Chapter Four
Dr. Kwame Nkrumah; TO MY MIND.
Dr. Kwame Nkrumah has been celebrated for quite some time and for me, the eulogy of Kwame Nkrumah leaves me a lot to tinker about. Before I begin to delve deeper into the subject area, I would like to set some basic records straight.
Kwame Nkrumah is not the FOUNDER of Ghana. In a parallel accord, the cohorts of the National Democratic Congress who have seen chosen to throw dust into their own eyes and consequently that of Ghanaians should have an awakening sense. As dealt with earlier, before Nkrumah had his foot in Ghana, then Gold Coast, J. B. Danquah and others had the independence strategy mapped out already to the extent of a name for the then Gold Cost. Also, they had the emblem of Ghana as the eagle and 6th March as the day for our independence.
Kwame Nkrumah should be seen as a TACTICAL POLITICAL OPPORTUNIST who played mind games with Ghanaians to achieve his own parochial political and selfish interest. Some might consider my statement as politically and intellectually disinclined. Before any does, let us ponder on these issues. If Kwame Nkrumah believed so much in fighting for independence, why did he see it as a job rather than a cause to the extent of being paid for his services as secretary? He was the only one on salary in the UGCC. Secondly, if truly his assertions that UGCC was fighting at a slower pace for independence and concocted the phrase “self-government now”, why did it take him eight(8) years to achieve independence? It should be noted that J.B. Danquah made it clear during the infant stages of UGCC that independence will be achieved within ten years. To echo the prophetic words of Danquah, the Watson’s Commission in its report said “Ghana’s freedom will be possible within ten years as submitted by Danquah.” Just like how Danquah predicted, Ghana was independent in 1957; exactly ten years after he made this statement. Furthermore, the MOTION OF DESTINY as put across by Nkrumah should not be seen as the communication which paved the way for Ghana’s independence. Rather, what it was meant to do was to give him Nkrumah, time to complete his selfish political strategy. If indeed Nkrumah was for self-government now why was the MOTION OF DESTINY advocating for independence when the British deemed fit? This motion called for the Assembly to authorize the CPP administration to: “Request the British Government to introduce legislation leading to Ghana’s Independence Act as soon as the necessary constitutional and administrative arrangements are made”. What Nkrumah was trying to tell us is that, then, he did not know independence was not possible because, to him, there were provisions and frameworks which would have made it possible so he “deceived” – told Ghanaians to believe that we need self-government now but when he got to the Assembly, the chorus he touted the UGCC of making, made sense to him. Danquah who was for pure political service reacted when he, Nkrumah passed the motion with an amendment to Nkrumah’s motion, calling instead for a “Declaration of Independence”. Danquah said: “Given the demand of the people for independence, the Legislative Assembly on its own should declare the country’s independence on 6th March 1954 and the British Government should be requested to extend recognition to the new state. Independence is a God-given right and not a gift of the British Parliament.” Nkrumah then opposed this amendment citing a very ASTONISHING point; if we as a country accept the amendment, we will “forfeit our British goodwill.” Someone who was for self-government now, now opposed to his own stance. If he knew we had any British goodwill, why fight for independence and force the British out?
Personally, I find it very hard to comprehend the ‘walks’ and ‘thinks’ of Nkrumah. It is for no reason I call him “THE TACTICAL POLITICAL OPPORTUINIST in the struggling château for independence.” I therefore would like to urge the next non-NDC government to help stop teaching our kids false history and help set the records straight.
Well, Nkrumah did his very bit for Ghana. He built the Tema Township, the Accra-Tema Motorway, Komfo Anokye Hospital in Kumasi, University of Science and Technology, University of Cape Coast, polytechnics and second cycle schools around the country, Akosombo Dam, Adome Bridge etc. Personally, I think Nkrumah did not do the BEST.
According to Severusa (2011), he described Nkrumah as AFRICA’S ROLE MODEL FOR AUTHORITHARIAN RULE. He said, “One of the saddest aspects of Nkrumah’s poor governance practices in Ghana was their replication in a majority of the newly independent nation states of post-colonial Africa. Because of his justifiable prestige as the first black African leader, it was relatively easy for the new leaders to subscribe to the specious, spurious arguments he had articulated in Ghana to justify authoritarian, personal rule. New nations required “emergency measures of a totalitarian kind” to secure their independence; “African communalism” meant that “African socialism” provided the natural ideological context for Africa’s “development”; multi-party democracy was alien to African culture and only heightened ethnic, tribal sentiments and allegiances, posing a risk to the integrity of the new states; “bourgeois rights”, i.e., civil liberties – freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of conscience, the right to personal freedom, etc., — were expensive luxuries that new nations struggling to win the war against poverty could not afford. Such nations required a single-minded focus on their “development” under the direction of an all-knowing, all-powerful “heroic” figure, who was beyond criticism and accountability. These were some of the misguided outpourings of the Nkrumahist media in newly independent Ghana. The upshot was the plethora of one-party authoritarian states with life presidents that proliferated across Africa in the first three decades of the independence era. As we now know, chronic instability, economic backwardness and persistent impoverishment of the African people were the direct consequences of the applications of these false concepts in Africa’s early development.
