Akufo-Addo Pinches Sleepy Mills

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Created on Saturday, 03 September 2011 00:00

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Akufo-Addo Pinches Sleepy Mills

It was billed as Liberty Lectures, the first in a series espousing the ideals in freedom to use human intellect as catalyst for development, organised by the Danquah Institute, a media, research and policy analysis centre in Accra.

But with the political clout of the Principal Speaker, and the fact that former President John Agyekum Kufuor and other dignitaries were billed to speak, the lecture was always going to have a profound effect on the body politic.

It turned out to be an illuminating night, offering an insight into what this nation would look like under the presidency of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) candidate, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. As was the normal feature with such gatherings, there were a number of side attractions.

When Prof. Kwabena-Frimpong Boateng, the Honorary Director of the Cardio-thoracic Centre, dismissed by the fumbling administration of President John Evans Mills Atta Mills, entered the hall, he was given a standing ovation. Everybody wanted to shake the hand of the heart surgeon, who was sent packing by a terse dismissal letter “with immediate effect.”

There was retired Supreme Court Judge, Prof. A.K.P. Kludze who was detained as a student leader in 1964, under the Preventive Detention Act of 1958, promulgated by the Convention People’s Party government of the first indigenous Head of State of the Republic of Ghana, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.

When he took the mike, Prof. Kludze had the audience cheering with the pronouncement that in the political tradition from which the NPP emerged, truth was sacrosanct. “A cow is a cow,” he declared to loud cheers.

He invited the audience to ponder over the possibility of including August 4th as a date worthy of national celebration. It was on August 4, 1897, he told the audience, when the Aboriginal Rights Protection Society, the first political grouping to emerge in the then Gold Coast, was formed to fight the threat from colonial Britain to put lands in the country under the British imperial crown, and which could be said to have been the fore-runner for agitation for self-government.

When Nana Akufo-Addo was called to the podium, the applause was understanding. He was not only the lecturer. It was the first time party faithful were to get an insight into the policy that would shape up into the New Patriotic Party’s 2012 Manifesto.

He apologised for the decision to postpone the lecture, which was originally scheduled for August 4th, this year. The change of date was occasioned by his departure to South Africa to deliver a lecture on ‘Outlawing Criminal Libel Laws in Ghana.”

“My speech on that day, focused fittingly, on that momentous enterprise of liberty. 10 years ago, on 2nd August, 2001, when the then President of the Republic, His Excellency John Agyekum Kufuor, gave his assent to the enactment of the Criminal Code (Repeal of Criminal Libel and Seditious Libel Laws (Amendment) Act, 2001 (Act 602). The repeal brought to an end, a century old legal regime repressive of free expression.” Incidentally, Nana Akufo-Addo was the Attorney-General who championed the abolition of those repressive laws.

Nana Addo traced the history of the NPP, which is founded on the libertarian values that informed the formation of the Aborigines Rights Protection Society at Cape Coast on August 4th, 1897. It was the brain-child of John Mensah Sarbah, the first qualified lawyer to come out of the then Gold Coast, Joseph Casley-Hayford, Peter Awoonor Renner, Jacob Wilson Sey, George Hughes and J.P. Brown among others.

“The society, with the help of the mosquito, spared the Ghanaian nation the seemingly intractable problems that continue to confront many nations of Eastern and Southern Africa, which experienced settler colonialism, and the expropriation of the lands of the indigenous people by the settlers, he told his audience.

According to the NPP leader, the United Gold Coast Convention, officially recognised as the first political party in the Gold Coast, was inaugurated at Saltpond 50 years later, on August 4th, 1947.

“Wealthy nationalist businessman, George Paa Grant, J.B. Danquah, R.S. Blay, Francis Awoonor-Williams, Edward Akufo-Addo, Emmanuel Obetsebi-Lamptey, otherwise known as Liberty Lamptey, Ebenezer Ako Adjei, and others such as Cobbina Kessie, J.W. de Graft-Johnson, William Ofori-Atta and John Tsiboe, publisher of the Ashanti Pioneer, gathered in Saltpond, at a colourful ceremony attended by chiefs and people from all walks of life, to launch the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), the nationalist organisation, which first lit the flame for the liberation of our country from colonial rule.”

It was the UGCC, according to Nana Akufo-Addo, that invited Dr. Nkrumah down to be its General Secretary. Nkrumah broke away from the UGCC and founded the Convention People’s Party, incidentally, also at Saltpond in 1949, to push for independence on March 6, 1957.

The man who could be President by the end of next year, said liberty was the cornerstone of these two major organisations from which the NPP emerged, urging Ghanaians to push the frontiers for liberty and free expression.

“Throughout the ages, people have fought for liberty. One of the founding fathers of the United States of America, Benjamin Franklin, said: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Nana Addo deplored the tendency of the Atta Mills administration to resort to borrowing, instead of exploiting the natural resources of state to move the nation forward.

“We may have to re-visit our HIPC experience, if we don’t borrow responsibly. For example, some $10 billion of loans has been approved by Parliament since President Mills took over. The danger with this development is three-fold: lack of adequate value for money assessment, debt sustainability issues, and insufficient preparedness on how these loans must be spent.”

The official leader of the opposition then tore into the Mills administration. “This NDC government has had plenty of resources at its disposal because of the expanded economy it inherited; record cocoa and gold prices on the world market, together with revenues from this new found wealth. To borrow a famous phrase: Na Sika No Wo Hene?”

He said a government run by Akufo-Addo would put premium on industrialisation to turn our natural resources into finished or semi-finished products, instead of shipping them as raw materials and receiving peanuts for them.

“We can’t continue travelling the worn path of limited success of being exporters of raw materials,” Nana Akufo-Addo charged. “Ghana should be at the fore-front of industrialisation of West Africa.”


Source: Ebo Quansah/The Chronicle