“Defending the indefensible,” Really?

E. Ablorh-Odjidja
January 19, 2012.

In the article “Defending the indefensible”, a writer points out the most outrageous, illogical accusations at Nkrumah and also at those who defend him.

Central to these accusations is this writer’s thoughts on socialism. How socialism leads to the one-party state system, the outcome of which are the extreme economic ills and the pogroms of the world.

To complete his thoughts, he conflates awkwardly all the shades of socialist systems.

He says, "Marxism, better known as communism, and euphemistically called socialism, is the single worse political and economic ideology that ever happened to the world, and for that matter Africa."

Under this writer’s magic penmanship, all the systems become one. Not apparent in the alchemy he concocts are the differences between the systems.

The fact is socialism comes in different shades (structures within governance), just like its counterpart, capitalism. The western countries of Europe, for instance, are descriptively more socialist in governance than the United States.

But in Ghana, he says, one must never mind the differences in types.

He says. Ghana was heading toward the most virulent type of socialism or communism, had the country not been rescued from Nkrumah.

The catastrophe would have peaked under Nkrumah in 1966, and then the severe mass killings of citizens would have followed. It all would have started after 1964, and then would have been like Pol Pot’s Cambodia, where 1.5 to 2 million people were slaughtered!

Not only is this conclusion pure speculation, but it is also nonsensical.

Socialism does not necessarily lead to a pogrom. But who must tell this to a writer who has the intention to make Nkrumah a mass murderer by branding him as a socialist first?

But the writer has not bothered to know very much about Nkrumah. Unlike Pol Pot, Nkrumah was not even recognized as a classic socialist. And by Nkrumah’s description of himself, he was Nkrumaist. Given time to read his peace, we soon find out that the writer is a fabricator.

“Ghana did not experience anything comparable to the killing field of Cambodia or events behind the Iron Curtain, but ideas like the intolerable one-party state is a pointer to what could have happened if events had not changed,” he writes in a prophetic tone and with certainty.

In other words, Ghana would have gone straight to hell under Nkrumah. And there would have been no cultural brakes in Ghana to stop the ride, had Nkrumah stayed beyond 1966.

“How can anyone practice a system that requires the killing and maiming of their people to get to their promised land?” This writer asks.

How the writer gets to this situation of killings, as it relates to Ghana, is a mystery. For, under the Nkrumah's socialist regime, as he calls it, not a single soul was ever executed. Rather, the killings came after 1966 and under capitalist-inclined regimes!

Intentionally, this writer fails not to note the brutalities that came after Nkrumah.

Rather, he manages in his mind to pull in brutalities that happened in far-off places under other socialist or communistic regimes that had nothing in common with what happened in Nkrumah’s Ghana.

He deliberately lies about Nkrumah but gets worried when others defend him.

As for the genocide Nkrumah would have brought to Ghana should we ask first what other genocides there were in Africa?

For instance, what was the politics of the genocide perpetrators of Rwanda, a country much closer geographically to Ghana than Pol Pot’s Cambodia?

At this point, we must infer that this writer, with this piece of writing, has little understanding of what genocide is, and why it happens.

A Yale University program that studies genocide has this to say about the subject:

“As in the Ottoman Empire during the Armenian genocide, in Nazi Germany, and more recently in East Timor, Guatemala, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, the Khmer Rouge regime headed by Pol Pot combined extremist ideology with ethnic animosity.”

I invite the writer to disagree with Yale University’s understanding of the subject of genocide and to point out where the ethnic animosity was in Ghana before 1966.

The simple truth is, under no other regime has Ghana ever been so uniformly nationalistic than during Nkrumah’s period. Under Nkrumah, Ghana gets its first experience of the nation-state.

Tribalism, the engine of “ethnic animosity” was mostly absent during Nkrumah’s era. There were profound political acts, driven by tribal passions, that ultimately could have led to serious civil strife before Nkrumah.

There were intense political rivalries before independence, between the CPP and opposing parties, that did not result in genocide like what happened in Rwanda.

Nkrumah quelled those passions.

But all this writer has in his head are these unbelievable misconceptions about the motives that drove Nkrumah's policies.

Nkrumah’s policies were driven by Pan-Africanism (black nationalism) and anti-neocolonialism ideals.

But more preposterous is this writer’s assertion that there is ultimately the risk of that much evil had the one-party state continued after that Nkrumah. And wonder if he knew anything about Ghana’s history. On the Gold Coast rule under the British, in essence, was such a one-party rule. Sorry, we missed the ethnic cleansing because the white man was in charge!

The writer crowds his writing with names like Karl Max, Robespierre, Rousseau, and others, thinking to point out failures within the socialist political system. But by pointing to the experiences of Robespierre and the French Revolution, he misses his conceptual framework by more than a mile.

Before the French Revolution, there had been the American Revolution. Both were more about the struggle for liberty, rather than the imposition of socialism on a society.

And the key to both these two historic was the thoughts of John Locke, a classic liberal, but not necessarily a socialist.

The ideas of Locke, just like Nkrumah's, have nothing to do with Pol Pot and his genocide, other than the fact that together they contribute to our basic understandings of the human franchise.

Socialism, ultimately, will not be the preferred form of governance in Ghana for me. But as part of a process to liberate a country from the colonial grip of the time, it was the ideal instrument to use.

Nkrumah, probably, was motivated by the same idea of using socialism as a tool for liberation.

So, in the 60s in Ghana, socialism became the tone of the experiment of the new state; a) to build new institutions, b) to form a foundational base for the indigenous entrepreneurial class, c) inculcate discipline for self-rule for effective governance of a new nation.

Unfortunately, it was the 1966 coup, the event this writer wants to uphold as the glorious moment that aborted the experiment. And with this coup, we lost the momentum to build an effective, developed nation-state; as India did.

Nkrumah was not a classic socialist. Socialism for him was a bulwark against neo-colonialism. His policies were not far from that preached by leading developmental economists of his time.

Writing about Nkrumah's era, Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw state in the book “Commanding Heights” that “Nkrumah’s “rejection of capitalism did not signify his adoption of scientific socialism.”

He said, Nkrumah “considered (scientific socialism) unacceptable for Africa in its ‘pure form” and he (Nkrumah) argued that it had to be adapted to specifically African conditions.”

We can argue about how much Nkrumah's brand of socialism impaired Ghana's economic development. But to insist that two years of one-party socialist state rule under Nkrumah in Ghana could have led to a Cambodia-style pogrom is irrational.

Eleven years of brutal military dictatorship under Rawlings in Ghana did not lead to a pogrom.

Comparatively, Felix Houphouet-Boigny’s capitalist and dictatorial rule in the Ivory Coast, which led to a bloody civil war after his death does not raise genocidal concerns in this writer's mind.

He seems to prefer Houphouet-Boigny’s heavy-handed rule in the Ivory Coast; a preference that betrays this writer’s bias against Nkrumah.

“The cult of Nkrumah will forever remain as long as there is a nation called Ghana. The position he occupies in Ghanaian political history cannot be wrestled away from him. Nobody can deny the fact that he had the interest of the nation at heart…" he writes.

But the last sentence of the commendation is not intended.

"We have to celebrate him as a leader who selflessly fought for our independence, and not retrogressively tries to keep his name alive by implementing his dead economic and social policies.” The writer concludes.

There you have it, "not retrogressively keep his name alive..." But one is allowed to tarnish retroactively Nkrumah’s reputation by creating a false equivalency between his system and that of Pol Pot - thus to arrive at the final mission of the search to destroy Nkrumah’s legacy.

E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Publisher www.ghanadot.com, Washington, DC, January 19, 2012.
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