It is exciting to find that the once Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum and Memorial Park in Accra has been redeveloped by the Akufo-Addo administration and renamed Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park.
The old facility housed the bodies of Nkrumah and his wife Fathia and had a museum that had on display objects from various stages of Nkrumah’s life, as well as other relevant things.
The redeveloped facility has a reception centre made up of a host of offices; a modern library, an eatery, a gift shop, an infirmary, and a conference facility digitally controlled.
It also boasts an audio-visually synchronised fountain which lights up the park at night and a mini-amphitheatre for lectures and performances, as well as a picnic area for the youth.
More importantly, it has its museum expanded and refurbished with facilities like digital audio-visuals which chronicle the life of Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah.
We, first and foremost, commend the now late President Jerry John Rawlings for the idea of building a monument in honour of the first President of the country.
Dr Don Arthur also deserves mention for designing the memorial complex dedicated on July 1, 1992, the 32nd anniversary of the British colonists’ coronation of Dr Nkrumah as the first President of the country.
It is heart-warming that the President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo buried all partisanship and saw Nkrumah as a statesman and pan-Africanist who deserves the due respect and honour and so any monument in his memory must be up to the international standard.
This is exemplary because most of the time, African leaders do not fancy honouring the memory of their predecessors, especially when they do not share the same political ideologies.
When President Akufo-Addo assented to the Public Holidays (Amendment) Act 2019, (Act 986), on April 16, 2019 and stripped July 1 of its holiday status and left it as just a commemorative day, many were those who said he wanted to erase everything that forms part of the good memory of Dr Nkrumah.
Well, we cannot stop the debate but we think the redeveloped Nkrumah monument has national and continental significance and speaks volumes.
For instance, it is all joy to learn that the redevelopment of the park forms part of the government’s plan to make it one of the best tourism and heritage attractions in West Africa.
We wish President Akufo-Addo’s vision of the redeveloped facility going to increase annual inflow of visitors to the place from the current 90,000 to about 1,000,000 would materialise.
So far he has sent the message that African leaders must reorient themselves to honour statesmen rather than cronies to encourage their citizens to, at least, consider what contributions they can make to their countries to move forward and to extend such to other countries, if they can.
In that same message is the fact that African leaders must leverage all the benefits of the positive acts of their citizens for national development, no matter the political ideologies of the people concerned.
