When Dancers Play Historians And Thinkers – Postscript 4

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
August 12, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]

Historiographical bluster and all, the author of Black Star notes that the Nkrumah-led CPP was no “revolutionary party” at all in 1951, as many an ardent Nkrumacrat or Nkrumah-leaning scholar and critic would have the rest of the world believe. For Davidson, the CPP simply could not have been either radical or revolutionary in thrust because the British colonial imperialist system was heavily and almost hermitically entrenched on the ground to be effectively or formidably countered by the largely starry-eyed and woefully inexperienced leader of the CPP and his associates. The 1951 transitional government, which Davidson mischaracterizes as having given birth to the New Ghana, was thus decidedly ushered into the seat of gubernatorial partnership, junior partnership, that is, as an “anti-colonial compromise.”

If Davidson’s observation has validity, then Danquah’s more deliberate, foresighted and gradualist anti-colonial argument had won the day. In other words, in real terms, by February 1951, while Nkrumah may clearly and aptly be said to have won the initial battle against British colonial subjugation, it was Danquah who could practically be envisaged to have won the long-term battle, hands down: “Naively, long afterwards, some critics would say that Nkrumah and the CPP had simply ‘bought the British plan,’ and that, by accepting a process of slow reform, they had sacrificed the hopes of revolution. These critics were misreading history and its possibilities. There was no chance in 1951 of any far-reaching change, much less of revolution. This was partly because of the strength of the whole imperial position. But it was also, and even more, because of the nature of the CPP and the ‘general situation’ in which it had to operate. Thus an assembly of genuine nationalists, the CPP was in no sense a revolutionary party; nor, in the circumstances at the time, could it have been one. Like other such parties or movements in the campaigns for political decolonization during the 1950s, the CPP had neither the experience nor the leadership, much less the ‘general situation,’ that could have carried it beyond a fight for immediate gains” (Black Star 84-5).

Davidson may have some logic on his side when he lights into what he alleges to be the entrenched colonial mentality “of the leaders of the opposition, in falsely claiming that Nkrumah’s extensive dealings with the Soviets and the eastern-bloc countries, the CPP had turned Ghana into ‘a center for subversive activities’” (Black Star 175). Still, the levelheaded critic could not discount the fact that the building of a nuclear reactor by the Russians at Kwabenya, and the heavily Soviet-supported Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute at Winneba, gave adequate cause for Dr. Busia and his associates to worry about. But the most significant exposé on the Nkrumah government by Davidson, has to do with the Show Boy’s infamous 1961 budget, which the author describes as a “savage budget,” for a populist government. It was this so-called Tighten-Your-Belt austerity budget that gave an increasingly desperate President Nkrumah the long-craved opportunity to incriminate his most ardent political opponents and put them away under his Preventive Detention Act (PDA).

That a thoroughgoing corrupt President Nkrumah intended to gratuitously milk the poor for the flagrant benefit of the rich and powerful, himself included, is cast by Davidson in the following terms: “What this sudden and savage budget did was to impose ‘compulsory savings’ so as to increase government revenue. All wage earners were to lose 5 percent of their wages, deducted at source. All other types of ‘assessable income’ were to contribute 10 percent, also taken at source. This included cocoa incomes, although cocoa farmers were already contributing about 13 percent of the nominal price they were getting for their cocoa from the Marketing Board. ¶ The effect might have been foreseen. It was one thing to say that expanding social services called for higher taxation. Schools and clinics undoubtedly cost money. But it was quite another thing to suppose that ordinary people would happily take a further cut in their standard of living, on top of the recent falls in real wages, simply because they were getting more schools and clinics. They might have taken it, perhaps, if the budget had signaled an all-round cut in incomes, and if the CPP had embarked on a rigorous campaign of honest explanation. Neither condition was fulfilled. All too clearly, the men at the top were going to escape deductions from ‘assessable income.’ As for the CPP, its machinery for persuasive explanation barely existed now.¶….¶ Not only were strikes illegal, but the Trades Union Congress had become so closely identified with the CPP that a single membership card was used for both; the Budget was CPP and therefore TUC policy. Yet the strike was solid, and it held for a long time. The strikers, commented West Africa ‘must be laboring under a very deep sense of grievance to have carried on for so long, in the face of so many difficulties, without any organization to assist them (Black Star 176-7).

