I Think Nkrumah was Over Ambitious, what is your say?

RIP Nelson Mandela of South Africa. Since the man died I have not verbalized a word about my emotions. I guess that won't mean I don't care?. Rather a question has kept my mind so busy that I barely can find my heart to cry out the grief.

Did Nelson Mandela achieve more than Nkrumah in the struggle for a better Africa for Africans?

In all these boring years of travelling through the History of Africa, I have come to a well convincing junction that there was no ideology more authentic than 'Nkrumaism'. For that matter, myself didn't have much time to waste, I carried on my tiny brain and shoulders the cross of Nkrumaism and started the march for one Africa in my own small pace. This was the spirit that led to the formation of the 'Builders of the African Dream', as at the conception of the idea, I had less than six non Ghanaian friends both on Facebook and 'Lifebook'. 

It has been a very pleasing experience meeting Africans from different states dreaming the African Dream of United Nations Of Africa, which basically germinated from the hodgepodge mess of largely Marxist-Socialist ideals and thoughts that the plagiarism-prone Ghanaian leader had adopted as his own, with the hope of guaranteeing his immortality in the realm of African social and political thought, as Kwame Okuampa Ahoofe would put it.

So my mentor, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, lived for the unification of African States. He was too busy finding ways of attaining one nation out of a continent of different cultures, languages and ethnicity to realize that unity was more vital than unification. The best Nkrumah should have done for Africans was to plant little trees of unity and peace which would have fruit the unification.

Sometimes I wondered where he had bought his inspirations from. It could evidently be said that he was feeding Africa with his savvy of the United States of America and the oneness of the People Republic of China. ” The American-schooled Ghanaian leader was merely using the United States of America as his model for Africa’s socioeconomic development, even while Mr. Nkrumah paradoxically, and hypocritically, pretended to be rabidly “anti-American imperialism.”


On Tuesday, my eyes were glued to the TV screen whiles I watched the memorial service of the late Mandela and listened with keen interest as the many heads of states from near and far coloured our screens with their ‘tributes’ of just words. President Zuma did a great job by taking the hands of my mind to another walk on the achievements of Dr. Nelson Mandela. Then the question came again, so did Mandela achieve more than Nkrumah, my mentor? Now I could hear a voice answering me in a disappointed fashion.

What I call, the Nkrumah Megalomania

My own Nkrumah lived in a psychological state characterized by delusions of grandeur.
Nkrumah preached a white-hot sermon of the rapid industrial development of the African continent, his requisite Ghanaian model for such development was woefully and callously compromised on the hazy altar of pan-Africanist megalomania.

There were other African leaders of his time who could probably be also thinking of the good for Africa but it was another thought of them to make sure that their homes were adequately prepared before crying for the larger masses. But Nkrumah in his way was louder on Pan Africanism instead of the reason that took him to independence and that crowned him the first president of Ghana. One thing was that, Nkrumah forgot he was a president of Ghana or He saw Ghana as a suburb of Africa.

So he lived with his psychotic belief that by he helping All, will mean saving All. I don't think that Nkrumah was much greater, powerful and influential than Nelson Mandela, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere, why was he so gaudier on Pan-Africanism that the rest could barely be seen.


The Comparison

Whiles Mandela kept much of his attention on anti-apartheid and the growth of South Africa, Nkrumah on the other side was occupied with making the whole of Africa a unified state like USA and China, though he knew very well that the Chinese had one language, one cultural trace and a taste of education pre-dated years, he still had much hope and confidence that the unification of Africa will come by the achievement of attaining mere independence for every state.

Though my dearest Nkrumah was not a science student, I had expected him to understand the principle of diffusion (the process in which there is movement of a substance from an area of high concentration of that substance to an area of lower concentration). It would have given him the egression of his mental shackles of Africa Melioration to Better Ghana Agenda which the late Prof. Atta Mills died for.

The names of Mandela would long reside in many history books around the world, not because he did any special thing for the USA, CUBA or AFRICA but for reasons that he mothered a country which was drowning in the bitterness of a social policy or racial segregation involving political and economic and legal discrimination against people who are were not Whites. Delivered an anti-apartheid nation and breastfed the People's standard of living to a level higher than any of the nations Nkrumah was nursing.

Who is that south African who can point out or object to the ideologies of Mandela? No one. But how can someone argue out a man who laid his life down for the betterment of every life of a land.

Here in Ghana people talk against Nkrumah despite the fact that he attained independence, because he had in his capacity to move Ghana to the highest economic and political stability in Africa, if he had focused much of his head and national resource in the good of a nation rather than the amelioration of a continent.
I have now understood fully why our mothers named him "Nkrumah Show Boy".
Even in his choice for a wife, he turned blind eyes to stupendous buttocks of our mothers and fished a Fatia from Egypt. Again that was Nkrumah for Africa instead of Ghana.

Nkrumah was jumping from one African State to the other, giving them the hope of light that will lift Africa from the darkness of colonialism, imperialism and capitalism should there be a united Africa Nation whiles Ghana, his own remained in darkness.

So whiles Mandela served the mouths of south Africans to maxi satisfaction. When the South Africans became much filled to the brim, Mandela didn't have to bed any one to go voicing the good he/she had tasted. So soon the world got to know the good Mandela was doing.

On the contrary, Kwame Nkrumah, 'show boy' served every African nose with a perfume of the light and after people had had just an aroma of his ideologies, they were thrown into a state of imaginary writing of what probably would have been the ultimate taste of the Nkrumaism.

It therefore could be established world widely that Mandela did more than Nkrumah, though in his nation. The comparison of the average Life of a south African and a Ghanaian reflects the achievement of both fathers of nations.

Nkrumah was gathering a huge army of unarmed soldiers in the fight for African Redemption and pan-Africanism.
Looking at the condition of Ghana at the time Nkrumah was preaching his Nkrumaism, it appeared like a pastor who was Prophesying mansions for his congregation while he slept in a cottage.

I think Nkrumah was over ambitious, what is your take on this?

Written By: Oppong Clifford Benjamin
Founder/President- Builders of the African Dream.
Ghana.