Fifty years after his death and still remembering Nkrumah

E. Ablorh-Odjidja
April 22, 2022 

Fifty years after Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s death on April 27, 1972, the West is still asking questions about the impact of his rule in Africa.
 
Behind these questions is the same intent that was when he was alive; deliberately done to control the narrative and to limit his exposure to the sham that is neo-colonialism.

Questions are still asked about Nkrumah’s character, intellectual acumen as a political leader, theorist, activist, and philosopher, but none about the deeds of the West in Africa.

In December 1999, BBC listeners in Africa selected Nkrumah as “Africa's man of the Millennium.” Thus, even in death, his reputation has grown more stellar. And, the West continues to be unhappy about Nkrumah.

So, the questions still linger; the trick being to provide his detractors the opportunity for revisionism and to dredge out or invent more negatives about Nkrumah.

In 2010, in a speech given at Pennsylvania University, Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko, an ideological opponent of Nkrumah, described Nkrumah as the "personification of the African tragedy of the 20th century."

Gabby was more creative than sensible. But, if ever there was a transparent leader in Africa’s history, he had to be Nkrumah.

With many books written, perhaps more so than any other world leader in recent history, it would be hard for a reader not to note nor understand his ideas and accomplishments; unless there is the intentional purpose to do the contrary.

The books are detailed with ideas and strategies that are relevant for the liberation of Africa from the colonialism of the West.

All this contrasts with those of contemporary and successor politicians who opposed avidly his ideas and rule in Ghana. It should have been enough to quiet down the aspersions against him but hasn’t.

So, the feigned curiosity and questions about his rule continue, as the quest to reinvent more negative opinions about him and his rule is pursued.

Starting on February 24, 1966, the question was why Nkrumah was overthrown. And Wikipedia has a ready answer.

“Nkrumah led an authoritarian regime in Ghana, as he repressed political opposition and conducted elections that were not free and fair. In 1964, a constitutional amendment made Ghana a one-party state, with Nkrumah as president for the life of both the nation and its party. Nkrumah was deposed in 1966 by the National Liberation Council, ….. Nkrumah lived the rest of his life in Guinea, where he was named honorary co-president."
 
In sum, this is the narrative from the like-minded opposition against Nkrumah. He was authoritarian, repressed political opposition, conducted unfair elections, had a one-party state, and aspired to be “president for life” are the arguments. Accepted.

Also, a must to be accepted is that two years after the imposition of the one-party system, Nkrumah’s rule ended. He was overthrown by the Armed Forces of Ghana, in a coup initiated by the CIA, and aided by French and British intelligence services.

But, did conditions in Ghana get better after Nkrumah? This is the question that is never asked.

Then consider this irony. We are to assume that America, Britain, and France had so much love for Ghana that they had the moral obligation to free her of Nkrumah’s tyranny! 
 
Rather, wouldn’t it be healthier to think that they had the plantation overseer expectation role for Nkrumah (as exemplified by Felix Houphouet Boigny), which Nkrumah never fulfilled?

The silly excuses given for the coup are repeated ad infinitum. Measured against the realities of Nkrumah’s era, these sound very hollow.

The opposition to Nkrumah was mostly based on Western ideals, the model being the kind practiced in Britain, a nation that had abused Ghana’s historical sovereignty in piecemeal fashions – territorial conquests small portions at a time. And has done so through deceit, humiliation, and exploitation under the guise of planting democracy. 

Throughout a century of colonial governance, the type of democracy dreamt of by the coup makers had remained ephemeral under the governors.

British authority was extremely despotic and the ruling itself was by edicts and decrees from England. Yet, we acquiesced. How the coup makers and their enablers came to think that there was a “lack of democracy” soon after independence and under Nkrumah was a miracle and a monument to colonial mentality.

It became obvious when Nkrumah started promoting “African personality,” as a theme for self-governance, that he was not eager to play the plantation overseer role designed by Britain for post-colonial Ghana.

And more obvious when he made his intentions known in the many books he wrote, which ideas were put to practice on the political grounds.

Nkrumah wanted to defeat the neo-colonial system; be it British, French, or American.

In the end, it was the same neo-colonialists that enlisted the collaborators who overthrew Nkrumah.
 
Under the purported “lack of democracy” excuse, they took the drastic venture of ushering in the 1966 coup, which sent Ghana into a tailspin for decades.

