The 2012 presidential candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has said late Prime Minister Prof. Kofi Abrefa Busia’s greatest contribution to Ghana was providing an alternative vision to that of Ghana’s first president, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.

He said Prof. Busia and his ally, J. B Danquah had the moral courage despite being tagged as “agents of imperialism and stooges of neo-colonialism”, to trumpet ideas of “free governments, representative governments, multiparty democracy, the rule of law [and] principles of democratic accountability” which, in his view, would have provided a “better context for the development of our nation”.

Speaking at a memorial lecture to celebrate the centenary anniversary of Ghana’s only Prime Minister in the Second Republic, Nana Akufo-Addo said because Busia’s ideas “ran counter to the prevailing orthodoxies” of his time, his critics rained “a great deal of invectives and abuse” on the UP tradition as “neo-colonialists” and puppets of Western “imperialism”.

He believes history will ultimately bear witness that: “Busia’s greatest contribution to our lives [and] our history was his determination to provide Ghana with an alternative vision to that of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, and that, it was important for our country that there should be that alternative vision that one man could never be the repository of all wisdom, and it was important that, that alternative vision of Ghana be kept before the Ghanaian people at all times”.

According to him, the ideas that Busia and J. B. Danquah espoused in the 1950s and 60s, “were very much against the current of what was happening on our continent at that time”.

Extolling Prof. Busia’s “democratic” credentials at the lecture, which was organised by the Busia Foundation on Thursday July 11, 2013, Nana Akufo-Addo said posterity will be the better judge of Prof. Busia and the ideas he espoused together with his contemporaries of the UP tradition.