The democratic revolutions that have swept across Africa in the last two decades, inspired by the failure of authoritarian rule in Africa and the collapse of the Berlin Wall, have enabled us to jettison most of these ideas. As democratic governance gains greater and greater roots in the African polity, political stability and economic performance have both been considerably enhanced. Our own country is a case in point. For the first time since independence, we have witnessed in the Fourth Republic a strong commitment to democratic rule by all sides of the Ghanaian body politic, right, center, left, a commitment which has given us the longest period of stability in our national life. We have been able, during the period, to supervise two peaceful transfers of power between opposing political parties which have not shaken the foundations of the state. Again, the period of democratic rule has seen a marked improvement in the management of the national economy, with perceptible increases in average per capita incomes and rising living standards. There is a great deal still to do, both in consolidating democratic rule and in organizing the take-off of the Ghanaian economy. There can be little doubt, however, that a good, healthier foundation is being laid for the nation’s progress in the Fourth Republic (heresy of heresies – is it possible that, in the end, history will be kinder to Rawlings —? founder of the Fourth Republic -than to Nkrumah — founder of the ill-fated First Republic?)
Be that as it may, it is simply amazing that, despite all the evidence, there are still so-called “progressive intellectuals” who continue to hanker after the old authoritarian culture that Nkrumah personified. But then some of them openly admire North Korea’s political system. So, it may not be that surprising after all.”
Within the period of 1965-66, democracy, the multiparty state and the very legislative framework – constitution, negotiated at Ghana’s independence, almost nine years old, was operationally in limbo and effectively adrift. The leaders of the opposition party, United People (UP) were cut a swathe through. These activists either ailed in prison under the Prevention Detention Act (PDA) or in exiled. Indeed, these activists who exiled in Lome, Abidjan and Lagos were the first political immigrants and refugees of post-colonial Africa. J B Danquah, then 69, Kwame Nkrumah’s great antagonist, the man whose learning gave our nat
ion its name Ghana, died disastrously in the prisons of Nsawam Prison without the any form of a trial. It was he who, with George Grant’s money, was responsible for the institution of the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), the first pro-self-government organization to shake up for our nation’s independence and freedom. The same man on whose idea of a movement brought Nkrumah to Ghana. Emmanuel Obetsebi-Lamptey, better known as Liberty Lamptey, another of the Big Six, had suffered the same doom as Danquah; dying in detention without trial. He was chained to a hospital bed. Danquah and Obetsebi-Lamptey, the most notable victims of the PDA, were not alone. On 24th February 1966, the coup led to the release of more than 2,000 political detainees, including many long-time detainees with five or six years in prison without trial. How demeaning! The human rights records of the various military governments that succeeded Nkrumah’s were no worse than his. At least they had the “excuse” of being unconstitutional governments, ruling by decree. What of our constitutional Kwame Nkrumah?
Judicial freedom and the power to decide at the time was theoretical and conceptual rather than practical. During the early months of 1963, in reaction to the verdict of the Special Court, a panel of the then Supreme Court, he sacked over the radio on the dreaded 1 o’clock news Chief Justice Sir Arku Korsah, the first Ghanaian Chief Justice, for presiding over the Court that acquitted his erstwhile Ministers and Party officials – Tawiah Adamafio, Ako Adjei (a member of the Big Six, the man who made the fateful introduction of Nkrumah to the Working Committee of the UGCC), and Coffie Crabbe – on charges of treason arising from the Kulungungu bomb attempt on Nkrumah’s life. Parliament proceeded by legislation, under his duress, to reverse the verdict of the Court and a new trial put across. The new trial was piloted by Korsah’s successor as Chief Justice, Mr. Justice Sarkodie-Addo, with a jury made up of graduates of the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute, who predictably returned a verdict of guilty. How can this be done? It should be noted that, all persons whoever enrolled in the institute were made to undergo a two-week orientation in order to equip them with Nkrumah’s ideologies. The retried accused persons were sentenced to death, which Nkrumah, in his ‘magnanimity’, commuted to life imprisonment.
