Lessons from Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana

BLACK Africa’s first decolonisation product, Ghana, celebrated its golden jubilee last week.
The celebrations were witnesses by about 20 African heads of state and governments. After 50 years of uhuru, we can look back and reflect on the lessons, if any; black Africa’s first born has for its brothers in the continent. The role and place of Ghana’s founder and first president, Kwame Nkrumah, is well acknowledged.
He remains one of the most influential Pan Africanists of the 20th century. It is in his role as a nation builder that I thought would be a useful intervention for me to generate a new context for an urgently needed conversation about Africa’s future in this century that has been dubbed the “African century”.
The 20th century was dominated by the quest for political sovereignty and Kwame Nkrumah was a pioneering leader in the struggle for the total emancipation of the continent. The century ended with Nkrumah’s dream fulfilled in so far as the eradication of race-based unconstitutional governments in the continent.
Nkrumah’s personal journey is as controversial as it is instructive of how Africa’s founding fathers failed to provide the required leadership in building sustainable institutions and viable economic models to deliver make good on citizens’ expectations. The story of Nkrumah has been repeated in many Africans states confirming the notion that it is difficult to learn from other people’s mistakes.
Was Nkrumah a good role model for Africans? In addressing this question, I am fully mindful that many Africans are blinded by Nkrumah’s contribution in destroying the hegemony of the remote British Empire than by his record as the leader of a sovereign nation to the extent that they would dare venture into critically evaluating the true cost of his blunders to Ghana and, indeed, many other African states whose leaders have followed in his footsteps with disastrous consequences.
Nkrumah spent about 12 years in the diaspora like many Africans. He was influenced by the civil rights movement in the US and by ascendancy of the US as a major superpower that espoused values of equality, liberty and justice. He became Prime Minister in 1952 and within 9 years of his release from prison, he became an Executive President of Ghana. In 1954, he won the independence vote and in 1957, Ghana became an independent state with Nkrumah as the first black Prime Minister. In 1960, Ghana became a republic with Nkrumah. Ghana was declared a one party state with Nkrumah as the Life President in 1964 and was subsequently overthrown in 1966.
The ideology that informed Nkrumah’s policies was socialist and he believed in the state as an instrument for transforming the inherited dualistic economic infrastructure. He used the state as a vehicle for investing in infrastructure and like many African heads of state, did not trust the market system as a rational and reliable instrument for allocating resources efficiently. The first years of Nkrumah witnessed a massive investment in social and physical infrastructure. The state was transformed into a new personality with Nkrumah as the overarching individual with all the wisdom and a monopoly of the vision of where the country should go.
Barely a year after independence, the Nkrumah government started to restrict the freedom of citizens by passing two pieces of legislation i.e. Trade Union Act and Prevention Detention Act. Organized labor as well as perceived enemies of the state was targeted.
The road followed by Nkrumah to a one party state is no different from what other African founding fathers have emulated. Like Nkrumah the one party state was justified on the grounds of national unity and cohesion. The role of the state in the economy was also justified on the grounds that at the core of the colonial regime was a capitalist ideology whose adverse impact on the majority poor could not be accepted by a post colonial administration. In the pursuit of an industrial policy, the farmers were penalized with low producer prices to facilitate resources being diverted to Nkrumah’s pet projects.
I am cognizant of the fact that notwithstanding the dismal record of socialism, there are many who still believe like Nkrumah that the state knows it all and the head of state is a repository of wisdom. In this construction, it is difficult to generate a new conversation that seeks to separate the liberation tactics from nation building strategies and program of action. It is true that a person who has been accustomed to be anti to everything is a difficult candidate for progressive and constructive thinking. I submit that the quality of a good general is not demonstrated by the mutiny of his troops against him but by their pursuit of the enemy.
It is true that Nkrumah was a victim of his own lieutenants exposing the fragility of the institutional framework he had built to support the democratic process. In saying this, I am also mindful of the view that Nkrumah was a victim of the regime change agenda of imperialist countries during the height of the cold war. There are many who would argue that Nkrumah’s term was interrupted not because of the cost his policies imposed on the people of Ghana but because of the conspiracy of the usual suspects i.e. America and its transatlantic allies.
