Nkrumah and Selassie

Kayode Komolafe writes that the verdict of history is that Nkrumah was a national figure accepted by all sections of the Ghanian nation. The disagreements between him and other politicians were ideological. The differences were not based on ethnicity, regionalism or religion.

By Kayode Komolafe

It is good news for progressive Africa that Ghana declared 21 September a public holiday to celebrate the country’s first president, Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah.

Ghana’s Interior Minister Ambrose Dery said in a statement that September 21, Nkrumah’s birthday, “is a Statutory Public Holiday.”
The idea of the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Day” is indubitably another reaffirmation of the place of that great Pan-Africanist in history.

This act of the government of President Nana Akufo-Addo Ghana is instructive in many respects. The father of the president, Edward Akufo-Addo, was on the opposite side of the political divide to Nkrumah. The senior Akufo-Addo was of one the leading six nationalists who fought Ghana’s independence. Ghanaians call them the “Big Six.” The senior Akufo-Addo became the Chief Justice when the military overthrew the government of Nkrumah in 1966. He later became a ceremonial president between 1970-1972.

Yet the Ghanaian nation has forged a national consensus to recognise the towering role of Nkrumah in history while Akufo-Addo’s son is in power more than 60 years later. The verdict of history is that Nkrumah was a national figure accepted by all sections of the Ghanian nation. The disagreements between him and other politicians were ideological. The differences were not based on ethnicity, regionalism or religion.

Born in Nkroful in the western region of Ghana, Nkrumah emerged as a rallying point for the Ghanaian nation. By this act, Ghana has amply demonstrated that it is a nation fully conscious of its history.

President Akufo-Addo has demonstrated a deep sense of national purpose in honouring the memory of Nkrumah despite his conservative political background and outlook. His political tradition in Ghana is clearly opposed to the progressive (some even say revolutionary) politics of Nkrumah.

It is ironic that President Jerry Rawlings, who emerged on the Ghanaian political firmament as a revolutionary somewhat avoided the Nkrumahist legacy. Rawlings was consciously a non-Nkrumahist in all his days in power.

Perhaps the development trajectory of Nigeria could have been different in terms of national integration if history had thrown up a figure like Nkrumah among the leaders who emerged at independence. That is a leader who could not be perceived as a champion of one section of the country. It would, for instance, be interesting to see how the debate would be conducted at the National Assembly if a bill is proposed to make November 16 statutorily the Nnamdi Azikiwe Memorial Day given the indisputable leading role of Dr. Azikiwe in the nationalist struggle. Azikiwe, the first president of Nigeria, was born in Zungeru , Niger state, on November 16, 1904. By the way, Nkrumah himself acknowledged Azikiwe as his “mentor’ in the nationalist struggles.

But the significance of Nkrumah transcends the shores of Ghana. There is a universal acclaim of his historical stature as the foremost Pan-Africanist in the last century. In December 1999, listeners of the British Broadcasting Corporation BBC radio service in Africa voted Nkrumah as the “Man of the Millennium.”

This Pan-African acknowledgment of Nkrumah’s role in history should not be a surprise. On the occasion of Ghana’s independence at the midnight of March 5, 1957, Nkrumah rendered the following unforgettable words: “We are going to see that we create our own African personality and identity. We again rededicate ourselves in the struggle to emancipate other countries in Africa; for our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent.”

No less a personality than Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the first premier of the old western region underlined the Pan-African essence of Nkrumah on another occasion. Awolowo had the honour of delivering the first series of the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Lectures by the University of Cape Coast in Ghana in November 1976. The lecture was entitled “The Problems of Africa: The Need for Ideological Reappraisal.” In the lecture which has been published as a book, Awolowo said this of Nkrumah: “Among all African nationalists – dead or alive -Kwame Nkrumah laboured more consistently and more tirelessly than others for the liberation of Africa from colonial bondage and for the enhancement of the dignity of the black man in Africa and elsewhere in the world. In particular, he strove relentlessly, and staked everything, including his personal freedom, for the ultimate independence of Ghana in 1957, thus earning himself the unsurpassed glory of leading the first black African country after Liberia completely out of foreign rule and domination. Furthermore, he, more than anyone else, master-minded the birthing and the initial dynamics of the Organisation of African Unity” (the precursor of African Union).

There is no tendency here to romanticise the symbolism of Nkrumah as a leader. Neither is this an exercise in literary excavation of historical figures. Nkrumah should be celebrated for the lessons that could be learnt from his remarkable life by contemporary African leaders grappling with challenges of development.

It has been well established that the essential Nkrumah could be distilled from the three concentric circles of his achievements. The inner most concentric circle was that of Ghana. At that level, Nkrumah proved that governance could be executed for the purpose of people-centred development. In the world of Nkrumah, the pursuit of the common good was the raison d’etre of government. He mobilised the people with his philosophy of “positive action.”

