Samia Nkrumah narrates what her family went through after Acheampong invited them back to Ghana in 1975
The daughter of Ghana’s first President, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, Samia Yaba Christina Nkrumah, has narrated the ordeal she and her family went through after they were received back in Ghana in 1975, three years after her father’s demise.
Speaking in an interview on Joy Prime, Samia Nkrumah indicated that her entire family went into exile when her father was overthrown in February 1966.
She said that it was in 1975, during the era of General I.K. Acheampong, one of Ghana’s military leaders, that they were invited back into the country.
She said that General Acheampong promised to take care of the Nkrumah family, and they accepted his invitation to return home.
The former legislator indicated that it was after they returned to Ghana that they realised that a lot of people had turned against their father.
Samia Nkrumah said that she and her siblings heard people making all sorts of allegations against Nkrumah, including those who said he him stole the country’s gold resources.
She also added that even in their classrooms, teachers criticised their father in front of them.
“When we returned in 1975 to pursue our education at the invitation of the Acheampong regime, they said they would honour our father, take care of us, and give our mother a house and so forth. It was then that I heard negative comments about our father for the first time, and they were pretty ruthless. He (her father) squandered our gold and all that.
“Even from Achimota School. One economics teacher, who mercifully I don’t remember the name, while we were sitting in class, said ‘Nkrumah squandered our gold and I don’t know, did what and what’. And I’m thinking ‘oh dear’. I was too shy, helpless, and intimidated to even be able to defend our father to my teacher,” she narrated.
Samia indicated that her family took solace in the fact that they knew all the things being said against her father were untrue.
She said that her father took the political decision not to amass wealth of any form and did not even own a house of his own.
“We heard a lot of these denigrating comments. He amassed wealth, he did this. And of course, we knew very well, being his own family, that was far from the truth. Even the house, the land given to him, the house which he built with the help of strong women supporters, entrepreneurs at the time, which is today Peduase Lodge, where I was born, that could have been our house, but he gave it to the state. It’s the property of the Republic of Ghana, receiving dignitaries just as he wanted it to be.
“So, from personal experience, we knew that our father didn’t amass wealth. Our father wasn’t interested in those kinds of things. In fact, he was a leader who exemplified courage, a sense of purpose, vision, all the things we longed for and we need to emulate in our lives – leaders across the board, all kinds of leaders,” she said.
Shocked by Samia’s revelation that her father did not own a house, the journalist asked, “Your father didn’t have a house?”
The former MP retorted, “He did not. Strangely, incredibly, he did not. And it was a decision, like everything he did, it was a political decision.”
She also said that the women who built the house for Nkrumah were so unhappy with him giving it to the state.
But she said her father managed to convince them that it was the right thing to do.
“I have a very interesting story about how those same women who helped him with the construction of the house were very angry when he gave it back to the state because they wanted him to have a place to go at weekends and, you know, with his family.
“He explained to them why he had to be almost superhuman. So, he had a reason for everything he did. And the fact that he decided not to make money out of politics was a deliberate, studied political decision,” she added.
ghanaweb.com
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