Another consequence of the verdict of this well-known trial was Nkrumah’s decision to remove the constitutional constraint on the President’s power to dismiss judges so that he could do so at his pleasure. The 90% plus ‘Yes’ votes declared in the 1964 referendum achieved this for him. He applied the power to remove respected, well-known legal personalities from the Judiciary, including Supreme Court judge Edward Akufo-Addo, another member of the Big Six, the future Chief Justice and President of the Second Republic, who was the third member of the Court that acquitted Tawiah Adamafio and the others, to replace them with pro-CPP judges of doubtful legal ability. We can see, then, that judicial independence and the rule of law were matters of little importance to Nkrumah.
The referendum was preceded, in the culture of Kwame Nkrumah, by a loud and aggressive campaign, playing the intelligence game, mounted by the State and Party media with the infamous Accra Evening News in the lead, against the Judiciary. It was a reactionary institution, staffed by “bourgeois” lawyers, who were agents of “auto-colonialism” with strong affinities to the “reactionary” UP. A purge of their ranks was needed to ensure that the “people” got a judiciary that was alive to its responsibilities to promote the “African Revolution”. Vicious insults, egregious abuse, and character assassinations – these were the staple fare of CPP propaganda.
Not startlingly, today, when frantic attempts are being made to rehabilitate Nkrumah’s name, the NDC hierarchy and media are waging the same kind of dangerous propaganda against the Judiciary — and for the same reason. The NDC wants a pliant judiciary to do its dirty work. They say the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Undermining judicial independence would lead, ultimately, to the undermining of our individual liberties. This is the slippery road to tyranny. We have seen it before. We cannot afford to repeat the tragedy of the past. Let all who believe in a free, democratic Ghana, where the rule of law works, stand up and ensure that we uphold the independence of the Judiciary.
There is a better example for the NDC to follow. The next successful Nkrumahist leader (i.e. after Nkrumah himself), Hilla Limann of the PNP, President of the Third Republic, was quick to distance himself from Nkrumah’s example when, in 1980, he received an unfavourable judicial decision in the famous case of Tuffuor v Attorney-General. His efforts to remove Mr. Justice Apaloo as Chief Justice failed in the Supreme Court in that case, a verdict he promptly accepted. No challenge to the Judiciary, no harangue against “reactionary judges”. Unlike Nkrumah, Limann was an embodiment supportive of the rule of law and judicial liberation. It was the unanimous decision by the Supreme Court in that case that has reinforced the principle of judicial independence in our country, notably, to the frustration of the Kwabena Adjei’s of contemporary Ghanaian politics.
Since our independence to 1965, the nation had become a one-party state by virtue of the notorious 1964 referendum. It was then felt that elections in these changed circumstances were no longer necessary. Kwame Nkrumah proceeded to sit as Chairman of the Central Committee of the One Party State to share parliamentary seats among his followers. There were many anomalies in this tragic exercise, which would otherwise have been laughable but for its seriousness, which, for example, led to a CPP stalwart, Kwesi Ghapson, an Nzema, being given Danquah’s old seat in Kyebi without a single vote being cast in his favour. This was Nkrumahist democracy at its best.
Pluralism and diversity in the media by 1966 were things of the distant past. Not only had the PDA done its ruthless best to suppress all dissent, the Ghanaian media, which, during the period of the independence struggle in the 1950s, was as vibrant as it is today, had settled into the dull monotony of heaping greater and greater praise on his Messianic Dedication, one of the many appellations that the extraordinary cult of personality surrounding Kwame Nkrumah threw up. As his failure to manage the Ghanaian economy became more and glaring, the more strident and expressive were the paeans of praise. Fortunately for us, none of his successors has had the craving for adulation, praise and self-glorification that drove Nkrumah. Like many of the great tyrants of history, he found nothing wrong in putting up effigies, monuments and statues to his own glory. Like the fate that befell many of them, it was no surprise that, when his opponents replaced him in power, those effigies, monuments and statues were pulled down. Ancient Roman history is replete with such examples. This is why it is always better for posterity to make the judgment on monuments and statues. They are invariably more permanent and avoid the hubris of power. Self-glorification tends to leave a sour taste in the mouth of observers.
SOVIET-STYLE STATE SOCIALISM.
A turning point in the history of Nkrumah’s controversial rule was his celebrated trip in 1961 to the Communist states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Already highly sympathetic to all things Soviet – he tells us in his autobiography, titled with his usual modesty ‘Ghana’, that he was [sic] “a Hegelian-Marxist, non-Denominational Christian” – the visit impressed him highly with the efficiency of the Soviet model: state enterprises, state farms, central planning, the command economy, rule by the “vanguard party” – this was the wave of the future, the irresistible force of history. Ghana, the first colonial nation in sub-Saharan Africa to escape the clutches of imperialism, was required to be in the forefront of history.
