Last week, on September 21, 2025, the world marked the 116th posthumous birth anniversary of the founding President of Ghana, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. Today, we recall a piece written in 2020 by BANJI OJEWALE to celebrate the great Pan-Africanist and liberation fighter when Ghana marked its 63rd year of Independence. Enjoy it.
February 24 slid into history again a couple of days ago, hardly remembered by many as the 54th anniversary of the military coup that toppled Kwame Nkrumah as Ghana’s president and temporarily halted the greatest anti-colonial move of the era. The putsch came just when the Black Star nation was preparing to celebrate nine years of liberation from its imperial lords in London. The rest of the free world across Africa and beyond, which had been thrilled by Nkrumah’s bold experiment in post-colonial sovereignty were also eager to felicitate with the Ghanaians.
A high
conspiracy of local malcontents and elements of the international community,
notably the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States, infiltrated
Ghana’s military and the Police to subvert the Constitution for a coup in the
early hours of Thursday, February 24, 1966. The Pan-Africanist Nkrumah had left
the country three days earlier for Hanoi, seeking peace in the Vietnam War.
The coup makers and their foreign partners sought to stop the trajectory of the anti-imperialism struggle, which Nkrumah and his wildly popular Convention Peoples Party (CPP), supported by the masses, had embarked upon right from Day One of Ghana’s Independence on March 6, 1957. Nkrumah, taking over from the Great Zik of Africa, Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, announced in his first Independence speech that March 6 was only the opening salvo against colonialism in Africa.
He would employ the resources of the newly freed state to encourage
others on the continent to break away from the ideological, political and
economic yoke of the Western world that had prevented them from surging into
greatness. He would, if the circumstances permitted, contribute men and women
of Ghana’s Armed Forces to fight for the armed liberation of sister African
nations. He would make Ghana the Mecca of the world for all oppressed black
peoples.
Ghana,
with a population of only 6,068,997 at Independence in 1957, was ready to take
on the burden of the entire African people, including those in the Diaspora.
Nkrumah had studied in the United States and been exposed to what the Americans
themselves taught the world about personal emancipation. The Statue of Liberty
says it all: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to
break free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the
homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” Millions
worldwide have heeded the call of the Statue since its dedication in 1886. They
troop to the United States of America, escaping destitution and hardship of
different shapes.
Osagyefo
Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s speech in 1957 was also welcomed as a call on all Africans
searching for the fresh breath of freedom to head for Ghana. The country was
the first black nation to unbind its umbilical cord from the United Kingdom.
But Nkrumah said that wasn’t enough satisfaction. March 6, 1957 wasn’t final,
wasn’t meaningful, wasn’t complete, unless it was “linked-up with the total
liberation of Africa.” March 6, 1957 must be the precursor of more independent
African nations, must be the ‘voice of one crying in the wilderness’ opening
the way for the “wind of change” that U.K. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan
spoke of in apartheid South Africa when he visited in 1960.
Many commentators have tried to brush aside the impact of March 6, 1957, preferring to insist that it was the U.K. leader’s ‘wind of change’ address before the lawmakers in South Africa that led to the push for, and independence in 1960 of several African countries, including Nigeria. Nkrumah’s Ghana adumbrated it; Macmillan was a late convert, after he saw what a free black nation could do with wealth not tethered to colonial control and manipulation.
The
Western powers had to bring Nkrumah down. They needed to sell the message that
the Black Race wasn’t mature for self-rule. A failed Ghana, under a ‘hater’ of
the colonial masters, would be the ideal intimation.
But
the first nine years of Ghana’s Independence under Nkrumah have proved a golden
age of the country. What he brought forth to nurse the nation out of
exploitative misery at the hands of the domineering tyrants have endured. He
introduced fee-free education in the early stages of the school system. He
established the Workers College that enabled adults who missed the classroom
benefit from education. As far back as the days of Nkrumah in the late 50s and
early 60s, when small African countries were not encouraged to establish them,
Ghana already boasted three multi-disciplinary universities.
Ghana
invested massive resources in the people and in infrastructure, such that
today, several decades after, many trace the country’s giant strides to the
good start it got from its leaders. The people didn’t mistrust their leaders on
account of corruption in handling the public trust and funds. Well, a
succession of military juntas and civilian administrations that began with the
Ankrah regime, followed by its offshoot, Afrifa’s, then the Busia republic,
which was toppled by Acheampong in 1972, Akuffo-Addo, all came to reverse
Ghana’s fortunes. These were all farcical arrangements which introduced fatal
strains of corruption into the Ghanaian society, notably kalabule, a strange
form of indiscipline and high graft, combining nepotism, cronyism and abuse of
office through ‘bottom power’.
Finally,
the mother of all coups came in the June Revolution of 1979. Its leader, J.J.
Rawlings, brought back honour to this battered land called Gold Coast before
Independence, when Nkrumah’s era named the land after a great medieval empire
in the Sahel region of Africa. He halted Ghana’s decline. The country had gone
to the dogs. Its virile young men and women abandoned their land to flood the
West Coast, especially Nigeria, where they lived in the shadows as prostitutes
and dodgy artisans and teachers. After the summary execution of the past
military rulers and top generals, Rawlings, dubbed Junior Jesus, began
sanitising Ghana’s politics.
Rawlings’ intervention first installed President Hilla Liman. He failed the nation and was removed in a famous coup that returned Rawlings to power. He resumed the cleansing of the Augean Stables. Rawlings is accused of raw tactics in dispatching perceived enemies of the state, his military predecessors in particular. But he counters by saying they deserved the executions, because the public funds they stole translated into the hospitals, drugs, schools, roads etc. which were missing, which they never provided, which in turn led to mass deaths. He claimed that he instilled ‘holy fear’ in public office holders and other such aspirants.
The talk of the town in Ghana since the Rawlings
Revolution is that when there is a temptation to steal public money, the
Rawlings spectre is invoked: Beware, a Rawlings might spring up again some day!
Ghana has been named among the world’s fastest growing economies in recent
years, despite the setbacks of years of military breaches. Why? The experts say
the country enjoys a stable and secure society they trace to the ‘big leap’
Ghana had in the early days of its statehood. They say it has since had ‘sturdy
and disciplined political leadership’.
So
how come Nigeria and some other slack black nations have not settled for such
sublime leadership and polity to make us soar like eagles? One reason is, in
the case of Nigeria, we didn’t duplicate the progress in the regions at the
centre. Nor were these regions allowed to sustain the pace of feats they had
recorded. Another is that we haven’t had a strong personality to address the
misadventures of the military, the way Ghana had when the soldiers bloodied and
trashed the federal system.
*Banji
Ojewale writes from Ota, Ogun State.
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