A good builder is not judged by the cracks that characterizes his structures but by the absence of such manifestation of bad architecture, structural deficiencies and bad workmanship. Was Nkrumah a good builder if his regime was succeeded by unelected military governments? The lasting legacy of any leader is ultimately measured by the quality of men and women who inherit the baton and take it to great heights on the back of the wisdom of the father. When you see succeeding leaders try to distance themselves from the policies of the founder then you know there is trouble.
Equally, when the leader is deposed, the people he thought were on his side start to celebrate his/her demise then you know that such a leader was never really a leader. How many African leaders can confidently predict how their closest lieutenants would behave when they are out of power is a question that many leaders should ask. It is important that Africans begin to openly discuss and evaluate the question of whether Nkrumah was pushed out or he pushed himself into irrelevance because of implementing policies and programs that were not in tune with the wishes of the majority of the citizens.
When Nkrumah proclaimed Ghana as a one party state with a Life President, it was evident that the only mechanism left for citizens to display their quest for change was through a military solution. Imagine a towering figure in African politics being replaced by the military as opposed to an intellectual. What does this tell us about the quality of Nkrumah’s leadership? Ultimately, many when a leader ceases to represent the wishes of citizens his claim to a respectable legacy becomes compromised to the extent that succession becomes a playfield for political prostitutes at the expense of national progress. Could it be the case that Nkrumah unknowingly condemned Ghana to a lower standard of living by pursuing misguided policies and in actual fact was the real stimuli for the coup of 1966?
What is it about power that it makes even the most gifted Africans to end up with the brains of a soldier? Many have observed in history that the best soldier has his brains in his/her shoes so that when he/she is told to jump they immediately ask how high. Soldiers are good at taking instructions and generals should be good at fighting battles before committing soldiers to battle. When you see soldiers turning against their generals then it means they generals have failed to plan. In many African countries, the generals are the heads of state and yet they collectively seem unprepared for the battle to improve the quality of life in their countries and in the continent in general. Some have inherited functional administrative systems and yet invest in undermining such institutions and replacing them with confusion.
How many of the African heads of state who attended the celebrations in Ghana are guilty of Nkrumah’s conduct and yet are genuinely ignorant of the costs that they impose on their countries by denying citizens the right to objectively choose who should govern them? How long can African leaders project themselves as victims of third party interventions when they should be the generals of the African battle against poverty?
On the question of poverty, it is a general observation that independence and affluence are soon parted. In post colonial Africa, poverty seems to be an enduring friend of the citizens of the continent while its leaders continue to imagine and manufacture new external enemies each day while citizens invest in the faith business hoping for a better life after death having given up hope on life on earth because they do not have any options to remove the generals who never planned for the battle to integrate Africa into the commonwealth of nations. Some have observed that the only thing common in the Commonwealth is not the wealth.
I listened to President Kufuor who lamented that Africa continues to export its human capital to the developed world even after 50 years of independence. In as much as the African diaspora responded like Nkrumah to the call to return to Africa to reclaim their African heritage and provide leadership in the decolonization period, the systematic and consistent hijacking of the post colonial state by an unaccountable cabal does not provide a conducive environment for human capital nourishment in Africa.
A continent whose leadership is allergic to alternative views cannot be an attractive destination for globally competitive skills. I submit that the heads of state in Africa many represent the biggest stumbling blocks to the reversal of the brain drain in the continent than anything else. If it took Nkrumah only a year to recognize that the rule of law, respect for human and property rights was not important for the new state, how can Africa expect long term commitment from its mobile assets without a corresponding investment in tolerance and mutual respect?
I do hope that in my lifetime, Africans will go beyond the personalities that seek higher political office underpinned by a drought of ideas on what it takes to create winning nation states and a continent allergic to poverty. History will not judge our generations by what we did not do but what we did. Equally, Nkrumah stands judged today not because he was a coward but because he dared to be engaged. He may have been a poison pill for his people but no one can doubt that without him Africa will not be where it is.
Yes, some may argue convincingly that it is better to be poor and sovereign than be rich and be in bondage. Africans are not the first to be colonized and lessons are available on how other nationalities have risen from the ashes of destruction and the womb of colonization into vibrant and successful nations. The lessons we learn from Nkrumah are many but the enduring one is that leaders ought to know when to liberate their countries by not over bearing on their people to the extent that the military or pedestrian options become the only viable solutions for reclaiming their future.