General News of Friday, 6 February 2015
Source: Graphic Online
Convention People’s Party stalwart, Prof Agyeman Badu Akosa, says after following discussions commemorating the 50th anniversary of the death of JB Danquah, he believes organisers were telling stories they themselves knew could not be the truth.
He said after J.B Danquah supported every subversive act against the state, he could hardly be painted the saint the UP tradition want the world to believe. And that approach, he said, also belies their calls for reconciliation.
A central theme of the anniversary celebration has been the imprisonment and untimely death of JB Danquah in prison under the Preventive Detention Act (PDA), an act said to typify Nkrumah’s wickedness and abhorrence for dissent.
But Prof Akosa, who spoke to Radio Gold on Thursday, said JB Danquah was not arrested for doing nothing and though his death in prison was regrettable, he could not have been an innocent candidate.
He said when J.B Danquah was arrested winthin the precincts of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, he was with a prepared speech to broadcast to the nation and the timing was well choreographed to coincide with the attempted assassination of Nkrumah by policeman Constable Seth Ametewe.
That brazen attempt, which also followed Danquah’s own conviction that President Nkrumah had stolen his birthright (for he was inordinately ambitious to be president and did everything to prove that), justified his arrest especially when the PDA was in effect, he said.
According to Prof Badu Akosa, the leadership of any country subject to terrorism will take far-reaching decisions “and that is precisely what Kwame Nkrumah did.”
He said Members of the UP tradition want to foist their version of history on Ghana but that cannot be the history of Ghana. Besides those who criticize the PDA are the same people who cannot even criticize the terrorism they perpetrated.