Edited and Reproduced By Samuel Adjei Sarfo
Attorney and Counselor at Law
Kwame Nkrumah took a much more promising economy and basically destroyed it. The only thing that can be said in his defense is that he pursued policies that the British had initiated. He took bad policies and drove them to their logical conclusions. The social democratic policies that nearly destroyed the British economy did destroy the Ghanaian economy. However, Kwame Nkrumah did not get all of his bad policies from the British. He created many of the worst elements on his own, such as the one-party state.
Nkrumah’s efforts were bogged down in blunders and mistakes and the economy was collapsing. Corruption was rampant. For example, some purchasing agents were paying the cocoa farmers for their production with phony checks and keeping the real payments for themselves. Finally the Big Push became the Big Putsch when a group of military officers deposed Nkrumah while he was, appropriately enough, headed to a state visit to North Viet Nam.
Although Nkrumah's Big Push was overall a disastrous fiasco, there were some worthwhile elements of his program. These generally came in the early days before the Big Push per se was initiated. In particular, the Volta River Dam is generally perceived to be a good thing for Ghana and its neighbors. In part the Dam was more beneficial than anticipated because of the unexpected increase in petroleum prices in the 1970's. The harbor and port at Tema has also been a boon to Ghana.
Nkrumah at first focused on infrastructure projects and these tended to be small, worthwhile projects. For example, until 1957, the only way to cross the Volta River was by way of ferries. In 1957 the first bridge was built for crossing the Volta.
Later Nkrumah and his planners began to think in terms of grandiose programs of economic development. Parallel with these grandiose plans, Nkrumah permitted (or even encouraged) a personality cult to develop such that a person could be punished for doubting that Nkrumah was immortal. Nkrumah used his political domination to create a one-party, totalitarian state. His political rivals were imprisoned or escaped into exile. Some of those he imprisoned died in prison.
Government officials took bribes and embezzled state funds. This included Nkrumah himself. He was found to have about $5 million in hidden bank accounts.
The rhetoric of his regime was socialism, but the officials who were spouting socialist slogans were acquiring expensive foreign cars. One official's wife was found to have ordered a gold-plated bed costing about five thousand dollars.
Some of the more notorious fiascoes of the Big Push are as follows:
• The sugar plant at Asuatuare was built without a water system and remained idle for a year before this flaw was corrected.
• A tomato and mango canning plant was built at Wenchi (in western Ghana) with a capacity to process 5,000 tons of tomatoes and 7,000 tons of mangoes each year. After it was built at a cost 80 percent above budget and ready to begin operations the authorities discovered there were hardly any mango trees in the area of the plant and it would take seven years for newly planted mango trees to start bearing.
• There was to be a cattle hide-leather-shoe complex. The slaughter house was sited in the north at Bolgatanga, a not unreasonable decision since the north is the cattle-raising area of Ghana. However the markets for cattle in pre-Nkrumah times were not in the north, probably for good reason. The tannery for turning the hides into leather was sited in the south at Aveyime. The plant in the north could not supply enough hides so the tannery had to import hides. The leather to be produced at Aveyime was to go to a footwear factory in Kumasi in western Ghana. The Kumasi plant was supplied with machinery from Czechoslovakia that could only produce a poor quality product. The footwear was to be shipped to the major consumer market at Accra. After the excessive transporting of the raw materials and final product around the country the government found the Ghanaian consumers were not willing to buy such a shoddy product. The government then tried to give the boots produced by the plant to the police force. The chief of police pleaded that the boots not be given to the police because they would rebel at having to wear such uncomfortable, poor quality footwear.
• Ghana Airways chose Soviet Ilyushin planes which could only be serviced in the Soviet Union. Ghana Airways had to maintain service from North Africa to the Soviet Union to accomodate this servicing requirement. Those lines had hardly any passengers at all and most of the ones they did have were government passengers flying for free.
