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BY ABENA OSEGU BOATENG
Presidential ignorance can be extremely dangerous given the fact that the President of Ghana is the country’s Chief Executive. He or she superintends over the Ghana Armed Forces, the Police Service, the public and civil services and many other institutions of state.
Indeed, to some extent, the destiny of Ghana is in the hands of the President who makes important decisions about how national wealth should be produced and used. The exercise of partial judicial powers even enables a president to play God by deciding who should live or die.
It is the role of the President in national affairs which makes the extravagant display of ignorance by former President John Agyekum Kufuor, all the more troubling.
He is quoted as saying that the Nkrumah government “zoomed” into industrialization without a plan.
He said “when we gained independence, we just zoomed into industrialization. So we started building factories. If your memory serves you right, in the first Republic there were several factories scattered across. That involved a lot of money. The money which was at the Bank of Ghana. That time we were 6 million people in Ghana and the reserves comparing it to now would have been billions because in 1957, it was about 450 million dollars.
“Comparatively, countries that are now being used as examples of developing countries like Korea, China and others could not be compared to us at all. Just four years after independence and even before Ghana’s population got to ten million people, all the reserves were gone.
“This is because we were running, we wanted to build factories. Shoe factory, leather factory. We didn’t take our time to plan and also make the treasury gain some interest in it. We just started chopping the capital. You don’t chop your capital. That is why the economy collapsed.”
What a ton of ignorance to release in just one encounter?
First, Mr. Kufuor fails to realise that Ghana gained its Republican status on July 1, 1960 and has remained a republic since then. Ghana’s republican status has never been lost and glib references to second, third and fourth republics can only amount to a bold display of ignorance. The constant reference to other republics is a deliberate attempt to devalue the republican status fought for and gained under the leadership of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nrumah and the Convention Peoples Party (CPP).
As for his claim that the British colonialist left a lot of money in the coffers of the Gold Coast at the time of independence, the Socialist Forum of Ghana (SFG) has adequately dealt with it. In a booklet authored by the SFG and titled “Fight back: A Response to Anti-Nkrumah Provocations’, the SFG writes “All kinds of figures have been bandied about the amount of money the British left Ghana in 1957. In fact, what the ‘Mate-Me-Ho’ people described as huge monies left by the British were, first the accumulation of cocoa surplus known as Cocoa Marketing Board Sterling reserves, and second, export duties on cocoa also known Ghana Government holdings in sterling securities.
“Thus, at the time of independence, these were the two reserves held by Ghana at the Bank of England, which were very often used by Britain to support the pounds sterling in times of financial crisis. Nkrumah did not touch these foreign reserves until 1960.
“The finances of the first Development Plan (1951-1956) costing £93.3 million, came from cocoa and internally generated resources, such as indirect taxes and duties. The second Development Plan (1954-1964) was financed from the free reserves of £G50m from Government holdings in sterling securities, £G25m from Cocoa Marketing Board sterling reserves and £15m from internal revenue, totaling £G90m. The balance of £G260m came from foreign resources and deficit financing”.
In a treatise on the agrarian basis of the post-colonial state for the period 1951-78, Bjorn Beckman (Judith Heyer, Pepe Roberts and Edwin Williams (eds), Rural Development in Tropical Africa, 1981) points out that Nkrumah relied initially on reserves and later on foreign and local borrowing, including monetary expansion.
It is most worrying that having become President of Ghana, Mr. John Agyekum Kufuor does not know of the two, five and seven-year development plans which were the frameworks within which Nkrumah’s industrialization programme was executed. He is also completely ignorant of the Arthur Lewis Plan which was formulated immediately after independence.
Mr. Kufuor’s insistence that the development projects initiated by the Nkrumah government should have been slowed down is consistent with the Danquah-Busia plea to the colonialists not to grant the Gold Coast independence too quickly because we still had a lot to learn from them.
The industrialization programme launched by the Nkrumah government was primarily aimed at delinking the Ghanaian national economy from the colonial metropolis. It needed to be accelerated because at independence Ghana was virtually dependent on Britain for all her needs including clothing, food, industrial goods and transport. Independence could not be meaningful if this level of dependence was not brought to a speedy end.
The 400 or more factories established by the Nkrumah were an important part of the effort to meet the material needs of the people of Ghana and to consolidate national independence. Ghana is now in the grips of poverty and dependence because people like Kufuor and his Danquah-Busia tradition sold off the factories to multi-national corporations from the colonial metropolis and their cronies and abandoned those they could not sell cheaply.
Ignorant people like John Agyekum Kufuor should never be allowed anywhere near power again because they will destroy Ghana with their monumental ignorance.