Son of Ghana’s first President, Dr. Sekou Nkrumah has given a detailed account of what led him joining the National Democratic Congress (NDC) instead of the Convention People’s Party (CPP) his father founded.
According to Sekou, he decided to come to Ghana to build a new life for himself by joining politics but his older siblings; Samia and Gamal Nkrumah, never showed interest in both politics and living permanently in the country.
In a Facebook post lamenting about the sour relationship between him and his older siblings, Sekou said he joined the NDC at the time he was inexperienced in politics and partly because Ghana was now practicing the multiparty system after years of military rule.
However, after the death of their mother, Sekou claims his sister and brother decided to revive the CPP without letting him know about it; a situation he says gets him angry anytime he thinks about it.
According to him, he felt sidelined because his siblings didn’t consult him on their decision to join CPP and believes things would have been very different had they told him about their plans.
Due to the betrayal he felt, Sekou said he decided to publicly criticise his sister, Samia and blame her for the disunity in the Nkrumah family.
Explaining reasons for the division amongst them, Sekou narrated “Well to begin with I will say that when I returned to Ghana in 1989, my brother and sister were not interested in living in Ghana at all, and I was the only one determined to make Ghana my home at the young age of 26!…Anyway I got involved in Ghanaian politics but because I belonged to the opposition and was very young and inexperienced at the time many people did not get to know me or know about me! As a country too we were also relearning the ways of party politics, and the multi-party system of democracy after almost a decade of military rule and a culture of silence.”
“When my sister returned to Ghana after our mother’s death she clearly had an agenda and an ambition, and that is perfectly normal! The problem however was why she and my brother decided to keep me in the dark. True they are both older than me (five and four years almost) but that is no excuse to slight or disrespect their younger brother.”
“You see if they had shared their interest in reviving the CPP with me I believe things would have been done differently! Even if I did not agree with them on for example socialism or the viability of the party in contemporary Ghanaian politics, we would have at least shared our experiences and knowledge, and kept a unified front in the public eye and I would not have been critical of my sister! At least not in public!” he said.
Sekou Nkrumah is however no longer a member of the National Democratic Congress. He joined the NDC in 2007 but resigned in 2012 after he accused the party (then in power) of failing to achieve results and bring change in the lives of Ghanaians. His resignation followed his dismissal from the National Youth Authority as the acting head.
Source: abcnewsgh
