To Brother Francis,

Your article of April 15, 2014, titled “Are the Nobel Dwarfs Invited too?” was both perceptive and opportune! In fact, your ability to enunciate the vagaries of the African Consciousness – that powerful, yet inaccessible, embodiment of everything African, is highly commendable. I truly enjoy reading about your profound dissections of the African problem, and I encourage you, Brother Francis, to continue in this great “vocation.” You have continually expostulated and postulated a compendium of ideas for the upliftment of the African people and continent, and I applaud your recurrent efforts to awaken our Black Consciousness, which appears to have been dimmed by the forces of penury, ethnocentrism, parochialism, and provincialism. However, I wish to provide some comments to both support and criticize your positions on some of the issues you explored in your article.

Your initial quotation, planted on the patch of partisanship and divisiveness, makes it difficult for me to determine if your appeal for better stewardship in Africa is based on your belief that Africa’s success ought to be channeled through the totemic postulations of Nkrumaism. Although Nkrumah’s suggestion that Africa be united under one federal government had euphoric elements anchored to it, it was a very impractical proposition, one that was based more on megalomania than egalitarianism. Determinism, if it meant anything to Nkrumah, stood as a primordial opposition to African unity, considering the fact that African unity had existed in name only, without any tangible efforts to bring such unity to fruition.

African chiefs would sell their fellow citizens to the foreigner. Slavery became the blotch on the awnings of the collective consciousness of Black people and of slavery’s perpetrators. Indeed, the enslaver, the complicit gangster, and the enslaved were all painfully mired in this chthonic, reprehensible act. Here began the fissures that would tear apart any modicum of unity on the continent. Then, of course, is the primordial burden of a smorgasbord of languages, dialects, and tongues, none of which was subsumable – except by cruel design, which, honestly, has never been an attractive phenomenon. Finally, the perpetual greed of Africa’s elites would have prevented any political, cultural, and/or geographical amalgamation of Continent Africa.

Blaming Busia alone, and leaving out the progenitors of the 1966 putsch, for the evisceration of Nkrumah’s “grand” plans for African unity makes your argument about the genesis and perpetuation of Africa’s twin curses of penury and retrogression quite dogmatic, rather than pragmatic, which, not unexpectedly, has elicited vicious and vacuous criticisms from those on the opposite end of the political spectrum. Of course, we all have our political loyalties and affiliations, but we cannot expect our enunciations to be accepted without criticism, if those enunciations are erected on the pillars of partisanship, presumption, and dogmatism.

Arguing differently, I believe that John Mahama’s call for dialogue within the body politic is not too late. Sadly, however, the ineptness of African governments is palpable: these leaders continually reject the voices of the opposition, no matter how brilliant those ideas are. For instance, any intellectual who has currently embraced the Busia-Danquah-Dombo Tradition is unlikely to be “feted” by the Mahama administration, no matter how original, “emancipating,” and constructive that individual’s ideas are. Similarly, the NPP is unlikely to embrace and implement the powerful ideas of an NDC devotee, for the simple reason that that individual belongs to the “wrong” political persuasion. Here, Brother Francis, lies one of Africa’s most lamentable and damaging sociopolitical evils.

Maybe, just maybe, we Africans are not very intelligent. If African leaders prefer to sell the resources of their nations to foreigners for peanuts; if ministers of state plunder state coffers to enrich themselves and their immediate relatives; if dissenting political voices are silenced via the diabolic instruments of intimidation and threats; if the leaders of Ghana would purchase brand-new SUVs and drive them on decrepit roads; if African leaders and their progenies would fly to Europe and the U.S.A., at their governments’ expense, to seek medical treatment, while the ordinary man and woman are left to die at local, understaffed, medically archaic hospitals, then, Brother Francis, perhaps we are not intelligent after all. So, let us allow the gravity-defying, levitation-capable, parapsychologically active dwarfs to implement our policies for us. Perhaps, the dwarfs, in their esoteric, celestial, prodigious, superhuman states, would carve out and implement better ideas for the survival of the African – and his continent!

© The writer, Daniel K. Pryce, may be followed on Twitter: @DanielKPryce. He invites the reader to join the pressure group “Good Governance in Ghana” on Facebook.com, which he superintends. “Good Governance in Ghana” is a group that emphasizes the preservation of democracy, justice, equity, and law and order in Ghana. He can be reached at dpryce@cox.net.