The Political Corruption of the Nkrumah Regime
The planning fisacoes and the financial corruption of the Nkrumah regime were probably less significant than the corruption of the politics of Ghana, the institution of a one-party totalitarian state and the ruthless persecution of anyone who was less than a devoted worshiper of Nkrumah and even some of those that were. Soon after independence Nkrumah began restricting political freedoms in Ghana. When regional/ethnic based parties in the northern territories and in Ashantiland presented a political challenge to Nkrumah's Convention Peoples Party (CPP), he used his party's overwhelming majority in the legislature to outlaw regional and ethnic based parties. When this action brought the disparate regional and ethnic parties together into a United Party, he then had laws passed that effectively banned all opposition parties. When political activity continued, he had the prominent opposition politicians arrested and imprisoned. People who had helped gain independence for Ghana, such as J.B. Danquah, died in prison. J.B. Danquah had invited Nkrumah back to Ghana and made him the general secretary of a political party.
Even Nkrumah's closest associates in the CPP were not immune from Nkrumah's political vengeance. Komla Gbedemah was founder of the CPP and an able administrator. He objected to Nkrumah's lack of financial discipline and soon found himself dismissed from the government by Nkrumah in a radio broadcast at dawn in April of 1961.
The Dawn Broadcast of April 1961 was the culmination of Nkrumah's shift to a militant Marxist Socialism. He had chosen Tawia Adamafio as General Secretary of the CPP and Adamafio made unswerving loyalty to Nkrumah and Socialism his guiding principles. Sycophants such as Adamafio began to talk of the immortality of Nkrumah and publically attacked any one who doubted that Nkrumah would live forever. The personality cult surrounding Nkrumah seemed thoroughly entrenched, but even the leftist such as Adamafio were not safe from State persecution in Ghana.
In August of 1962 someone tossed a grenade at Nkrumah. He was injured but recovered soon. But long after he recovered from the physical injuries, he seemed psychologically affected. He had about five hundred people arrested and detained indefinitely. He had the legislature review and grant him extensive powers under the existing Preventive Detention Act which permitted the government to detain anyone for any reason. He closed the borders of Ghana. And finally Nkrumah took it into his head that Adamafio and his cohorts were behind the attempted assassination. He had them tried for treason, but the court under the Chief Justices of Ghana found them not guilty. Nkrumah was outraged and had legislation passed which gave him the right to overturn any court verdicts. They were retried with new judges and found guilty and sentenced to death, but Nkrumah commuted the death sentences to life imprisonment.
Visits from Soviet and Chinese Communist dignitaries became more frequent. But there was a more sinister side to these contacts. In April of 1965, a terrorist tried to assassinate the president of Niger. Evidence came out that the terrorists had been trained in Ghana. Nkrumah denied this and asserted that it was all part of a neocolonialist plot. Felix Houphouet-Boigny challenged Nkrumah's denial and released evidence of guerrilla training camps in Ghana staffed by Chinese Communist instructors.
At a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Organization of African Unity, Nkrumah in June of 1965 tried to divert criticism but the representative from Niger made public the existence of seven guerrilla training camps operating in Ghana with Chinese and East German instructors.
In February of 1966 Nkrumah left Ghana to visit Hanoi in North Vietnam. He was at a stop-over in Beijing on February 24th when military officers took control of the government. Some people now say that Nkrumah was a visionary, but his was ultimately a hideous vision of absolute, ruthless, brutal control.
•H.T. Alexander, African Tightrope: My Two Years as Nkrumah's Chief of Staff, Frederick A. Praeger, New York, 1965,
•John Alex-Hamah, Farewell Africa: Life and Death of Nkrumah, Times Press Ltd., Lagos, Nigeria, 1972.
•Dennis Austin and Robin Luckham (eds.), Politicians and Soldiers in Ghana 1966-1972, Frank Cass, London, 1975.
•George B.N. Ayittey, Africa Betrayed, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1992.
•LaVerle Berry (ed.), Ghana: A Country Study, Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 1995.
•E.A. Boateng, A Geography of Ghana (2nd ed.), University Printing House, Cambridge, 1967.
•David Rooney, Kwame Nkrumah: The Political Kingdom in the Third World, SSt. Martin's Press, New York, 1988.
•W.J. Varley and H.P. White, The Geography of Ghana, Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1958.
•Jon Woronoff, West African Wager: Houphouet versus Nkrumah, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, N.J., 1972.
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