All this is to say Nkrumah’s achievements are truly outstanding and mind-boggling, and that he achieved more than what Danquah and Busia achieved together multiplied by infinity. How convenient it is to hide Busia’s political mediocrity and ideological failings behind his Oxford education! This is a convenient view to take in the case of those who have no understanding of the concept of political economy.
The University of California-trained economist Dr. Tetteh A. Kofi, one of the world’s leading authorities on the cocoa industry, has shown in his paper “The Elites and Underdevelopment in Africa: The Case of Ghana” how clueless Busia and his colleagues were on matters of political economy and economic development. He writes that Progress Party did not have a “plan for development,” a “development strategy,” or a “manifesto” when Busia assumed the reins of government.
In other words, Busia and his Oxford colleagues had no idea how to run the country though Nkrumah had given them a solid foundation! In Nkrumah’s case he had to build a “desert” country almost from scratch while the West and its local collaborators, Busia and Danquah included, sabotaged him. Thus in the absence of any creative ideas on statecraft, Busia had no choice but to fall back on Nkrumah’s ideas to run the country. Even the Center for Civic Education which he [Busia] chaired borrowed from Nkrumah’s Ideological Institute (see E.A. Haizel’s “Education in Ghana, 1951-1966”).
Interestingly, and most significantly, Dr. Kofi’s commentary on Busia’s political cluelessness on political economy has strong evidential support from other economists, historians, and writers. Gocking writes of Busia: “Not surprisingly, as Busia struggled to control the political kingdom, Nkrumah’s presence, not far away in Guinea, began to haunt him. SOCIALISM ONCE AGAIN BEGAN TO SEEM MORE ATTRACTIVE THAN THE BUNGLING MARKET-ORIENTED POLICIES OF THE PP, WHICH DEPENDED SO MUCH ON THE UNPOPULAR ADVICE OF ORGANIZATIONS LIKE THE WORLD BANK AND THE IMF” (our emphasis; see Roger Gocking’s “The History of Ghana”).
In fact, Busia was so scared of CPP songs, Nkrumah’s pictures and Nkrumah’s name as to demand parliamentary passage of a “certificate of urgency” within seventeen hours after Johnny Hansen, in 1971, inaugurated the People’s Popular Party in Kumasi “amid the singing of old CPP songs” and public display of Nkrumah’s picture (see Gocking).
That piece of legislation banned public display of Nkrumah’s pictures as well the mere mention of his name in public. The National Liberation Council (NLM), Busia’s client, also trembled at the sight of Nkrumah’s shadow. The NLM forced Nkrumah’s eighty-year-old mother, almost blind, to say Nkrumah was not her son, at gun point; she was also dragged to a Commission of Inquiry and questioned whether Nkrumah was her real son. The NLM also dragged Nkrumah’s high-school niece to the Commission of Inquiry and interrogated her true relationship with her Nkrumah. They even spread the rumor that Nkrumah’s father was a Liberian! This is just by the way!
Also, the American economist Dr. Emily Chamlee-Wright, Provost and Dean of Washington College, has offered insights into Busia’s reversion to the ideas of Nkrumah in her book “The Cultural Foundations of Economic Development.” She writes: “FURTHER, BUSIA AND HIS FINANCE MINISTER, J.H. MENSAH, WHO HAD BEEN A PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT OF THE SEVEN-YEAR DEVELOPMENT UNDER NKRUMAH, CONSIDERED IT POLITICALLY PRUDENT TO PURSUE POLICIES OF GOVERNMENT-LED GROWTH, REMINIESCENT OF THE NKRUMAH YEARS…THOUGH IN WORD BUSIA ADVOCATED A LIBERAL POLITICAL ECONOMY, IN DEED HIS POLICIES WERE STRIKINGLY SIMILAR TO THOSE ADVANCED BY NKRUMAH” (see also Jonathan H. Frimpong-Ansah’s “The Vampire State in Africa: The Political Economy of Decline in Ghana” and Douglas Rimmer’s “Staying Poor: Ghana’s Political Economy, 1950-1990”).
To state it differently, Busia and his top advisors saw strategic prudence in the adoption of Nkrumah’s “mixed economy” to the extent that they reverted to it as a critical policy question to bail the country out of economic strain. Of course, Busia’s policies were “strikingly similar” to Nkrumah’s because they were essentially Nkrumah’s and because politicians like J.H. Mensah who worked with Nkrumah and saw how policy decisions worked and implemented still attached enormous strategic and tactical prudence to his [Nkrumah’s] ideas.
