Nkrumah’s followers are ‘lazy thinkers’ – Amoako Baah

Followers of Dr Kwame Nkrumah's ideals are lazy thinkers and bankrupt of ideas, says Head of the Political Science Department of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Dr. Richard Amoako Baah.

The Political Scientist said on Adom fm’s Burning Issues Monday night that he is disappointed in the ‘professed believers’ of the ideals which he said are inconsistent and irrelevant to happenings in modern times and ‘would not work when put into practice.

"[Nkrumah’s] time was completely different, the world order today is completely different, even Russia, China, Vietnam who were practicing socialism have all departed from it…so what are they saying?” he asked.

He wondered why people would still purport to believe in ideals that Dr Nkrumah himself could not define.

"Nkrumah himself was not consistent on his ideological stance as 'he sometimes claimed he was a socialist and another time, a communist…hence did what he thought was right for the time," he said on Dwaso Nsem on Adom FM, Monday.

“Different people have different reasons for calling themselves Nkrumaist…” he told show host Captain Smart.

Several political parties including the Convention People’s Party (CPP), People’s National Convention (PNC), Great Consolidated Popular Party (GCPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) have all professed to be believers of the ideals of Kwame Nkrumah.

However, all these parties, apart from the NDC, have since the beginning of the Fourth Republic tried joining forces to become one political party but this vision has never materialized.

And the clear lack of definition of the ideology, according to political analysts, is what has led to the confusion among the Nkrumaist front.

According to Dr. Amoako Baah, Nkrumah was a great man by all standards but he would be very disappointed in the lazy thinkers following his ideals.

“Nkrumah himself would be disappointed in those people because once he’s taken you to school, you have to improve on what he did but that is not the case today…the least chance they get, they want us to go back to Nkrumah and that would not work…,” he stated emphatically.

In relation to Ghana, Dr. Amoako Baah said, Nkrumah would have found it very difficult to implement some of his ideas in modern times looking at the growth in the country’s population from 4.5 million as at independence to 25 million in 2010

.

He therefore called on the CPP and other Nkrumah followers to come up with a new way of defining themselves if they wish to remain relevant to the current political discourse.

Source:myjoyonline.com