the most edifying part of our story.

Instantly, we honor Kotoka because of the February 1966 coup, his only claim to fame or infamy.  The notion that some have advanced that his death in the hands of insurgents, on the airport grounds, is a hollow one. 

Kotoka was killed by junior officers of the armed forces. Had Nkrumah been killed there, would Kotoka have named the airport after him?  

What is missing in the honor assessment for Kotoka is the point that he set on course the example that brought his own death. 

Two junior officers, Lt. Samuel Arthur and Moses Yeboah’s coup ousted Kotoka’s regime from power.  

They did so without aid from any foreign power.  It was successful takeover of power from Kotoka’s regime.  And had it not been for the betrayal by another officer within the junior ranks, Lt. Arthur would have been a hero today.

No monument exists for Arthur and Yeboah who were executed.

There were other historic deaths within the city of Accra.  Sgt Adjetey and others were killed on the road to preset grievances to the governor at the Osu Castle in 1948. 

Ever since, no one has used that historic incidence as reason to change the name of the Osu Castle.

Sgt Adjetey and his men showed valor, far greater than Kotoka and Afrifa’s, in executing grievances against the colonial government, which advanced the cause for independence.

They had no national edifice named after them.  But in a haste, we named the Accra airport after Kotoka, a man who betrayed our sovereignty.

Unlike Sgt Adjetey who was a WWII veteran, Kotoka came back from a policing duty in the Congo very disgruntled.  Nkrumah had sent him there to help a sister African country attain some political stability.

Yet, it is Kotoka we honor.  We have by this act enshrined his February 1966 coup as a necessary political part of our type of democratic process of governance.

Hopefully not!

But the world, the CIA included, have already had its chance to reassess our level of political maturity after Nkrumah and the coup of 1966.

E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Publisher www.ghanadot.com, Washington, DC, September 25, 2010 

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