Celebrating Founder’s day as holiday is “unnecessary” – Dr. K. B. Asante
- Posted on
- Comment
Ghanaian statesman and retired Diplomat, Dr. K. B. Asante has described as “unnecessary” the celebration of Founders Day as a public holiday.
He argues that the day could have been put to better use without the declaring it a public holiday.
Dr. Asante, who worked as secretary to Dr. Nkrumah explained that a day in honour of a hard working personality like Dr Kwame Nkrumah should not have been a holiday.
“Nkrumah was for hard work…this is Kwame Nkrumah’s birthday and we focus on Kwame Nkrumah,” he said.
The Founders Day was instituted by the late President John Evans Atta Mills in 2010 and was set aside tocelebrate the birthday, life and legacy of Ghana’s first President, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.
According to K. B. Asante, Ghanaians “should celebrate him [Nkrumah] properly” by reporting to work at 7:30 am which was the scheduled time Dr. Nkrumah reported to work.
He recalled that “we used to start work at 7:30 am in Nkrumah’s time and he was on time. You never hear the siren on the streets taking the President to work at 10:00 when we are supposed to start working at 8:00 and I think if we would do that on Founders Day.”
In a sharp rebutal, a political science lecturer at the University of Ghana, Dr. Aggrey Darko, is of the opinion that celebrating the day as a holiday is not a misplaced priority.
“If the nation believes that there are certain critical actors and certain critical individuals who at certain points in time had to sacrifice their times, their livelihoods and everything so we can have some self determination, we need to remind ourselves that of the contribution of these individuals so we can also access our own contributions,” he explained.
Dr. Darko stated that it is imperative for the general public to make a self assessment of their personal contribution to the development of the nation while celebrating the achievements and sacrifices of Dr. Nkrumah.
“We have to look at it in the light of our own developmental nemesis, our own challenges and whether indeed, we have had leadership plus followers who really have the interest of the nation at heart and not people who are literally interested in what they will eat and what their own parochial interest will be shaped by public policies and programmes,” he advised.
By: Efua Idan Osam
ABOUT: Nana Kwesi Coomson
[email protected] An Entrepreneur, Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Communications Executive and Philanthropist. Editor-in-Chief of www.233times.com. A Senior Journalist with Ghanaian Chronicle Newspaper. An alumnus of Adisadel College where he read General Arts. His first degree is in Bachelor of Arts - Political Science (major) and History (minor) from the University of Ghana. He holds MSc in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Energy with Public Relations (PR) from the Robert Gordon University in the United Kingdom. He is a 2018 Mandela Washington Fellow who studied at Clark Atlanta University in USA on the Business and Entrepreneurship track.
View all posts by: Nana Kwesi Coomson
(Selorm) | 
(Nana Kwesi)