But, Busia and his top advisors did more than just borrow Nkrumah’s “mixed economy,” as cluelessness and frustration stared them in the face. They borrowed Nkrumahism. Dr. Chamlee-Wright writes again: “WARY THAT GHANA WAS RETURNING TO THE PRECARIOUS ECONOMIC POLICIES OF NKRUMAHISM, THE UNITED STATES AND BRITAIN REFUSED, INSISTING THAT ASSISTANCE BE SECURED THROUGH THE IMF…” This was when Busia and his team of advisors had gone to the US and Britain for assistance to revive the economy, yet what they had in exchange for Western conditionalities was a package of economic policies literally taken out of the pages of Nkrumahism! Given these hard facts about Busia’s cluelessness and unpreparedness for the role of statecraft, could one say he was prepared and ready to lead Ghana?
If the answer is in the affirmative, how could he have led the country given that he did not have a “plan for development,” a “development strategy,” or a “manifesto” to start with, in the words of Dr. Kofi? Had Nkrumah not put the country on a sound industrial footing from where Busia could have, with a little intellectual exertion derived from his Oxford education and doctoral degree, proceeded? On the other hand, what Busia and his like-minded proponents of “dependency strategy” did not know was that America (and the rest of the West) was not prepared to underwrite Ghana’s development after the 1966 coup (see Dr. Tetteh A. Kofi).
It may then appear that the West had used Busia and the leadership of the NLM to achieve its ultimate aim, which is to see the experiment of self-sufficiency and industrial development in Africa retrogress or fail.
The pro-Western Busia and the leadership of the NLM had become useful idiots, jesters, and pawns in the hands of somebody else’s chess-game of dominating Africa politically and economic domination, considering that these men did not understand political economy and the complex nature of imperialist capitalism. This view indicts the claim that the Gold Coast should not have sought self-governance outside the political context of British paternalism, colonialism, and economic dictatorship.
What was the American War of Independence for, if not for self-reliance, liberation, and freedom from British colonial dictatorship? What were the first and second imperial wars (World War 1 and World War 2) about? What about the Irish and the British wars (the Irish War of Independence or the Anglo-Irish War)? Did the Dutch (Boers) in South Africa not resist the British attempt to colonize them via wars, what has become known as the First-Second Anglo-Boer Wars (First-Second Boer Wars)?
Perhaps one nation of white men cannot colonize another nation of white men, which also begs the question: Are only non-White peoples who are fit for colonization and economic domination by white men, as the Danquah-Busia camp wants the world to believe? The more surprising query is: Why did Busia nurse a return to socialism as a proposition “more attractive than the bungling market-oriented policies of the PP” and to the adoption of Nkrumahism to save his government from popular ire? What are we driving at? Our simple argument is that when the political kitchen became unbearably hot Busia and his Oxford advisors quickly found a sense of direction and virtue in socialism and Nkrumahism!
This volte-face represents the greatest irony of Busia’s political career. Then also, what happened to the Oxford-trained sociologist and anthropologist [Busia] to turn to the University of Pennsylvania-trained philosopher and educator [Nkrumah] for creative ideas, Nkrumahism, to run the country?
What were Busia’s Oxford-trained advisors doing at this time? There is no doubt in our minds that they agreed on Nkrumahism as the best strategic policy choice for the economic challenges facing the country since Busia could not, arguably, have taken that decision alone, without the benefit of concertation. What happened to Busia’s Oxford education and doctoral degree? Were his Oxford education and doctoral degree worth the political cost of socialism and Nkrumahism? What have a doctoral degree and an Oxford education got to do with intelligence, prudence, wisdom, prescience, statecraft, and foresight? With anything? Did Busia’s Oxford education and doctoral degree put him in the know as to the fact that Acheampong had been planning his coup since 1970?
Those questions aside, Dr. Kofi acknowledges Busia’s and his colleagues’ elation at embracing the overthrow of Nkrumah and his CPP government. He writes that Busia and his friends justified the ouster of Nkrumah “BECAUSE THEY FELT THEY COULD DO THE JOB MUCH BETTER…THEY HAD ALL THE ‘TRICK’ FOR RESTORING GHANA’S ECONOMY: STOP ALL THE FOOLISHNESS ABOUT SOCIALISM AND NKRUMAHISM.”
