Ghana's Golden Jubilee Independence celebrations which were held last March gave rise to a flood of assessments as to whether Africa's "Black Star" was finally on the rise, and whether Ghana had at last begun to fulfill the role of being the Great Black Hope that Marcus Garvey and other Pan Africanists had earmarked for it decades ago. Some analysts, including the President of Ghana himself, were optimistic that this was the case. As President John Kufuor told the assembled dignitaries, "we have recovered our track and are making headway. We should be careful not to miss our way again".
Kufuor attributed Ghana's "false start" to the colonial inheritance. As he complained, "there was no blueprint on the more difficult business of governance, economic management and the building of a nation out of the diverse peoples that had been forced within artificial boundaries by the colonialists for their own convenience".
Those on the left blamed the west in general and the US in particular for Ghana's predicament. According to that narrative, the west, in pursuit of its Cold War objectives, destabilised Nkrumah's regime. In this view, the militarisation of Ghanaian politics was a response to what the CIA was doing to promote "regime change".
More conservative analysts, like Sir Arthur Lewis who wrote policy prescriptions for Nkrumah, put the blame on the political incompetence, adventurism, naivete,and utopianism of Ghanaian political elites, many of whom adopted Soviet-inspired forced-pace strategies of development which they believed were historically required to telescope the modernisation process into one or two generations.
In Lewis's view Nkrumah was a loud mouth demagogue who masqueraded as a charismatic leader when what was needed was a patient building-up of those basic institutions which were needed to sustain development.
There were no substitutes for these institutions or short cuts in the development process. Nkrumah's injunction that one should put politics in command was misplaced; his oft-repeated view that one should "seek the political kingdom and all else would be added onto ye" was also seen as being equally naive.
Yet others saw the problem in terms of the tendency on the part of the so-called modernising elites to adopt inappropriate styles of leadership. Leaders formally adopted the trappings of western or socialist democracy but ruled as tribal chiefs which was the only reality they knew. Chieftainship was thus transformed from a local to a national institution. Nkrumah recognised the utility of the disguise and sought to augment his status by declaring himself to be the "Osagyefo". He was President as well as Paramount Chief..
There were many noisy disagreements as to what went wrong in Ghana, as I found out when I went there following Nkrumah's overthrow in 1967. Those disagreements continue, and some surfaced during the jubilee celebrations.
Former President Jerry Rawlins, who is a Nkrumahist, even refused the government's invitation to attend the celebrations, explaining that he could not share the same platform with those now in power who had "denigrated us for the last seven years and see no good in what we have done for the country."
Nkrumahists felt that not enough was done to honour the Osagyefo's role as the founding father of Ghanaian independence and as the continental African who had done most to advance the fortunes of Pan Africanism.
Notwithstanding the continuing inter-party quarrels, it does seem that Ghana has settled down politically, and that the country has passed some of the crucial "turn over tests" that western political analysts employ to determine sustainable democratic governability. The same cannot be said for Uganda which for awhile seemed to glow as a star, and it certainly cannot be said for Zimbabwe or neighbouring Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast or Senegal, all of which also shone for a while but have since virtually collapsed. Sudan and Somalia also continue to be a nightmares as does Nigeria which recently held national elections which have been widely condemned as being seriously flawed.
Caricom diasporic states have recently been formally recognised as the sixth regional member of the African Union (AU) which has replaced the Organisation of African Unity. The AU is committed to respecting international canons of democracy and good governance, and each member state is expected to ensure that fellow African states behave as if they were so committed. The same obligations are expected of diasporic members, and we in the Caribbean must support states like Ghana by making our voices heard when violations of these canons take place. Regrettably, Ghana was the only state which was openly critical of what was taking place in Zimbabwe and was roundly criticised for so doing by radicals who described the former Gold Coast as "the weakest link" in the African chain.
The President of Ghana however rightly pointed out that Ghana was a member of the New Economic Partnership for Economic Development, and was obligated "to work with the rest of the continent to develop Africa and its people to gain a responsible and dignified place in the mainstream of the emerging global village." One could not shout "Africa Moto" and then turn a blind eye on suffering in Zimbabwe in the name of African solidarity against the west.
This column applauds the fact that the African Parliament recently supported a motion (149 to 20) to send a fact-finding mission to Zimbabwe. The motion noted that the AU is committed to consolidating democratic institutions and ensure good governance and the rule of law, and cannot therefore be indifferent to what is taking place or refuse to do what is right.
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