TAN – The Afro News

Africa Old Leadership, New Leadership

Development/ Africa  ; By Kofi Akosah-Sarpong :Leadership has become a buzz word for practitioners, bureaucrats and theorists of African development. The term variously means a process of getting work done through people. Read the full story

By Charles Quist-Adade, PhD, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Surrey, B.C., Canada

The Centenary Anniversary of Africa’s Man of Millennium Kwame Nkrumah,

Had he lived, he would have hit a ripe old age of 100 on September 21. On September 21 1909, in the small village of Nkroful in the Western region of Ghana, a child was born. The event passed, as in the case of many children, as an ordinary event. And, as in many African families, the parents of this child did not even take note of the date on which he was born.

In his autobiography, he was to state that it was with some difficulty that he could pinpoint his birth day. Kwame Nkrumah, the visionary Pan-Africanist, who dreamt of a united, prosperous Africa, was a man of foresight. He had a noble vision for Africa and the Black race. He saw the metropolises of Africa becoming the headquarters of science, technology, and medicine. He saw in Africa a giant hypnotized, made dormant by years of foreign tutelage and exploitation, and he sought to awaken this giant. But time and his contemporaries were not on his side. He seems to have been born ahead of his time and his contemporaries. As the celebrated British historian, Basil Davidson put it: Nkrumah lived far ahead of his time. It would be in the year 2060, that people would read about his works and wonder to themselves why such a man should have lived at such a time. But, Nkrumah was not a paragon of political virtues. He committed mistakes, including his allowing bootlickers and sycophants in his Convention People’s Party to make a tin god out of him and to tear him away from the ordinary people.

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