At the level of the second concentric circle, Nkrumah was an avowed Pan-Africanist. He promoted black consciousness and Ghana under his leadership supported liberation struggles in African countries towards national independence. He wrote books about the problems in the Congo and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) among others.

And at the outermost concentric circle, Nkrumah fought for the dignity of the black man everywhere. Nkrumah’s Ghana was declared home to all black people on the continent, the Americas and elsewhere. Progressive Nigerians found refuge in Ghana when they had to flee Nigeria during the political crisis of the First Republic in Nigeria. Mrs. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti had to go to Ghana under Nkrumah to obtain travel documents for a political trip to China. The government of Nigeria put obstacles on her way. In fact, Mazi Sam Ikoku was the director of the Ideological Institute in Winneba where he taught cadres socialism and Pan-Africanism.

Indeed, the story of Africa could have been different today if Nkrumah’s vision for Africa had been realised. Unfortunately aberrant soldiers inspired and supported by imperialism truncated the Nkrumah mission with the tragic coup of 1966. The Ghanaian president was on a state visit to North Vietnam and China.

Ironically, Nkrumah himself was conscious of the fact that imperialism was not comfortable with the progressive advance he was making in the realm of governance. This was evident in his many books especially Neo-Colonialism; The Highest State of Imperialism, which was published at the eve of the coup.

Nkrumah’s enemies accused him of undemocratic acts only to inaugurate a long period of military rule in Ghana which was followed by a succession of military regimes until Rawlings restored civil rule 30 years ago.

For the purpose of reflection, the fact that the Nkrumahist vision still remains relevant to Africa could be illustrated at least in two areas.

First, Nkrumah’s Ghana was a model of a developmental state. The government of Nkrumah was a government “thinking big.” The government was expansive in its ambition of a development having the people as the object of the process. The government invested massively in the social sector especially health and education. Public education was adequately funded to ensure quality. Today quality public education has become an exorbitant commodity available only to the rich in Ghana, Nigeria and other African countries in a complete negation of Nkrumah’s vision. The construction of the Akosombo Dam was a landmark water project that won applause globally. More than 60 years after, African politicians now spend time and money to “commission” boreholes and culverts.

To be sure, Nkrumah’s preferred path to development had a central role for the state. He knew that after the ruins of World War II, western powers did not leave the well-being of their people to market forces. Instead the welfare state was built in Europe. The British National Health Service (NHS) is a product of the era of the supremacy of the welfare state. Healthcare delivery was not a profit-making game.
So for Ghana, a country emerging from colonial exploitation and was “underdeveloped” (as Walter Rodney would put it), Nkrumah knew that the state definitely had a role to play in sectors such as education, health, social housing , electricity, water supply, physical infrastructure etc.

Nkrumah saw development as a process that should be planned for the purpose of people’s welfare. In today’s Africa, absence of planning in economic management has been elevated to the level of a virtue in policy-making by experts in many African countries.

The second aspect of Nkrumah’s vision that still remains relevant is Pan-Africanism. Nkrumah dreamt of an all-African government as he put in his highly polemical work Africa Must Unite. Today there is an upsurge of separatist forces on the continent. Politics has been reduced to ethnic arithmetic on the African continent with all the bitter consequences.

The matter is even more complicated in a place like South Africa, a country that was once a beneficiary of continental solidarity in its quest for freedom. Black South Africans routinely unleash violence on other Africans especially Nigerians. The generation involved in this xenophobic upsurge surely has no memory of the enormous sacrifices other African made to extend solidarity to black South Africans. These other African countries had their own developmental problems at that period. Former president Thabo Mbeki of South Africa was more conscious of this recent history and the nexus between South Africa and the rest of Africa. He advocated “African renaissance.” In contrast, some officials of the government of President Cyril Ramaphosa even rationalised the attacks on fellow African by South African blacks. Those South Africans probably have never heard about the Pan-Africanist vision of Nkrumah.

It’s distressing to imagine the degree of the retrogression in African politics 50 years after Nkrumah!

The progressive members of the Nkrumah generation saw the whole of Africa as their constituency. It was not for nothing that Dr. Azikiwe was called Zik of Africa and not Zik of Onitsha. However, ethnicity has become what the Africanist Basil Davidson called the “the black man’s burden,”

In the light of the foregoing, the government of President Akufo-Addo has done Ghana and Africa a lot of good by keeping the memory of Osafyefo Nkrumah alive as the proponent of “positive force.”

*Mr Kayode Komolafe, journalist and labour activist, is on the management of Thisday