In a provocative lecture delivered to Pennsylvania University students and professors last Monday (on the eve of Founder's Day in Ghana), Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko described Ghana's first President as the "personification of the African tragedy of the 20th century." He said, it was ironic, but pregnant with subconscious meaning that BBC listeners voted Kwame Nkrumah as Africa's man of the Millennium in December 1999. "Precisely because, in my view, Nkrumah's leadership epitomised the African dream that decayed, the political freedom that was won and lost, the promise that was missed, the economic experiments that led to our detriment, triggering a long, avoidable period of instability and mass poverty." He said Nkrumah used his charisma, energy and urgency to inspire his nation to the promise of greatness, beginning with a GDP growth of between 9.12%, rapid industrialisation and significant expansion of social programmes. However, within a decade there was decline on nearly every major front -- civil rights, democracy, and the economy suffered -- and he ended up offering to a hopeful continent a model of leadership and a paradigm of governance that left a 50-year legacy of 'Afropessimism'. The head of the Accra-based governance think tank, who was in the United States for a month-long series of public engagements, stressed, "in fact, the Nkrumah failure was Africa's failure or vice versa," yet, "we are happy to hail him as Africa's Man of the Millennium." With undisguised irony, he said the Nkrumah story captures all that was wrong with Africa in the 20th century and that was why the founder of the CPP best represents Africa's millennium -- one of avoidable failure which the leadership of this new century must fix. "It was apt he got the vote - over Mandela and others -- even if not consciously intended for the reasons I suggest because Nkrumah's failure served not only as a microcosm of Africa's failure but as the pace-setter for that continental failure which today has the majority of our people still steep in poverty." The Executive Director of the Danquah Institute said, Ghana, being the first Sub-Saharan nation to break away from colonial rule readily offered not only a model for independence but more importantly on how Africa's new-found self-governance and development status were to be moulded. In his lecture, 'Challenges and Opportunities for Africa's Democracy and Development -- Ghana's Historical Pace-setter Burden', Mr. Otchere-Darko called on the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to reduce their activities in Africa and, instead, redirect much more of such financial resources through the African Development Bank, which he described as "probably the greatest legacy of the defunct OAU." Mr. Otchere-Darko praised the urgency with which the AfDB is attempting to lead the charge for Africa's development but for which it has not been receiving the commensurate funding. "The AfDB," he said, 'continues to show unsurpassed courage and native care and wisdom that given a greater fiscal space it can better support Africa's development, especially, through the funding of essential self-paying infrastructural projects for a sustained Pan-African development." He said, "a recent Afrobarometer survey done in East Africa showed that a vast majority of African people simply want the freedom to move and trade freely with each other across states without borders. They are not interested in either a political or defence union but in economic integration." He added, "We must, therefore, find a clever way to take the momentum (or lack of it) of that integration process away from the politicians so that the momentum from the people would then force the politicians to buckle up. Let us speak with a strong, united voice to our leaders that we want economic integration now -- and leave them to argue among themselves about political integration, if they so choose." Mr Otchere-Darko lamented how, for ten years, since the process for a common West African currency, Eco, was started in 2000, the five member states continue to struggle to meet the convergence criteria -- with an embarrassment of serial postponements. He also touched on the absence of a generally recognised supranational court or legal system to facilitate, enforce and enhance the harmonisation of laws, rules and regulations for integration. Taking an interesting angle that seemed to have taken many of his knowledgeable audience by surprise, the Danquah Institute director questioned Nkrumah's sincerity to Pan-Africanism. He queried the Pan-Africanist wisdom in dismantling institutions of integration that were already in place by 1957 only to turn around and preach unification. "Today, the very same countries (plus Guinea which followed the Nkrumah way and stayed out of the CFA zone) which for over 50 years till 1957-68 shared the single currency called the West African Pound, are the same states forming the West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ). "So, why was Nkrumah, the Pan-Africanist, the first to pull Ghana out of a single regional currency in 1957, when a common currency is one of the major achievements for integration?' Mr Otchere-Darko also questioned why Ghana's first President took Ghana out of the West African Court of Appeal, causing the collapse of a critical institution for integration. He also cited Nkrumah's decision to take Ghana out of the West African Airways Corporation, forcing countries like Nigeria, the Gambia and Sierra Leone to form their own airlines, none of which is around today.