The question is: Why would Busia entertain the potential of socialism or better still, Nkrumah’s “mixed economy” to revive the Ghanaian economy, as well as adopting Nkrumahism as a convenient policy strategy?
Again we should also, however, not overlook Dr. Kofi’s central argument that “THEY [BUSIA AND HIS CLIQUE] CAME TO POWER NOT TO REJUVENATE AN AILING ECONOMY WITH HIGH-POWERED IDEAS BUT TO PRESIDE OVER THE LIQUIDATION OF THE STATE ENTERPRISES. THE GHANAIAN ELITE WOULD THEN BECOME THE AGENTS OF CHANGE: THEY WOULD SHARE THE FRUITS OF THE LABOR OF THE ILLITERATE COCOA FARMERS. SINCE 1966, THIS ELITE, AS ADVISORS TO THE MILITARY GOVERNMENT, HAD IN FACT PRESIDED OVER THE SALE OF ALL THE VIABLE GHANAIAN STATE ENTERPRISES TO FOREIGN CONCERNS OR TO THEMSELVES…”
Dr. Kofi’s indictment of the Busia Administration recalls another incident in which Busia’s client, the NLC, teamed up with their Western co-conspirators of the 1966 coup to destroy Ghana’s Atomic Energy Program. How then could the Busia Administration have continued from where Nkrumah left off, by destroying the country’s industrial base? Thus, Busia and his friends constituted themselves into economic Luddites and Orwellian demagogues.
In the final analysis, the Acheampong Government set up the Taylor Assets Committee and following that, petitioned the British Government to deport Busia back to Ghana so that he would have the opportunity to assist the Committee investigate how his Progress Party ministers had acquired their wealth and assets. Unfortunately the British would not deport him and Busia died in exile, like Nkrumah.
Nkrumah and his team of advisors saved money, since the British Colonial Government never left any funds for the CPP government, which was used to develop the country. Busia and his advisors could not to replicate this! The answer is simple: Busia’s Progress Party did not have a “plan for development,” a “development strategy,” or a “manifesto.”
What Busia and the leadership of the Progress Party had for the country, indeed, were a policy of “dependency strategy” and wanton sale of Ghana’s foreign policy positions to the highest bidder in the West for foreign aid and a pittance of recognition in the backyard and backwater of the pimps of free-market capitalism. The “dependency strategy” came about because the West would not accept Nkrumahism in place of its conditionalities. And Nkrumahism called for self-reliance.
Nkrumahism also threatened the industrial base of Western imperialist capitalism, because the praxis or success of self-reliance via massive industrialization of Africa represented another strategic potential on the part of Africa to scale down shipment of Africa’s mineral wealth and other raw materials to the West, to feed its industries. Ideally, unemployment and industrial lethargy in Western economies represented the ultimate, if implied, corollaries of the political praxes of Nkrumahism.
We may recall that, California-based Kaiser Aluminum agreed to fund the construction of the Volta Dam but once the dam had been built and started generating electricity, Kaiser Aluminum began importing aluminum ore (bauxite) from other parts of the world, in spite of the fact that Ghana had aluminum ore in abundance.
Why? Because America and those other countries from Western Europe that had colonized and exploited Africa for five centuries to underwrite their industrial growth, did not want to see Nkrumah’s industrial revolution take off, a strategic calculus meant to prevent a situation where Ghana’s supposed industrialization became a model for other newly decolonized African nation-states, which, to an extent, could have spawned other intended or unintended economic activities detrimental to corporate interests of Western capitalist, technological, and industrial developed. This was, essentially, the thesis which Walter Rodney developed in his major work “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.”
Now, given the solid foundation Nkrumah left behind giving Busia an advanced comparative advantage, how does his three years in office still compare with Nkrumah’s? There is nothing to compare.
As for Danquah the less said about him, the better! Funny how Busia traveled to England to plead with the British Government not to grant independence to the Gold Coast, because in his opinion the country was not ready for parliamentary democracy, and yet by 1969 when he assumed the reins of government, where Nkrumah had practically built the country for him and put it on a strong industrial footing with a concomitant strong foundation of parliamentary democracy, he still was not ready with a “plan for development,” a “development strategy,” or a “manifesto” (see Dr. Botwe-Asamoah’s “K.A. Busia: His Politics of Demagoguery, National Disintegration and Autocracy”).
What does it take to author a “plan for development,” a “development strategy,” or a “manifesto”? Could this have been a major lapse in his Oxford education and doctoral degree?
We shall return…
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