Kwesi Pratt urges deeper African integration, industrialisation and economic sovereignty as Nkrumah’s 117th birthday is marked
Keypoints:
- Pratt renews case for deeper African unity
- US records confirm advance coup knowledge
- Industrialisation seen as key to sovereignty
AFRICA’S political and economic fragmentation remains a major obstacle to genuine sovereignty, veteran Ghanaian journalist and political commentator Kwesi Pratt Jnr has argued, renewing Kwame Nkrumah’s case for deeper continental integration, industrialisation and greater African control over strategic resources.
Pratt made the case during the concluding session of the 15th Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Lectures at the University of Cape Coast on Friday, September 18. The two-day event formed part of activities commemorating Nkrumah, whose 117th birthday falls on September 21. UCC’s memorial lecture series, instituted in the 1970s, focuses on political, economic and social questions affecting Africa and the Black world.
The university also conferred an honorary Doctor of Letters on Pratt during Friday’s special congregation in recognition of his contributions to journalism, public discourse and pan-African thought.
The anniversary gives added resonance to Pratt’s central argument: that Nkrumah saw Ghana’s independence, African unity and economic sovereignty not as separate causes but as parts of the same unfinished project.
Unity as strategy
‘Pan-Africanism was not an additional feature of Nkrumah’s politics,’ Pratt said. ‘It was at the centre of his worldview.’
He traced that outlook to Nkrumah’s political formation in the United States and Britain, his engagement with Black intellectual and anti-colonial movements and his participation in the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945.
Pratt argued that those experiences helped convince Nkrumah that Ghana’s independence could never be secure while large parts of Africa remained under colonial rule.
After independence in 1957, Accra became an important centre for African liberation movements and hosted both the Conference of Independent African States and the All-African Peoples’ Conference in 1958.
Pratt said Nkrumah later pressed for a much stronger form of continental integration than emerged with the creation of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963. His proposals included common approaches to defence, foreign policy, economic planning and continental infrastructure.
But the idea was contested. African leaders including Julius Nyerere, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and Léopold Sédar Senghor favoured a more gradual model based on cooperation between sovereign states.
Pratt acknowledged concerns that an immediate continental government could weaken newly won national sovereignty or create problems of democratic accountability and political diversity.
The underlying debate remains current. UCC Chancellor Sam Jonah has similarly argued for deeper strategic and economic cooperation among African states as geopolitical and economic competition intensifies. In an earlier Africa Briefing commentary, Jonah urged African governments to strengthen continental coordination and bargaining power.
Fragmentation and economic weakness
For Pratt, the continuing relevance of Nkrumah’s argument lies in the persistence of Africa’s economic fragmentation.
‘Nkrumah’s pan-Africanism was economic and strategic, not sentimental,’ he said.
Pratt pointed to African states exporting similar raw materials, competing among themselves for foreign investment and importing manufactured products carrying far greater value.
‘Continental unity was therefore not a decorative addition to development,’ he said. ‘It was the scale on which development, non-alignment and defence could become effective.’
He argued that acting separately leaves individual African economies with weaker bargaining power when dealing with large states, multinational corporations and international financial institutions.
The challenge is also evident in Africa’s continuing struggle to translate growing regional trade into stronger manufacturing. Africa Briefing has examined how intra-African trade is expanding while industrial capacity continues to lag.
1966 coup revisited
Pratt also returned to the February 24, 1966 overthrow of Nkrumah, arguing that it should be examined within the wider Cold War struggle over Ghana’s political direction.
‘The overthrow must be examined from both domestic and international perspectives,’ Pratt said. ‘It did not occur outside the Cold War.’
Declassified US records establish that American officials knew about coup plotting by senior Ghanaian military and police figures well before Nkrumah was overthrown.
A May 1965 memorandum by US National Security Council official Robert Komer said key military and police figures were planning a coup and that ‘the plotters are keeping us briefed’. CIA reporting continued to track coup preparations, including intelligence received on February 23, 1966, the day before Nkrumah was removed.
The records also show that senior US officials viewed the outcome favourably. Weeks after the coup, Komer described Nkrumah’s overthrow as a ‘fortuitous windfall’ and urged Washington to consolidate the opportunity presented by the new government.
However, the US State Department’s published historical summary says the archival record establishes advance American knowledge of coup plots but does not establish that the US government directly carried them out.
Pratt advanced the stronger argument that the CIA played a direct role, citing former intelligence officer John Stockwell. That allegation goes beyond what the published official US documentary record conclusively establishes.
Pratt said the coup’s consequences extended beyond Nkrumah’s removal, weakening Ghana’s development programme, shifting its foreign-policy orientation and reducing Accra’s role as a centre for African liberation movements.
Africa Briefing has separately reported on evidence of Britain’s covert propaganda campaign against Nkrumah’s government during the Cold War period.
‘Africa must produce what it trades’
Pratt said Nkrumah’s relevance should ultimately be judged by whether the structural problems he identified have disappeared.
He pointed to continuing dependence on raw commodity exports, unemployment, debt, import dependence and foreign-exchange pressures. The University of Cape Coast’s account of the lecture similarly highlighted Pratt’s call for industrialisation, value addition and greater economic self-reliance.
While describing the African Continental Free Trade Area as important, Pratt warned that removing trade barriers would not by itself transform African economies.
‘Africa must produce what it trades,’ he said.
He called for stronger transport networks, common standards, industrial value chains, digital infrastructure and African-controlled financial institutions.
‘A larger market without production can simply become a larger market for goods made elsewhere,’ Pratt said.
Technology and the next phase
Pratt also urged Africa to move beyond being primarily a consumer of technologies developed elsewhere.
The continent, he said, should build its own capabilities in artificial intelligence, renewable energy, biotechnology and the digital economy.
At the national level, he called for long-term development planning in Ghana that extends beyond electoral cycles and gives priority to industrialisation, education, energy, agriculture, healthcare, technology and infrastructure.
He also argued that Ghana’s gold, cocoa, lithium, bauxite, oil, gas and agricultural products should support domestic value chains, scientific research, manufacturing and skilled employment rather than being exported mainly as raw commodities.
An unfinished project
Pratt concluded that Nkrumah’s legacy should not be measured merely through monuments and anniversary commemorations but against Africa’s continuing struggles over industrialisation, economic sovereignty and continental integration.
‘The Nkrumaist future will not emerge through nostalgia,’ he said. ‘It must be studied. It must be democratised. It must be modernised. It must be organised.’
His argument carries particular resonance on the 117th anniversary of Nkrumah’s birth: political independence, in Pratt’s analysis, cannot by itself deliver full sovereignty where economies remain heavily dependent on raw-material exports, external capital and fragmented markets.
The question he leaves for a new generation is therefore not whether Africa should recreate Nkrumah’s programme of the 1960s, but how far its underlying emphasis on productive capacity, African agency and continental scale can be adapted to today’s economic and technological realities.