So with considerable vigour, a systematic effort was made to transform the Ghanaian economy into a replica of the Soviet model. Between 1961 and 1966, the economic landscape became littered with a multiplicity of state enterprises and state farms. We even had our own equivalent of the ‘Gossplan’ – the Seven Year Development Plan that was stillborn at birth. The state enterprises and farms of the Nkrumah era proved to be no more efficient in Ghana than they were in their country of origin. Far from being the wave of the future, they have become syn
onymous with economic failure and have been repudiated almost everywhere they have been tried. Even in China, where the vanguard party continues to hang on to power, the rulers have seen the wisdom in reviving private property rights and letting the market take an increasingly central role in the allocation of resources. The Chinese boom of the last two decades is the direct result. Deng Xiaoping – he of the “it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice”– not Mao Tse-Tung, is the architect of this dramatic development, which has led China towards a market economy and the second largest economy in the world today. Indeed, we have the recent words of the great Fidel himself, the icon of latter-day Leninists, that the experiment represented by the Cuban Socialist Revolution, which commemorated its jubilee in 2008, has been a failure. His brother, Raul, now in charge of Cuba in the manner of political succession in the “Workers’ States”, has begun to dismantle the economic apparatus of the revolution even before his great brother dies and disappears from this earth.
It is ridiculous for present Nkrumahists to continue to scream that Nkrumah’s era was a sort of Augustan golden age when the dominant ideas of that era have been so discredited and rejected by history. ‘Bourgeois’ democracy has, indeed, triumphed across the world, and ‘proletarian’ democracy has proven to be a hoax and a cover for squalid rule by self-serving oligarchies. We need look no further than North Korea. Can one be at the same time a lover and promoter of Ghanaian democracy and also an admirer of North Korea’s political system?
An interesting footnote to Nkrumah’s tour of Eastern Europe was the railway workers’ strike that took place in his absence in 1961. The demand of the strikers, supported by the TUC, was for better conditions of employment and not “compulsory savings”, which they argued was an unwarranted form of taxation. In a speech at Flagstaff House (the seat of Government), Tawiah Adamafio, then at the height of his power as Minister of Presidential Affairs before his fall, described the striking workers as “despicable rats”. The leaders of the strike, including the distinguished trade unionists and nationalists, Pobee Biney and Vidal Quist, who played such important roles in the nationalist struggles of the 1950s (indeed it was their support that gave teeth to Nkrumah’s declaration of Positive Action which led him on to his glory), were detained under the PDA, and were joined in prison by the leaders of the United Party Opposition. Danquah, William Ofori-Atta (another member of the Big Six), Victor Owusu, Joe Appiah, Kofi Amponsah Dadzie, Kwame Kesse Adu, Oheneba Kow Richardson and Osei Badoo, amongst others, had their first taste of preventive detention, following R. R Amponsah, Modesto Apaloo, Baffour Osei Akoto, Attoh Okine, Attoh Quarshie, K Y Attoh, and Henry Thompson, amongst others, who had already been in detention for some two years. The exchanges in prison between the veteran conservative statesman, Danquah, and the veteran trade union leader, Pobee Biney, both of whom had devoted their lives to the movement for Ghanaian freedom, deserves to be duly acknowledged.
Apart from the quack referendum of 1964, the only other popular consultation after independence in the Nkrumah era was the 1960 presidential election. If ever there was a rigged deck that was it. With no access to the state monopoly media, with deliberate obstruction by the security agencies, with his colleagues either in jail under the PDA or in exile, the most prominent, Busia, the leader of the Parliamentary Opposition, having fled in 1959, with many incidents of systematic intimidation of his supporters and agents and with the ever-present menace of the PDA, Danquah decided, nevertheless, to contest the election in order to affirm the principle of choice. He consulted his colleagues in jail and for the same reason they encouraged him to run. The Ghanaian people should never lose sight of the principle of choice, no matter how flawed. He was under no illusions as to his chances.
Nkrumah’s tight grip on the country by 1960, largely as a result of the increasingly widespread application of the PDA, which was to engulf Danquah himself the following year after the railway workers’ strike, meant that the result of the contest was a foregone conclusion. Nonetheless, Danquah’s tenacity and sheer doggedness enlivened the election and brought about an impressive showing for him in Accra, which forced the regime to “stagger” the declaration of results in other parts of the country in order to guarantee a “correct” outcome. But, he had made his point – Nkrumah was not the sole candidate for the Presidency. The principle of choice had been affirmed. Even if symbolic, a marker had been put down for the future.
Nkrumah, therefore, for me should be seen as an AUTO-COLONIALIST and a POLITICAL OPPORTUNIST even though he did his bit to ensure Ghana was “better” placed.
Founder's Day or Founders' Day Page 5
