Trashing the nobles among us

E. Ablorh-Odjidja

May 05, 2013

Want to know the small minds at work in Ghana these days?   Any news from the country these days will quickly tell you how our recent history has been cluttered with acts of the small-minded.

Most conflicts in the conduct of the state of affairs of the nation arise because they are governed by these acts of the small-minded.  These acts are not executed with the future in mind.  The convenience of the now and present is what dominates the mission.

For instance, how we use state protocol to honor the nation builders as opposed to the nation wreckers among us could be a good starting point.

A quick review of our history will reveal that when it comes to honoring our greats and national heroes, we seem to lack the force to do so in a manner befitting the achievement for which we want to do the honoring.  

As soon as the honor mark is established, you can be certain that this mark would soon be made porous enough to admit the elevation of some nation wreckers, thereby diluting the tribute.  And thus, we blunder on while erroneously calling ourselves a nation of honorable people.  

Only the small mind can withhold honor for the true hero.  And we do this with the pettiness of our politics and warped humanity.  The inability to show magnanimity and the constant failure to behave properly and being hampered on all sides by partisanship behavior are part of the examples.

These are some of the behavior types that are generated by small-mindedness.  This condition has nothing to do with literacy.  It is born out of meanness - literate men acting willfully to deny honor to the deserving.

Such a situation happened on May 03, 2013, at the opening of the Bui Dam with the obvious absence of former President John Agyekum Kufuor because he was not invited.

This was a deliberate act to satisfy a political sentiment.  It didn’t happen because of a lack of knowledge about President Kufuor’s whereabouts at the time or his immense contributions to the building of the Bui Dam.  His absence was the result of deliberate partisan calculations.  

The Bui Dam was Kufuor’s dam.  So often in our history, this vile practice of denial of praise has happened.  Sharing the same credit space of honor with a political rival has been the mark of denial.  Such was the situation at Bui.  

Kufuor’s presence on the same stage with Mahama at Bui would have added to the esteem of both men.

The Bui Dam was our politics at an exhibition.  Magnanimity and patriotic consciousness could have done more, while political spite took a backseat to hekp raise our profile as a nation of civilized people for the world to see.  And the honor derived could have been a collective for all.  But partisan politics prevented that determination. 

Another exhibit of spite can be found in the naming of Accra International Airport for General Kotoka, the man who staged the 1966 coup.

Kotoka had since been exposed as a quisling of the CIA, yet he is worshiped in a memorial as a national hero instead of him being remembered as a traitor because of his epic betrayal.  Yet, his posthumous profile has been raised to fit that of a national hero like Nkrumah.

Some may see in the Kotoka monument a recklessness that defies common sense.  And they would be right. 

The next monument of political spite is the Golden Jubilee Palace, named so by President Kufuor who conceived the idea and saw to the building of it before he left office. Soon after he left office, there was a rush by the new administration to return the complex to its old name - Flag Staff House

Both acts of naming, Kotoka International and Flagstaff House misconstrued significantly the mystic value in a name for a commissioned monument.  Thus, Accra International Airport now honors an established villain.  And the Golden Jubilee reverts the colonial past name of Flag Staff House. 

From the Golden Jubilee House name that celebrated our 50 years of independence from the British, we were now back to the Flag Staff House, where the British army commandant resided.

And in these efforts, we have rebuked our independence as well as restored with plomb our erstwhile colonial mentality. 

The excuse that the Flag Staff House name change was necessary to honor Nkrumah was bogus. Nkrumah would have scrapped the name Flag Staff House in the same way he left the Osu Castle because he thought it was a slave fort.

It would have been by far more meaningful to have removed Kotoka's name from the airport. 

On a personal level, the neglect to invite Kufuor could be forgiven.  But, put in a larger frame beyond the personal, it should not.  We need not honor or be respectful only to men with whom we agree.

The handlers of Mahama could have allowed him to share the same stage and space with the former President Kufuor at Bui.  And the world could have seen us as a politically matured nation.  That didn’t happen.

Recall that it was Kufuor who made the building of the dam possible. The dam was Nkrumah’s original idea.  But it was mothballed immediately after the 1966 coup. Kufuor saw the worth and gave support to the big idea behind it, thereby affirming the continuity needed for developmental ideas that must transit from regime to regime.

But the successor regime after Kufuor didn’t want any of that.  Rather, they would seek to pursue the destructive and useless policy reversal ploys, concocted for partisan spites, that have existed before Kufuor.

These policy reversals have done serious damage to our development.  A nation cannot quarantine its big ideas in a partisan mold and hope to be able to develop at the same time.

For this reason, we must owe Kufuor a big apology for the lack of courtesy shown to him at Bui.

E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Publisher www.ghanadot.com, Washington, DC, May 05, 2013

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