The widow of Kwame Nkrumah, Madam Fatiha, passed away last week in Cairo, her home town, where she had been living for most of the years since Nkrumah’s over throw in February 1966.

As to be expected all kinds of tributes have been pouring out from all kinds of corners including people and institutions who have never really cared what became of her and her three children (Gamal, Sekou and Samia) since Nkrumah died. Many of these conspicuous mourners did not even realize that Madam Fatiha was still alive all these years.

The worst of these hypocrites is always government. Those in power have the power, if the will was there to have honoured Madam Fatima, recognized her and provided for her and her family. But shamelessly successive Ghanaian governments, at best pursued a policy of benign neglect or even outright hostility or opportunistic association and gestures towards the family. This is not because Madam Fatiha has lived outside of Ghana because the same treatment was experienced by the oldest of the children,, Dr Francis Nkrumah (the first son of Nkrumah , from his Ghanaian first wife) or Sekou (Fatiha’s second son) who both live in Accra. This shameful conduct included governments and regimes that claim to be political heirs of Nkrumah.

The government of Ghana immediately announced that it will provide a state funeral befitting a former first lady of Ghana (indeed the very first!) but of what benefit is this post humus honour when she was neglected while she was alive? It is part of that African hypocrisy that suddenly transforms a dead person into the friend of everyone around with no body willing to say anything negative about the departed. Some of this is actually due to guilt. We tend to over compensate by making all kinds of commitments and all manner of gestures immediately after the death of someone close or public figures. However the guilt soon subsides and life continues very much as before with the loved ones left behind to pick up the pieces, as they must. Tears of some of the politically correct mourners go dry as soon as the TV cameras are turned off.

The way we treat the family of our national and Pan Africanist heroes cannot inspire commitment and confidence that devotion to Africa meant anything. As with all committed, genuinely committed (not the convenient foot lose opportunists that are so common these days), their families suffer: absent fathers and husbands. The children grow up feeling victimized by ‘struggle’ and after the hero have gone or is no longer in power the family might as well have been dead.

Nkrumah, even his worst critics, will agree, was completely devoted to the cause of liberating Africa. It was not for him building of personal mansions or having secret accounts all over the world. The struggle was everything. Madam Fatiha was much younger than the Osagyefo when he married her in a matrimonial union that typified Nkrumah’s refusal to accept the Saharan divide of Africa. The three children they had together were all toddlers when Nkrumah was overthrown, and they were only young teenagers when Nkrumah passed away in 1972. Fatiha herself was barely in her mid 30s. No husband, no father and no state provisions the family had to survive on good will sometimes of kind strangers who never met Nkrumah but treasured his contribution to our liberation. They could not leave in Ghana but thanks to President Gamal Abdul Nasser (after whom Fatiha’s first son, Gamal Gorkeh, was named) the family had been given a befitting home by the banks of the Nile. That house progressively became damaged due to lack of maintenance support since the family could not afford to maintain such a modest stately building.

The Ghana for which Nkrumah laboured and the Africa he toiled for simply ignored his family.

It is an insult to now be shedding crocodile tears at the passing of his widow. It is an insult to the family to be offering state funeral to a person that was largely ignored in her life by the same state that is now leading the mourning. The same Ghanaian state showed similar hypocrisy when Nkrumah passed way in exile in Conakry and demanded and later brought Nkrumah’s body to Ghana for State reburial! The embalmed body was for many years left to deteriorate in his village of Nkroful before shame and political expediency and influence of Nkrumahists in his administration forced Rawlings to accept a Mausoleum for Nkrumah in central Accra. Even then most of the money came from Gaddafi!

The spirit of Nkrumah continues to wonder and I hope it continues to haunt all the opportunists, ideological parasites and political saprophytes who continue to use Nkrumah’s name in vain. It should shame us into honouring our heroes and heroines both in life and in death especially the widow and children they leave behind. Ask yourself how many more widows like Madam Fatiha are abandoned to penury across Africa? This bitter experience is even making many of our corrupt leaders to believe that whatever the volume of our assets they are looting now is a kind of insurance for their family against an uncertain future.

In this fiftieth year of Ghana’s independence and the inspiration for the independence of the rest of Africa we should assuage Nkrumah’s wondering spirit by doing right by his family, not by state burial to his widow but by Ghana’s government first repaying back all the entitlements die to them by way of gratuity to their father, refurbishing and handing over their family home in Accra and setting up a proper trustee body to look after, maintain and supervise the Nkrumah Musoleum in Accra. Then the rest of us can honour Nkrumah the best way we can. But Ghana has to lead in atoning for these wrongs.

* Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the deputy director of the UN Millennium Campaign in Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He writes this article in his personal capacity as a concerned pan-Africanist.

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