After 60 years, what is Ghana all about? (1)

  By Kwadwo Afari.  Our country, Ghana, emerged as a distortion of the historical events. Long before Ghana, this nation was made up of several independent traditional states linked together by colonialism – those states which formed the colony, Ashanti, the Northern Territories and later joined by Trans-Volta Togoland. These states were ruled indirectly by […]

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By Kwadwo Afari. 

Our country, Ghana, emerged as a distortion of the historical events. Long before Ghana, this nation was made up of several independent traditional states linked together by colonialism – those states which formed the colony, Ashanti, the Northern Territories and later joined by Trans-Volta Togoland. These states were ruled indirectly by their chiefs on behalf of the British colonialist at the centre with their own distinct ideals, values and governance systems. These traditional states or divisions could have gone their separate ways, because, the sectional differences based on economics and tribe were an obvious problem.

It is therefore not surprising to see that Ghanaian politics were to a limited extent driven by regional youth movements – the youth movements in Ashanti, the Ga Standfast Association with its Tokyo-joe boys in Accra, the Togoland Congress Party, and many other rights societies in the north – were all inspired by the desire to protect their self-interests, for greater opportunities and peculiar rules and laws to protect their sectional interests.

The political organisations that emerged later, The Gold Coast People’s League (GCPL) and the Gold Coast National Party (GCNP) were dominated by lawyers and rich merchants. All these movements and parties were motivated by reforms in the administrative set up of the colonial administration and greater involvement of ordinary citizens in the governance of the country and possible independence. These organisations did not worked effectively and were bedevilled by tribal divisions and lacked deeper intellectual ideas and debates on the role for a post-independence government in the economic and social affairs of the new nation.

When the GCPL the (DCNP) the two moribund political parties joined to form the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) under Pa Grant and Joseph Boakye Dankwa, they talked about changes in the system of indirect rule and a reduction of the powers of chiefs, to include ordinary people and the elites. While Danquah talked about ‘constitutional, determined, persistent, unflinching, unceasing’ fight until ‘freedom is achieved’, he offered no answers to the role of the post-independence government in the lives of the people, and no detailed economic plan of action going forward, until much later. By the time he did, it was too late.

Kwame Nkrumah arrived to take administrative charge of the UGCC and in spite of his organisational ability and putting forward a detailed plan of action towards self-government, which included demonstrations and boycotts, he also offered no tangible vision and ideas about the role of government in the life of the ordinary Ghanaian. When he broke away from the UGCC to form the Convention People’s Party (CPP), all he did was to urge the populace to ‘seek the political kingdom’ and all else would be added. His slogan, ‘Independence Now’ won him adulation and the vote, but nothing about the form and structure of a future government in Ghana.

Both the UGCC and the CPP were opposed strongly against each other, however, they were united in general support for Ghanaian nationalism and independence. However, the question of forging a new country was acrimonious and devoid of serious discussion and debates. When later Danquah insisted on careful debate on the way forward and espoused a property owning democratic country, ‘with the right to life, freedom and justice, in order to specifically enrich the life, property and liberty’ of each and every citizen, in the euphoria of ‘Independence Now’ slogan, it was met with derision.

Unable to explain the concept of individual freedom, decentralisation, law and order and above all, property rights, embedded in Danquah’s ideas, Nkrumah, with a hidden agenda to turn this country into one party, centralised, socialist tyranny, and his ‘Micky-mouse intellectuals at that time, described Danquah and his people as ‘paranoid’, their politics ‘symbolic of feudalism’ and the product of ‘status anxiety’. The critics were not only wrong, they misunderstood and hated the democratic idea of subsidiarity and under the influence of populist slogans never tried to debate the concept. Of course, the ideas of Danquah and his people were sophisticated principles, harder to get across but they could have been achieved through democratic politics.

Indeed, Nkrumah’s attempt to create a socialist economy, with the means of production and distribution controlled by the government was in direct contradiction with Ghanaian communalism and the individual’s role and his rights in that agrarian rural setting. He forgot entirely that traditional Ghanaian society was without extreme concentration of wealth; was democratic and relatively free from intense class, religious or sectional interests, with the chief’s role restricted to the custodianship of the beliefs and customs of the people and a very limited role in the citizens’ lives and basically none in the individual lives of the people.

At independence, this nation possessed a prosperous and well-organised class of peasant farmers capable of producing two-thirds of the world’s cocoa. What happened to them? We destroyed them through government meddling, illegal appropriation of their produce to ‘develop this nation’, and plain corruption. The official CPP line was that Soviet style collective ownership of the means of production would lead to high economic growth – and ultimately wealth. In the end, the creation of state farms and government sponsored agricultural schemes killed our agriculture and made the peasant farmer poorer.

In the end demagoguery won. The need for democratic consensus building, to debate the future of the nation, was reduced to bigotry and dogmatism. So-called socialist intellectuals and ‘parasites’ found a profitable market for their social democratic views. The view that all our problems could be solved by simply enacting a law and creating government bureau, staffed and managed by the party faithful won the argument to our detriment.

Since 1957, our governments have made public ownership of our resources an end in itself; spent a lot of money, and mostly spent it badly. As always happens when government is shovelling out money, lobbyists, crooks and parasites thrive. Fast-forward to the present day. Today, government is the largest formal employer, dispensing over ninety per cent of our budget. In Ghana, the adage that ‘where the sole employer is the state, opposition means death by slow starvation is very real. The old Bible principle: those who do not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: all those in opposition shall not eat.

This country is in trouble. Everybody say so, and everybody is right. From there, however, our paths differ and different opinions have been heard. The relevant questions are these: How deep is the trouble? How much of it is self-inflicted and how much is a function of circumstance? Can the problem be solved, and if so, by what means?

Kwame Nkrumah and his successors made a blunder when they tried to impose their faulty visions on the people of this country. Ironically, almost all the successor regimes, both military and civilian, have not learned from this failure. The result is a society in stalemate – a standoff between ‘the one and the many’. On the eve of our 60^th birthday, the greatest enemy of the population is the cult of personality whose ‘core ideology’ is state ownership and control of the economy. This is what the poor must reject. Social-justice is essential to this core.  We do not need Fathers of the Nation. Our patriarchs have failed us, the citizens. It is time to dump them. Only when we understand who we have been, and the nation we have made and intend to make, shall we come to know the answer.

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