ACCRA, Ghana: Ruth Botsio recalls with misty-eyed wonder the jubilation and triumphant cries of "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!" that greeted the birth of sub-Saharan Africa's first nation to win independence from Europe.
Fifty years on, battered by political repression, military dictatorship and economic collapse that has bedeviled the entire continent, Ghana's hopes are diminished, even after seeing its first peaceful and democratic changeover of government in 2000.
The West African nation's Golden Jubilee on Tuesday is prompting some sober reflection on why Africa has failed to translate its dreams, and its bounty of mineral and agricultural resources, into wealth.
"It was so emotional," Botsio, who just celebrated her 80th birthday, said of celebrations 50 years ago. Her late husband Kojo Botsio was one of the architects of Ghana's independence movement and a Cabinet minister in the first government following freedom from British rule.
Kwame Nkrumah, independent Ghana's first leader, dreamed of pan-African power that would free blacks from reliance on whites.
Today, President John Kufuor would be happy to see the country leap the gap from poor to middle class, while the urban poor dream of a steady job and coming home to running water and electric lights.
Ghana was producing 10 percent of the world's gold when it became independent and had a similar gross domestic product per person to South Korea. Today, South Korea's GDP per head has soared to $16,000 a year while Ghana's is about $550.
Some Ghanaians see little to celebrate.
"I'm supposed to be happy about struggling to make ends meet?" asked Kwesi Boateng, who drives a taxi because his teaching job paid only 2.5 million cedis (less than $250) a month, not enough to cover the basics for his wife and two children.
"Am I happy that I haven't had running water for three months? Happy that when I finish work at night my home is more likely in darkness than light? Why should I be happy?" he asked, more weary than angry.
Ghana's seaside capital, Accra, is suffering increasing power outages — including one that plunged the airport briefly into darkness and silenced a band welcoming people to the independence celebrations. Some say it's because the hydroelectric dam built under Nkrumah cannot produce enough power because of poor rains; others that an aluminum smelter recently returned to service is gobbling up more than its share of the limited electricity available.
Tens of thousands of people in the capital, Accra, have no running water and heft buckets and cans from water pumps to their homes.
Some major players who shaped Ghana are boycotting the celebrations, a sign of divisive politics some say have tribal overtones that Ghana previously had managed to avoid even while tribal wars raged in the region.
Among the boycotters are some members of Nkrumah's Convention People's Party, who say Nkrumah's legacy is not being given its due, and former coup leader and president Flight Lt. Jerry Rawlings, whom Kufuor last year accused of plotting yet another coup.
Rawlings said Monday that Ghana confronts "pervasive corruption at all levels, missed opportunities for genuine progress, nepotism, tribalism and known cases of political torture and killings."
But Kufuor has won international acclaim for building democracy in Ghana.
The chief executive of independence celebrations, Charles Wereko-Brobbey, said Ghana's politicians still are "learning democracy" and that "it's only (in the past) 10 years that we have had the kind of pluralism that allows people to speak their minds."
Modern day Ghana was part of the Gold Coast that soon became the Slave Coast as Portuguese and Danes set up trading posts there in the 1400s.
Britain gradually colonized what became its Gold Coast colony in the 1800s, putting down successive rebellions until finally defeating the Ashanti kingdom in 1902.
When Nkrumah began pressing for independence, Britain was demoralized by its loss of the Suez Canal and gave in without a fight.
In his famous independence declaration, Nkrumah declared "Today, there is a new African in the world, and that new African is ready to fight his own battle and show that after all the black man is capable of managing his own affairs."
It was just the first gust in what British leader Harold MacMillan called the "wind of change" that saw dozens of African nations freed from British, French, Portuguese and Spanish colonizers over the following two decades.
Nkrumah embarked on massive industrialization, opening numerous state-owned factories. He also introduced free education and health.
But his projects and widespread corruption nearly bankrupted the nation and, facing opposition, he himself became paranoid and dictatorial, imprisoning opponents. He declared Ghana a one-party state, arguing political pluralism divided the populace on tribal lines.
In 1966 he was overthrown in a military coup — just the second of scores to come over the years in Africa. The most recent were in Gambia in 1994 and Mauritania in 2005.
Ghanaians found the soldiers no better governors than the politicians. By the 1980s, savvy visitors to Ghana brought along everything they needed, including toilet paper, knowing little would be on the markets here.
Democracy was restored by Rawlings, the instigator of two coups in 1979 and 1981, who organized and won elections in 1992 and again in 1996 when he defeated Kufuor. Limited by the constitution to two terms, he handed over to Kufuor, victor of the 2000 polls.
Rawlings liberalized the economy and a painfully slow but gradual improvement ensued.
According to the World Bank, the number of Ghanaians living below the poverty line has dropped from more than half the population in 1990 to about 37 percent.
Philippe Ayivor, 52, a Coca-Cola executive who returned home from the United States a couple of years ago, has one easy measure of how the economy has changed.
In the early 1990s, Coca-Cola was selling 2 million cases a year in Ghana. Today it's more than 20 million cases. Ayivor says there's no reason Ghana cannot achieve the success of an Asian tiger.
"Malaysia got independence the same time as Ghana and was fortunate enough to have that focus, that drive to be very successful today," he said. "There's no reason why we can't do it. There are enough smart people around here."
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