Mr. Chairman, Elders, Students and Staff of UDS, Fellow Ghanaians,

It is with a great sense of joy and fulfillment that I have come to Wa the capital of the Upper West Region and to meet with all of you today. I know that the true sons and daughters of the Osagyefo are indeed those of us who benefited not only from the free education programmes he introduced but also those who were inspired by him.

This region has a pride of place personally to Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. We all know that on Independence Day, 6th March 1957, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah wore this famous smock with his colleagues on the podium to pronounce independence. However, very few people know how he came by that smock which we are told he cherished so much.

I have been reliably informed that during the struggle for independence, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah was arrested and detained here in the Upper West region precisely in Lawra. When he was released someone from here magnanimously gave him this smock to wear because the shirt that he had prior to his detention had a problem. He cherished this smock so much that he chose to wear it on that special day, Independence Day, and he urged his colleagues to do the same. Today this beautiful smock has become a national dress.

I also want to share with you another intriguing story about Sir Gordon Guggesberg, the governor of the Gold Coast from 1919 to 1928. Though he is credited for developing some infrastructure in Ghana, such as the famous Korlebu Teaching Hospital, the Achimota School and the railway system in southern Ghana, etc. he had no such plans for the north.  Before he was made governor he as a professional surveyor who did survey work on almost all the lands of the Gold Coast.

He therefore came into contact with most of the tribes in Ghana including the people of North. He came by a strange conclusion that the people of the north were very robust and disease-resistant and will be used as a labour pool for the cocoa plantations and the mines of the Gold Coast. It was therefore his policy that the people of the north should not get education beyond class six.

Thus when Governor Guggesberg visited Wa in 1926 and was met by a pupil with a bouquet of flowers who recited some nursery rhymes to welcome him, Guggesberg turned to the commissioner and said: “You have gotten the whole concept wrong, the people of this area are not supposed to have this level of education, they are not supposed to be this eloquent”.

So there you have the origins of the discriminatory policy against a particular part of the country whilst at the same time promoting education and development in another part. This policy perhaps accounts for the fact that in the colonial era, there was only one middle school for the three northern regions. That one school was sited in Tamale. Thus people from the three northern regions had to travel on foot for days to have access to middle school education. Sons of this region travelled on foot from towns like Wa, Lawra, Tumu, and Gwollu to Tamale to have access to middle school education.

Obviously such harsh conditions were not favourable to the women so the bulk of our sisters from the north did not venture to attend school. They were automatically cut out whilst their counterparts in the south had access to the best education. This obviously was a system akin to apartheid and would have hindered the socio-economic and political development of the north.

My brothers and sisters, this sad state of affairs was not acceptable to Dr. Kwame Nkrumah who had firsthand information about this deplorable state of affairs in the northern part of the country during his tour of the country first as the Secretary General of the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) and then as leader of the Convention Peoples Party (CPP).

As leader of government business he initiated a move that transformed the then middle school for the three northern regions into a secondary school. From this time on there was no turning back. Kwame Nkrumah gave a priority to the north in his accelerated development programme. He made sure that the northern sector got its fair share of the Ghana Education Trust Schools which were been built all over the country. In addition to that he insisted that education for the people of the north from primary to secondary level should be free! This he thought was a way of compensating the people of the north for the way they were so unfairly treated by the colonial government for decades.

My sisters and brothers, today we have lots of intellectuals, professionals from the northern part of this country at the various sectors of the economy contributing meaningfully to the socio-economic development of the country. This is indeed a vindication of Kwame Nkrumah’s vision for the north. H.E. Vice President John Mahama, Prof. John Nabila, Dr. Sulley Gariba, Dr. Edward Mahama, Alhaji Mahama Idrissu, Hadjia Adissa Munkhaila, Ms Francesa Issaka, Mrs Nabila Williams.

We are grateful that the Osagyefo has not toiled in vain.  However, his policy of building as many schools as possible and giving as many scholarships as possible to the people of the north was truncated by the coup d’état of 1966.

By 1966, schools like Ghana Secondary Senior High School Tamale, Bolgatanga Girls Senior High School, Bawku Senior High School, Navrongo Senior High School and the Kanton Senior High school in Tumu had been built and stoked with books and qualified teachers who were tasked with the responsibility of giving the best education to the students there.

It is not a coincidence that many schools around the country are celebrating their 50th anniversary these years.  The reason is simple, 50 years ago, under the government of Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, many schools were established by the Ghana Education Trust, as part of a national policy to expand educational facilities throughout the country.

Those many schools established in the 60s were well-built and well- equipped schools. They were built in the same structure, same model, same standard, and all look similar.  The idea was that many others would emerge to replicate them.

The emphatic statement is that from no single secondary school for the three northern regions in 1951 there were almost ten or more secondary schools doted over the major towns in the three northern regions by 1966. In the first ten years alone, from 1951 to 1961, more was achieved than in the whole period of colonial rule.

SEE TABLE IN AN ELEMENTARY HISTORY FOR SCHOOLS BY F.K. BUAH, first head master of Tema Secondary School (one of the schools built by Kwame Nkrumah) and a minister of education under the PNP government of Dr. Limann.

The figures in the table show the great increase in the number of children in primary and middle schools, and of students in secondary and technical schools and colleges of higher education.

For example, in 1951, you had 1,083 primary schools and by 1966 you had 8,144 primary schools. Similarly the number of students in primary schools grew from 153,360 in 1951 to 1,137,495 in 1961. In 14 years, the number of primary schools grew to 7,061 with an average of 504 primary schools built a year.

In 10 years, they had achieved more than in the whole period of colonial rule. In 1964-65 there were 9,988 primary and middle schools, and 89 secondary schools, 47 teacher training colleges, 11 technical schools and universities. Ghana was actually the most literate country in the whole of Africa.

