President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has been in the news in recent years for being someone who has brought new conversations and perspectives to some narratives about Ghana's history.

One of them is his repeated indications on the need for the country’s premier university, the University of Ghana, to be renamed after one of the founders of Ghana, J. B. Danquah.

Not being the first time he mentioned it, while addressing a gathering during the 75th Anniversary Thanksgiving Service of the University of Ghana, President Nana Akufo-Addo drew in the narrative again.

This time, he detailed some of the events that led up to the influences that both J. B. Danquah and some other founding members of the country had on the decision to build the country’s first public university.

The president also described JB Danquah’s role in the establishment of the University of Ghana as an ‘inestimable work,’ which should be rewarded with his name put on the university.

This hope, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo stated, could become a reality soon.

Read the exact comments he made at the event below:

“And for me, the most poignant of those memories is the inestimable work Dr. J. B. Danquah did to mobilize the Ghanaian people to insist on the building of this university. It was the inspired leadership vision of this great scholar and nationalist, who’s described in his lifetime as the doyen of Gold Coast politics, that following the establishment of the Elliot Commission, tasked by the colonial government, to inquire into the possibility of establishing a university in West Africa, enable the Ghanaian people to reject the original decision of the British-colonial government based on the majority recommendation of the Elliot Commission that a single university be established in Ibadan, in Nigeria, for the whole of the then British West Africa, and got it to agree, through a series of passionate interventions in the then legislative council.



“And with the enthusiastic support of the founders of Ghana to the creation of a separate university for our country, on the basis on his minority recommendation. How felicitous was that decision and how greatly it’s contributed to the growth of modern Ghana. It would be wholly-appropriate, and not at all far-fetched, to describe Joseph Boakye Danquah, as the founder of this university. A fact, which on the 75th anniversary of its existence, should be vividly recalled by all of us who have been, and are the beneficiaries of his work.

“Indeed, in many other jurisdictions where there is less heat in their politics, and more attachment to the historical records, it would not have been put of place to have this university named after him. Who knows, one day, it may well happen,” he said.

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