I read Mr.
Kwesi Pratt’s intemperate vitriol against the British High Commissioner to
Ghana, as usual, with amused contempt and even wondered whether this
50-something career rabble-rouser would ever mature beyond emotional
adolescence. For starters, we learn that Dr. Nicholas Westcott had participated
in a public lecture organized by the Public Affairs Directorate of the
University of Ghana during which forum the British envoy had made his clearly instructive
remarks about the perennially regressive anti-investor policies indulged by
many an erratic Ghanaian government.
What is
interesting is that the British High Commissioner said exactly the same thing
that my late father used to say about Ghanaian governments for umpteen years
and times before his glorious passing in November 2001; which is simply and
commonsensically that the rampant change of policies anytime that there is a
change of government in Ghana has not augured well for the development of the
country.
Indeed, while
I was growing up at Kwabenya, where the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission (GAEC)
and the latter’s nuclear-power plants are located, in the late 1960s, my father
used to point to the unnecessarily wasteful fact of us, his children and, of
course, those of his friends, colleagues and neighbors having to be bused every
morning to school at distances of between 5 to 15 miles from where we lived.
The irony of it all inhered in the fact that a few hundred yards across the
street from our part of Kwabenya, the so-called African Quarters, lay rotting
building materials that had been earmarked for the construction of an
elementary and middle school but had been abandoned in the wake of the
overthrow of the Convention People’s Party (CPP).
For some
inexplicable reasons, neither the Kotoka- nor later Afrifa-led National
Liberation Council (NLC) had deemed it appropriate to pursue this worthwhile
project. And while I was growing up under the Busia-led Progress Party (PP)
government, the aforementioned building materials were still wastefully exposed
to the elements, as it were.
Then we also
have the sorry policy of summarily dishonoring all the agreements initiated by
the Progress Party with foreign governments and individual investors by the
Nkrumah-leaning National Redemption Council (NRC) junta led by then-Col. I. K.
Acheampong. The latter policy became known as “Yenntua” and initially seemed to
be the most patriotically proper thing to do. And just like his ideological mentor,
Mr. Acheampong acted as if Ghanaians lived in an autarkic fish tank, whereby
official policies could be dictated more by caprice than cognition. No wonder then
that shortly after the NRC assumed reins of governance, Ghana’s economy began
to totter to the brink of virtual stasis; and it would take hectic diplomatic
and apologetic measures to get the country’s economy moving again.
In essence, what
we understand Mr. Kwesi Pratt to be saying is that as representatives of
foreign governments, first and foremost, Dr. Westcott and his ilk had no
business in either attending the public lecture organized by officials of the
University of Ghana or making what clearly appears to have been a constructive,
albeit patently pedestrian, observation about the perennially erratic and
outright idiotic policy of deliberate discontinuity routinely indulged by
successive Ghanaian governments. In the case of the Kwabenya school-building
materials, for example, the ultimate loser was the proverbial Ghanaian
taxpayer.
Well, Mr.
Pratt is quite accurate in his decidedly superficial assessment that Ghana is
no longer a British colony. Interestingly, however, seeing and listening to his
own name, one would readily think that Ghanaians were still stuck in the
colonial phase of our history. Actually, we are not very far from the latter
situation; from the look of national affairs, particularly vis-ŕ-vis our
increasing dependence on foreign investment and Ghanaian Diaspora remittances,
one would expect the likes of Mr. Pratt to at least deport themselves with the
kind of diplomatic decency befitting a people who are instructively cognizant
of the fact that ours is a metropolitan, as well as cosmopolitan, interdependent
global economy and culture. In this new postcolonial environment, no human
personality is a foreigner or stranger to another, irrespective of geopolitical
and/or geographical context.
We also have
Mr. Pratt impugning the integrity of the British Serious Fraud Office’s recent
investigation of the Mabey & Johnson scandal, in which a remarkable number
of highly placed members of the Rawlings-led National Democratic Congress (NDC)
were found to have bilked the Ghanaian taxpayer hundreds of thousands of
dollars mostly for either and/or products and work never delivered or performed.
In other words, Mr. Pratt seems to be saying that the British government had
absolutely no right to expose the slimy underbelly of such presumptuous
apostles of probity and accountability as Messrs. Rawlings and Sipa Yankey.
In the case
of the alleged British arms deal with Saudi Arabia, which Mr. Pratt recalls
primarily in order to expose Britain’s hypocrisy, the logic is rather superfluously
sophomoric. First of all, the public lecture attended by Dr. Westcott during
which the British high commissioner allegedly made the observation attributed
to him bordered on the general “unclassified” socioeconomic well-being of
Ghanaians at large, whereas the British-Arabian arms deal was a patent case of
“classified” national security concern which, hypocritical or not, was
fundamentally a British affair. The Mabey & Johnson scandal, on the other
hand, regarded what might aptly be termed as “Noblesse Oblige,” the bounden
duty of a privileged former colonial power to ensure the welfare of its far
less privileged erstwhile colonial and current semi-colonial. For what does Mr.
Pratt think Ghana’s membership of the British Commonwealth of Nations is about?
Interestingly, the critic also provides
us with absolutely no evidence indicating that Dr. Westcott did or did not
comment on the British-Arabian arms racket, thus making it rather presumptuous
of Mr. Pratt to ask where the British High Commissioner was in the wake of the
same.
On the
question of Ghana’s membership of the British Commonwealth of Nations, guess what?
Mr. Pratt’s own ideological idol, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, was indescribably proud to
have been named to the Queen’s Privy Council in the wake of Ghana’s
independence. To hear Prof. Ali Mazrui narrate it, Nkrumah even rapturously
claimed that such accolade made him the symbolic beacon of continental Africa’s
recognition to the global community (See Mazrui’s “Nkrumah: The Leninist Czar” Transition 26 [1966]: 8-17).
In any case,
it is rather ironically risible for a man who proudly wields his British
surname like a law-enforcement official’s swagger stick to be lecturing his
intellectual and moral superiors about Ghanaian sovereignty and national
integrity. You see, Dr. J. B. Danquah both midwifed and baptized the Gold Coast
into Ghana, once the road to independence became evident. And to the best of
our knowledge, nobody ever put a gun to his head to prevent an immitigably
anti-British Mr. Pratt from changing his name. For make no mistake about this,
the first salient mark of psychological sovereignty is a name change for any
person of sanity. Thus, once upon a time, Mr. Francis Kofi Nwia saw the light
of cultural self-rediscovery and confidence and became simply known as Mr.
Kwame Nkrumah. Then recently, Mr. Kweku Baako also contracted an
Arabo-religious madness and became “Malik” Kweku Baako. Now, of course, it is
the turn of Mr. Kwesi Pratt to demonstrate that he is capable of regaining his
postcolonial sanity by renouncing his Afropean nominal identity for an organic,
original African one.
*Kwame
Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and
Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New
York, Garden City. He is a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah
Institute (DI), the pro-democracy think tank, and author of 21 books, including
“Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.