The 1961 “Savage Budget,” as Basil Davidson pointedly characterized it, also brought Nkrumah into sharp confrontation with some leading members of his own cabinet, as the President made a public and passionate call for filthy rich cabinet appointees like Messrs. Komla Gbedemah and Kojo Botsio to “surrender part of their property.” Komla Gbedemah, sensing imminent danger, decided to go into exile. But it was not until he had fired off an “open letter” to Nkrumah titled “It Will Not Be Work And Happiness For All,” an obviously sarcastic reference to the CPP’s new program of action titled “Work And Happiness” (Black Star 181). Davidson also notes that among the overnight-brewed nouveau riche party men whom Nkrumah called upon to release some of their ill-gotten wealth into the public domain, or to the State, “Krobo Edusei was [perhaps a little unfairly targeted because he had become ‘notorious’] for the ‘golden bed’ which his wife, a keen businesswoman in her own right, had lately added to her sense of comfort and prestige” (Black Star 180).

Nkrumah would also “impose resignation on six leading members of his government,” including Messrs. Gbedemah and Botsio. The latter would shortly be recalled and, somewhat, rehabilitated. What is significant to point out here is the fact that this was the era of the 10-percent political culture, introduced into government by the CPP, in which a 10-percent kickback was routinely ceded by all foreign-owned companies awarded contracts by the Nkrumah regime. It was directly by this process of bribery and corruption that the aforesaid politicians and their associates and assigns had become relatively filthy rich overnight. On the sentiments that commonly guided the cavalier reception of such kickbacks on the part of Nkrumah’s henchmen, so-called, this is what Davidson has to say: “To these men Nkrumah’s action seemed unfair to them, but also unwise of him. They felt that they had nothing to reproach themselves with. All they had done was to behave as a ‘growing middle-class’ on the best pattern of foreign examples. If they had gathered in wealth by whatever means came to hand, so had all their forebears in every ‘developing country’ in the past, and not the least in England and the United States. There was no other way for a ‘growing middle-class’ to grow. Besides, they had done their duty to the State, and, true to their own traditions, they had taken care to provide for their relations. If highly respectable foreign companies were ready to pay them 10 percent on contracts who were they to reject such gifts?” (Black Star 180).

Davidson also observes that among the opposition leaders summarily rounded up by Kwame Nkrumah and charged with instigating anti-government rebellion in the wake of the 1961 national industrial, or labor, strike, “Some of these [,] including Danquah, were no doubt innocent of any rebellious intentions. But it soon became clear that rebellious intentions were on the scene” (Black Star 181). Where it gets messy is Davidson’s attempt to rope Mr. Emmanuel Obetsebi-Lamptey into the Kulungugu assassination attempt on the life of President Nkrumah, as well as the grenade attacks that preceded Kulungugu in Accra, reported to have resulted in the deaths of some thirty people. What is fascinating here is that in his memoir Reap The Whirlwind, Sir Geoffrey Bing, QC, the British lawyer and former Westminster parliamentarian hired as Ghana’s Attorney-General by President Nkrumah – so much for civil-service Africanization – thoroughly discounts the likelihood of any involvement in these veritable acts of terrorism of a terminally ill Mr. Obetsebi-Lamptey in either Kulungugu or the deadly grenade attacks in Accra – at the Accra Sports Stadium, to be precise – that killed some thirty people and wounded several hundred others.
Indeed, credible sources close to the reticent Big Six member claim that Mr. Obetsebi-Lamptey had returned to Ghana from his base of political exile in Togo because wanted to spend the last days of his life at home surrounded by his relatives and friends. On the contrary, this is how Davidson documented the same in his political biography of Kwame Nkrumah, titled Black Star: A View of the Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah (1973): “This time [i.e.Kulungugu] the police found solid evidence. Among those whom they arrested was an NLM leader, Obetsebi-Lamptey, lately returned secretly from neighboring Togo: evidence produced at the trial went to establish that he had supplied grenades and paid those who threw them. He and six others, similarly implicated, were found guilty by Chief Justice Sir Arku Korsah, sitting with Judges Van Lare and Akufo-Addo. They were sentenced to death, but the sentences were at once commuted to imprisonment. Lamptey died in hospital soon afterwards of cancer of the liver” (Black Star 183).

His very own account of the cause of Mr. Obetsebi-Lamptey’s death may be seen to clearly contradict Mr. Davidson’s rather hollow attempt to implicate Mr. Obetsebi-Lamptey in either the Kulungugu or Accra carnage. It is quite clear that Mr. Obetsebi-Lamptey had returned home, to Accra, from Lomé not to sponsor any acts of terror against either the person of President Nkrumah or his CPP regime, but simply to die in peace and comfort among his own relatives and friends. In fact, in his very authoritative account of the 1966 coup that overthrew President Nkrumah, titled A Myth Is Broken: An Account of the Ghana Coup D’état of 24th February 1966 (Longmans, 1968), the former trusted aide of President Nkrumah categorically notes that the caliber of grenades used at Kulungugu and the Accra Sports Stadium came from the armory or arsenal of the Ghana Armed Forces. Gen. Ocran further notes that such ordnance, as used at both Kulungugu and Accra, could only have been purchased for use by the Government of Ghana, and not by any private individuals.