Kwame Nkrumah. Vision and Tragedy

14. The Socialist State

14 THE SOCIALIST STATE Nkrumah returned from his visit to the Soviet Union and China, and from his conversations with Khrushchev, Tito, Chou en Lai and Mao Tse-tung, determined to achieve a rapid socialist revolution in Ghana. Full of confidence and buoyed up by their encouragement, he went on to address the UN General Assembly feeling that he was representing the hopes and aspirations of the entire African continent. He said: Over 200 million of our people cry out with one voice of tremendous power – and what do they say? We do not ask for death for our oppressors, we do not pronounce wishes of ill-fate for our slave masters; we make an assertion of a just and positive demand. Our voice booms across the oceans and mountains it calls for the freedom of Africa. Africa wants her freedom. Africa must be free… For years Africa has been the footstool of colonialism and imperialism, exploitation and degradation… Her sons languished in the chains of slavery and humiliation, and African exploiters and self-appointed controllers of her destiny strode across our land with incredible inhumanity, without mercy, without shame, without honour. These days are gone for ever and now I, an African, stand before this august Assembly of the United Nations 252 and shall speak with the voice of freedom proclaiming to the world the dawn of a new era.1 At the UN he played down the socialist element in his plans but the local press, working on an official brief, spelt it out more clearly: Nkrumah has spent ten weeks drawing inspiration from the spectacular achievements of former underdeveloped countries which are now giant industrial countries, building happiness and prosperity on socialist foundations. Nkrumah has seen the effectiveness of socialist planning and economy where, by hard work and sacrifice, the whole people have been organized to better the community and eliminate unemployment.2 Nkrumah’s socialist ideas had been outlined as early as the 1949 Manifesto, which aimed at a socialist state ‘in which all men and women shall have equal opportunity and where there will be no capitalist exploitation’. This had been followed by various development plans, 1951-6, 1957-9, 1959-64. All of these were intended to set up the infrastructure to make possible the rapid agricultural and economic development which was to follow. The Statutory Corporations Act had been passed in 1959, enabling public corporations to be set up without any recourse to parliament, and without any formal rules for audit or control. By the end of that year seventeen subsidiaries of the Industrial Development Corporation had already been established, and the Corporation had taken shares in eleven additional projects. These activities included tobacco and cereal processing, printing, laundries, sawmills, oil processing, cold storage and the manufacturing of matches, soap, furniture, bricks, tyres, biscuits, pottery and shoes. While these developments were progressing, Nkrumah frequently emphasized the need for the government THE SOCIALIST STATE 253 254 KWAME NKRUMAH - VISION AND TRAGEDY to control the means of production, and for the people to have socialist drive and a socialist perspective.3 State activity in the industrial and commercial field, which was accompanied by considerable socialist propaganda, did not pass unchallenged. In an Assembly debate in April 1961, P. Quaidoo made a brave attempt to defend the old way of life. He defended the chiefs and elders, as well as the founders of the CPP, against upstarts who put forward Marxist nonsense and talked of Nkrumah’s immortality. Quaidoo referred to the strength of Ghanaian family life, the role of chiefs and elders, and the traditional respect for authority. Socialist tampering with such matters was perilous for everyone. He believed that Ghana must build upon its own culture and cast aside the alien ideas of Marx and Lenin. The harsher aspects of the regime were seen shortly afterwards, when in the Ghana Times of 27 April 1961, Adamafio attacked Quaidoo, calling him a ‘Tshombe faced nincompoop who stands out as one of the biggest buffoons… a chaff brained myopic man who dares to challenge the immortality of Nkrumah’. A few weeks later, Quaidoo was dismissed from a government post, and by December 1961 was in prison. Nkrumah’sdeterminationtorestructuretheGhanaianeconomy became clear well before his visit to the Soviet Union. In June 1961 he set up a Committee for Economic Co-operation with Eastern Countries, with twelve principal secretaries whose task was to transform the Ghanaian...