All levels are important but we must focus on primary and secondary levels. If you expand tertiary education without proper preparation at the bottom, the universities do not produce the best. This is similar to building a house. The foundation does not look attractive but it is what the rest of the building is going to stand on. Putting money in primary and secondary education may not sound very grand, however, they feed the rest of technical and other higher educational institutions.

So Nkrumah’s vision according to the statistics here show exactly the growth of education in the 14 or so years he was in power and one can project that if he had been allowed to continue, he would have achieved his objective of FREE and COMPULSORY EDUCATION FOR ALL in Ghana.

By investing so much in educating the people of the north just as he did for other parts of the country, it is clear that Kwame Nkrumah realized long ago that human resource development is a strategic and the most essential pre-requisite for social cohesion, national integration and development.

To him both the educational and industrial set ups were to be pursued almost simultaneously and as a matter of urgency. No part of the country including the north was to be left out in this regard. 

When launching the Seven Year Development Plan in 1964, Nkrumah said, “The development of Ghana has not been sufficiently balanced between different parts of the country. It is the deliberate policy of this Plan to correct this imbalance… Special effort has to be made in order to ensure that the rate of progress in the less favoured parts of the country is even greater than the rate of progress in those sections that have hitherto been more favoured.  It is only by this means that we can achieve a more harmonious national development. In the present Plan it is proposed to pay special attention to the modernizing of agriculture in the savannah areas of the Northern and Upper Regions. It is hoped that through secondary industries based on agricultural raw materials to turn the Northern areas into major sources of food supplies for the whole country …”

Just as he was building up these schools, industrial concerns were also being established to respond  to the needs of the north. Alongside the building of schools came the building of factories. Notable among which are the Meat Factory near Bolgatanga (Zuarungu) which I am told used to produce, among other meat products the Volta corned Beef, one of the best corned beef products of the world. There was the Pawlugu Tomato factory that created ready market for our tomato farmers  just to mention but a few.

Ironically most of the buildings that once housed these factories are in ruins and some have been sold to churches. In fact, Kwame Nkrumah realizing that development of such huge industrial infrastructure had to be complemented with the supply of reliable energy supply set out to construct the Bui dam which was to be designed to be bigger than the Aswan dam in Egypt.

This dam was to provide electricity for the northern sector of the country as it complemented the Akosombo dam. After condemning Dr. Nkrumah in the post-1966 period, we have revisited the Bui dam project and it is now being constructed albeit with a reduced capacity.

Now we can see that Dr Nkrumah believed in investing heavily in human resource development as an essential component of the national development agenda. The idea is to develop the people and the people will develop the country.

We have many examples from all over the world showing that most of the new emerging economies had related the importance of education to development.

After the Second World War, countries like Japan and Korea decided to send students to the West to study and these are the people who returned to Korea and Japan to rebuild the economy.

Similarly, for a long time, India made university education virtually free for all. People thought India was cheapening education but we can see today that India has emerged from a third world country to become an influential economic player in the world mostly due to the fact that that country invested in education.

Nkrumah believed in the same philosophy. He had embarked on a lot of projects that will need many expertise so he enabled or made it possible for Ghanaians to go and study abroad. Most of them returned to help in diverse ways to the development of Ghana. So education has a lot to do with development.

Coming from the Nkrumaist tradition, we believe that education does not go to the highest bidder, rather it is a right, a democratic right. Democracy is not only concerned with multi-party elections, but it is gender equality, civil rights, and social justice. Education is a democratic right to be readily given from primary to university or tertiary level. There should be no compromise on this principle.

That education is increasingly going to highest bidder is a remarkable departure from Nkrumah’s vision. And that is what Dr. Edward Mahama said during one of the presidential debates when he was asked how relevant is Kwame Nkrumah’s vision today. He said he was the son of one of the peasant farmers from the North and was given a scholarship by the Nkrumah government to come and read medicine.

When he arrived in Legon, to even pay for his transport to the village from Accra was a problem. And as if that was not enough, it was even a problem trying to pay for his Trotro fare to and from medical school. Ironically at that same time, Nana Akuffo Addo was also in Legon with him. Nana Akuffo Addo had a car and Dr Mahama could not even afford the Trotro fare. But today thanks to the prudent education policies that Nkrumah put in place, Nana Akuffo Addo is a Lawyer, and he Dr Mahama is a medical doctor. Nana Akuffo Addo has cars, Dr. Mahama also has cars. Nana Akuffo Addo is a national figure, and he Dr Mahama is also a national figure. Nana Akuffo Addo has the clout to want to be president of Ghana, Dr Mahama also had the clout to become president of Ghana. “That is what I mean by Nkrumaism giving every one the opportunity to reach the maximum of his potential,” he concluded.

In fact, my standard response to those who say that the Osagyefo was a dictator is that how can a dictator invest so much in education as a pioneering president with so many resources at his disposal. He chose to invest these resources in our people and their education and left himself with virtually nothing. Self-denial even to the detriment of his own nuclear family. The products of this sacrifice are all the Ghanaian men and women who benefitted from his policies and who are carrying this nation today.

I hope you can now appreciate that Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s vision for education in Ghana immediately after independence was part of an overall comprehensive plan to bring about social justice, economic self-reliance and national cohesion in Ghana. And this was all linked to his vision of a united Africa including the Diaspora; the economic, political, and cultural doctrine for African Rennaissance.  It is the principle of the political union of Africans. It is the advocacy of the restoration of socio-economic and cultural emancipation and the realization of our dignity.

Long Live a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, multi-religious United Ghana.

Long Live a multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-lingual, rich and diverse United African Nation that must be.

Thank you.