The founder’s day holiday is a relatively new one, officialised by the late President John Atta Mills as a public holiday. But the celebration of the day of Osagyefo’s birth had been going on long before we added the public holiday tag to 21 September of every year.

It’s almost a cliché now to use the phrase ‘if Kwame Nkrumah could see what was going on in Ghana now, he would be churning in his grave’. But being cliché does not make anything less true, and the same can certainly be applied to the above phrase.

There are several reasons people often go gaga over Kwame Nkrumah as a leader of Ghana; he won the country independence, initiated and completed several socio-economic and infrastructural policies that hugely benefit Ghana to this day, and he was a huge believer in the capabilities of the African in managing our own affairs.

Those are all well documented and would be futile rehashing here; after all he also had his faults. He initiated policies and laws inimical to the democratic ideals upon which he swung to power, the Preventive Detention Act, establishing the one party state that led to his edging closer to that tyrannical status.

So Nkrumah’s supporters and detractors hold this argument every Independence Day and Founder’s day, and in fact it is already been raging through the country this past couple of days; but that is far from my purpose here.

Because friend or foe: what cannot be denied about Kwame Nkrumah was his unrivalled excellence at being a leader, a political actor, and a power for economic development. More than anything that is what Ghana needs at this moment in our history, not a leader to win us independence, but a leader who can galvanise the people of this nation into one, a leader who revels in taking the hard decisions that real governance is rife with.

That is the real tragedy of founder’s day, that we now live in a country once ruled by a man of Osagyefo’s ilk, that is now a bedrock for corruption, incompetence, and a weird mixture of the two and several other ills that now have made this country unbearable to live in.

We are witnesses to all these, the fuel price hikes that drives up the price of every other commodity, the unbearable power situation, institutionalised corruption that is sewn into the very fabric of society, and within it all the flagrant display of extravagance by the leaders, characterised by cases such as the recent CHRAJ one; and within it all a President at the top who either does not care, or is incapable of taking care of the problems even if he does care.

It is the absence of a true leader since Nkrumah that has set us on this inevitable path towards hardship that gets worse with every subsequent president. The iron will, palpable charisma, the intellectual capabilities, the vision to propel a people forward towards a certain destiny; that combination has been missing in all our presidents since that first one, and the decay has spread infinitesimally from the top decade by decade, until we are left with this current shell of Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana we now live in.

So yesterday as I listened to pundits across the country trying to justify either side of Nkrumah’s persona, I felt like people were missing the real point of the issue. Because it does not matter which side of the divide you fall on, it is an incontrovertible fact that Ghana has not had a leader like Nkrumah since, and the combination of average and mediocre leaders since has culminated in the Ghana we find ourselves in today.

That is the real tragedy of Nkrumah’s demise we should be looking at; that neither we nor our leaders seem to have taken any pointers from the greatest leader this nation has ever produced. As time goes on we should be progressing, not regressing; but that can only be done if we are willing to learn from the past, embrace the great and endeavour to avoid the pitfalls.

We have failed to do that, and that is why Ghana would never join the pantheon of great nations. Because they all have one thing in common, great leaders; and we have not had one in 48 years.