Did this coup and the many others that followed result in achieving the ideals that were purportedly lacking under Nkrumah, and if so when?

Under Nkrumah, the expectation was for a so-called democracy; a concept that none of the coup makers and their enablers understood nor were ready to practice when it came to their turns.

Instead, we saw a culture of military brutalities, parades of military-style executions, and the Rawlings style of governance.

Rawlings would survive in government for 19 years and to make cowards of all the proponents of the vaunted democracy devotees. 

Rawlings survived because he was never a threat to the West.  Nkrumah didn't because he was.  He proposed policies that had the potential to end neo-colonialism in Africa.

Soon after the 1966 coup, the Nkrumah's anti neo-colonial policies were drastically reversed through local political spite and encouragement from institutions of the West.

Under Nkrumah, Ghana had an “import substitution” policy that demanded that anything that could be manufactured in-country never got imported. To our eternal shame, it was this policy that was one of the sparks to oust Nkrumah.

The trumped-up charge of “lack of essential commodities” gained currency, along with the absurd chant of “lack of democracy.”

For lack of sardines and cans of milk, we threw out a critically needed policy of “import substitution” that aimed to preserve hard-earned foreign exchange for developmental needs.

South Korea would pick up the same “import substitution” policy a decade later and prosper. 
 
So, was Nkrumah a good leader? This question can be easily answered in the positive.  But the detractors have never bothered to place his policies in the context of their era.
 
The West’s expectation for Africa has always been the plantation variety.  And we made the mistake of going along with the design until Nkrumah arrived on the scene.

Keeping Nkrumah's new policies would have been wise.  But to keep insisting that the 1966 coup and the reversals were the better choices we had would propel some reasonable people to wonder about our retrospective sanity.

Instead of comparing Nkrumah’s rule with some stereotypical unrehearsed ideals of the West, why not stack the tenor of Nkrumah’s regime against that of Felix Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast, a sister country next door and a declared darling of the West?

Do this and we should soon be able to discern the huge hypocrisy and the double standards the West always has for Africa. This would help explain why Nkrumah was so hated by the West.

President Houphouet-Boigny, famously known as Le Vieux or the “Sage of Africa” was held in reverence by the West, at the same intensity level they used to hate Nkrumah.

He ruled as president of the Ivory Coast for 30 years; from independence in 1960 until his death in 1993.

He ruled the longest, protected jealously by the French, yet no one from the West, despite the obvious, ever accused him of being a “president for life” as they did with Nkrumah.

Through Houphouet-Boigny, the French did their dirty work in Africa. Under a policy called FrancAfrique, he aided the conspirators who overthrew Kwame Nkrumah in 1966.

In 1977, he took part in the attempted coup against Mathew Kerekoo of Benin on behalf of the French government. And in 1987, he helped in the overthrow of President Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso.

If ever there was a dictator in West Africa, Houphouet-Boigny was the real one, but the West didn’t care.

UPI wrote in 1990 that there were “Opposition attempts to break a 30-year hold on power by President Houphouet-Boigny and install political pluralism in the Ivory Coast ….”

For 30 years, the Ivory Coast had no political pluralism. Yet, some 24 years earlier in 1966, the West had already engineered a coup against Nkrumah for trying to create a one-party system in Ghana with him as president for life.

Meanwhile, Houphouet-Boigny in the Ivory was all that Nkrumah was accused as being, yet he could get a free pass in the Ivory Coast because he was the plantation overseer for the French.
 
Houphouet-Boigny would rule with no multiparty system opposing him in the Ivory Coast for 30 years.

Nkrumah, for supposedly suppressing democracy and attempting to set himself up as president for life, was to last for at most nine years in office.

And, without the multiparty pluralism being in place in 1989, UNESCO would approvingly create the “Felix Houphouet-Boigny Peace Prize” in his name. Just the same manner in which the Nobel was awarded to President Obama in 2009.

You may be asked now whether Nkrumah was a good ruler. But just remember to put the question in context and to point to the Western powers by asking the same about Houphouet-Boigny, this famous, rich son of the Ivory Coast and a dear friend of the French. Then the double standard and the lies would start again.


E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Publisher www.ghanadot.com, Washington, DC, April 22, 2022. 
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