Nkrumah Did Not Throw In The Towel After He Was Toppled

Pieces of information put together reveal Ghana’s Founding President, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah had wanted to make a return to power but for betrayals by some of his appointees who went down with him in the overthrow of 1966.

He went to Hanoi, Vietnam, on a peace mission but could not return following a coup de tat in his absence. While in exile, the contemplative Nkrumah recalled ”Handshakes and the expressions of good wishes from Harlley (et al). These men smiling and ingratiating had all the time treason and treachery in their minds. They had even planned my assassination on the last day, though they later abandoned the idea.”

Well, he did not return to Ghana alive.

Revisiting his statement, Dr. Nkrumah said, ”I remember shaking hands with Major General Barwah-to be murdered in cold blood three days later when he refused to surrender to the rebel army soldiers. I little thought then that I would never see him again, or that Zanerigu, Commander of the Presidential Guard Regiment, Kojo Botsio, Kofi Baako, and other ministers who were there at the airport, would shortly be seized by renegade soldiers and policemen and thrown into prison.”

Pictured above and circled, we get to know the other name of Dr. Nkrumah as Kofi Wea in the declassified information, on a placard within jubilant crowds in Accra.

The deep-throat source indicated that Dr. Kwame Nkrumah was in a struggle to return to power but his building blocs which were the fraternity around him before the coup collapsed in the dreadful circumstances that ensued his overthrow. It is still not clear whether he contemplated the seizure of power in the comeback bid but had the external communist armada at his disposal which needed corroborators in Ghana to fly.

Nkrumah’s key appointees feared their properties would be confiscated by the government of the National Liberation Council if they could not substantiate the source of income used in acquiring them. It said those who could not prove sources of their material gains, quickly turned themselves into double agents and informants for the intelligence services of the ruling junta.

The grapevine was unequivocal in the claim that Dr. Kwame Nkrumah had wanted to take the coup-makers by surprise with pushback and ultimately return to power in one year but for the ”fallen” nature of his political cohorts back home in Ghana.  ”Sadly, however, these elaborate and strenuous efforts were woefully sabotaged by many of the men (or so-called Nkrumaists) who had enjoyed life in positions of substance and trust under his leadership back in Ghana before the 1966 coup that dethroned him” quoted the chief source.

Dr. Nkrumah was quoted as having said in exile thus ”It is a great disappointment and sorrow that I often reiterated, that if Nkrumah’s top political associates in Ghana had not sold their consciences for bread and butter, the ex-President would have regained power in less than a year after his overthrow.”

The Leader of Guinea Conakry at the time, Sekou Toure made him a co-President of his country but the life force in Nkrumah gradually petered away from cancer. He died in a hospital in Romania and had a temporal burial place in Guinea before the new military leader of Ghana, Gen. Kutu Acheampong called for the relocation of his remains which were buried at his hometown,  Nkroful in the Western region of Ghana.

In 1991, another military leader, Flt. Lt. Jerry John Rawlings oversaw the construction of a Mausoleum to which Nkrumah was transferred for final interment. His wife, Fathia, an Egyptian died in Cairo in 2007 and was also buried in the Mausoleum in Accra. The place is now a haven for tourists.  Dr. Kwame Nkrumah was adjudged by the African Union, Africa’s personality of the century ahead of  South Africa’s Freedom Fighter, Nelson Mandela, and other continental stalwarts.