Comment: DO NOT RENAME LEGON AFTER DANQUAH!

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Comment: DO NOT RENAME LEGON AFTER DANQUAH!

Author: Nana Akyea Mensah, The Odikro

Date: 2011-08-24 18:12:21

Comment to: Legon Should Be Renamed After J. B. Danquah

OFFICE OF THE ODIKRO
a companion of the black star!

Subject:
DO NOT RENAME LEGON AFTER DANQUAH!

To: Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr.,
Danquah Institute, c/o Akufo-Addo.



Grandson,

Did you set out to deliberately provoke me?

I find this renewed energy behind the ill-fated call to rename the University of Ghana after J.B. Danquah as opportunistic, a deliberate provocation, and a rather mischievous attempt to re-write the history of our country.

This does not come as a surprise, however. This is not the first time Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., is making this ugly call. And like all previous attempts, this also shall fail. Futile as everyone knows this is, Okoampa's importunate call to rename the University of Ghana after his maternal granduncle is loaded with despicable lies and unreasonably goes against the verdict of J.B. Danquah's own people, in his own constituency who voted against him on each and every occasion he presented himself a a candidate, be it for Parliament, Municipal Council, or as a President of this country.

It is not only the people of Akyem who rejected him. He was rejected by the whole country by more than an overwhelming majority! And his contemporaries who knew him well had every reason to reject him. I have personally analysed and evaluated some of the reasons why J. B. Danquah was so overwhelmingly rejected. This call to rename Ggghana's premier university after J.B Danquah, goes against the collective knowledge and wisdom acquired over the years, concerning the very dark sides of this shady character, so dark as to be "black voted" even by his own elite colleagues in the Lodge!

A darling of the British colonialists, J.B Danquah's highest political ambition was to be a Colonial Secretary, lost a lot of respect in the eyes of his British masters in the role he played in the promotion of human sacrifice and ritual murder in the Gold Coast. Thus, in the end, neither the Akyems, who knew him more than anybody else, Ghanaians as a whole, his colonial owners, nor the CIA, his last refuge, wanted to have anything to do with him! A very serious problem with Okoampa's call is the presumption that most Ghanaians consider this villain a hero. This is a fundamental flaw, and a mischievous one, because it is so easy to find out!

It is annoying enough to hear Okoampa complain about "no significant monument, other than the rough-hewn statue located on the minor rotary – or roundabout – bearing his name somewhere in the Osu district of Accra recalls the memory of Dr. Danquah." This is because, Danquah does not deserve even that statute he is talking about! It is even more annoying when Kwame Okoampa tries to compare J.B. Danquah with Kwame Nkrumah! He has the blinkers firmly in place as he observes:

"Even President Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first postcolonial premier whom Dr. Danquah mentored and introduced into the mainstream of Ghanaian politics, and who already has the erstwhile University of Science and Technology named after him, also has a major institutional landmark on the campus of the University of Ghana named for him."

A question which Okoampa asks, which for a frustrated grand-nephew who badly needs a university named after his granduncle, must have a lot of meaning is:

"The most relevant and logical question, therefore, becomes: Precisely what crime did Dr. J. B. Danquah, the indefatigable spearhead behind the development of Association Football (or soccer), COCOBOD, the Tetteh Quarshie Memorial Hospital and even the constitutions leading the erstwhile Gold Coast to independence as Ghana, commit and/or perpetrate against the august republic that he so much loved and fervidly dedicated the bulk of his adult life to?"

Here is my answer: You shall see it in the next post!

[TO BE CONTINUED!]

Forward Ever! Backwards Never!!!

Cheers!

–

Nana Akyea Mensah, The Odikro