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February 24, the Day that Progress
Died in Ghana
On February 24, 1964, General Kotoka and
the Armed Forces of Ghana at the instigation and copious help
from Western interests, took upon themselves to remove
forcefully from office a constitutionally elected president of
Ghana, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.
And thus began a tailspin in
the affairs of Ghana
As one writer was to describe it
later, it was the beginning of the “celebration of traitors.”
But some thought the coup was good. They naively named it
the “Glorious Revolution.” To no one surprise, at least not Dr.
Kwame Nkrumah's, this coup was to bring in many ills in its
train; some wickedly consequential and others devastatingly
worst.
not quite.
It has been some fifty year since
the last coup. You would think our fellow citizens would know
better;
There has never been an open regret. But there have
many attempts to justify that coup, even in the face of
contradicting historical events, namely, that the coup was not
the brain child of Ghanaian discontent, executed by the two
soldiers Kotoka and his sidekick Afrifa.
February 24,
1966 coup was a catastrophe planted by the CIA and executed by
Kotoka and Afrifa. And a destructive force was unleashed that
continued on a path through the 70s into the 90s.
Many
presidents went down. Busia was blown away after a couple of
years. Next was Generals Akyeampong, Akufo.
President
Limann was to suffer the same fate half way through his first
term after about two years in office.
“Reap the
Whirlwind.,” Geoffrey Bing, the British expatriate Attorney
General under Nkrumah, was to famously state in his iconoclastic
book by that same name and thus produce one of the most gripping
accounts of the period.
Something had been serious
damaged with the event of February 24, 1966. Yet, the day is
being quietly celebrated in the memorial of Kotoka International
Airport, named after the general who in a sane society would
have been called a traitor.
The presence of this Kotoka
memorial is mind shattering. It is a reminder of how oblivious
we have become of the change or damage that has taken place
after this coup.
The damage did not end with the killing
office holders in the institution of the presidency. It extended
to other killings of other personalities, some judges. Others
ordinary folks who were whose fortunes or lives ended as victims
of collateral damages.
Kwame Nkrumah was the founder of
modern Ghana and one if not the most prominent African leader of
the 20th century.
After his removal from office, he was
to die in exile in Guinea in 1972.
There have been many
attempts to tarnish Nkrumah's legacy and the attempts are still
ongoing. But many who lived in that era know that “What Went
Wrong in Ghana” was not Nkrumah's creation.
Those imagined “wrongs” were made very
real by the very people who staged the coup. They were to
manifest themselves later under various and corrupt regimes.
But to say the least, it is a a lasting testatement to
observe later that the soldiers who staged the first coup were
very, very naive. And because of them and their enablers, things
have been in a state of mess in Ghana since 1966.
But there is no need for the current
generation to be complicit in their naivete some 50 years later.
We need to understand the damage in order to set things right.
Between 1966 and now, there been one spark in the attempt to
ignite Ghana's forward movement as experienced under Nkrumah.
That spark was only achieved under President Agyekum Kufuor,
presiden of Ghana, 2001 – 2008.
It remains to be seen if
the same spark can be achieved under the President Nana
Akufo-Addo's current regime.
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