"The coup in Ghana is another example of fortuitous windfall. Nkrumah was doing more to undermine our interests than any other black African. In reaction to his strongly pro-communist leanings, the new military regime is almost pathetically pro-Western."
- Robert W. Komer.
The quotation above is an excerpt from a letter written to U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, on March 12, 1966 (declassified Johnson Library State Department NSC file Africa document 260), by Robert W. Komer, of the U.S. National Security Council.
It sums up succinctly, the importance the Western powers attached to the removal from power, of President Nkrumah - and the contempt in which those selfsame Western powers held the quislings that they recruited locally and used to attain the ends that they sought in Africa: unimpeded access to the continent's natural resources and markets.
In linking Nkrumah's name with communism, Kromer was repeating a falsehood used by his political opponents, in the propaganda war against President Nkrumah.
Nkrumah was a pragmatist, not an ideologue. He was genuinely non-aligned. He had written to U.S. presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson that he was building a mixed-economy in Ghana and welcomed genuine private investors.
Nkrumah was far ahead of his time in many ways. His economic development model is what has powered China's economy and turned it into an economic superpower.
Alas, today, fifty years after Nkrumah's overthrow in 1966, Ghana has become a dream neocolonialist profit-centre, for foreign commercial interests - from which flow vast sums in repartriated profits and evaded taxes amounting to billions of dollars annually.
In the meantime, as the billions of dollars flow out of the country, the nation struggles to stay afloat financially - and there is great hardship amongst ordinary people as their vampire-elites allow Mother Ghana to be milked dry by sundry vested interests.
Yet, Nkrumah's goal, was the eradication of poverty in Ghana - and the transformation of the nation into a prosperous and industrialised society: by utilising our nation's natural resources in an import-substitution industrialisation drive.
If his government's development plans had been implemented fully, today, Ghana would be an industrial powerhouse, exporting manufactured goods across sub-Saharan Africa.
And its well-educated citizens would be enjoying high living standards - and the world would be referring to Ghana as an African equivalent of the egalitarian societies of Scandinavia.
It is still not too late to achieve that goal. That is why our present-day leaders must learn from the win-win agreements that President Nkrumah's regime signed with foreign investors - so that some of the profits from such investments are retained in the country: and used to develop Ghana with.
The agreement that led to the building of the oil refinery at Tema is a classic example of the beneficial agreements that President Nkrumah's government negotiated and signed with well-intentioned foreign investors. All the political parties in Ghana ought to study it carefully - and learn from its positive impact on the national economy.
No foreign company must be allowed to bid for government contracts if it does not have Ghanaian partners.
And when foreign companies and their Ghanaian partners win government contracts here, politicians must not see such contracts as opportunities for their cronies in the Ghanaian business world to grow super-rich, at the expense of Mother Ghana and ordinary people.
By allowing the outsourcing of the recruitment of labour for the Brazilian companies building the interchanges in Accra and Kasoa, for example, our current leaders have allowed some Ghanaian workers to be exploited unecessarily by privately-owned human resource companies. Nkrumah would never have allowed that to happen.
Our ruling elites must rather ensure that all the Ghanaian workers that such companies employ, are paid well and enjoy all their full benefits - such as social security contributions, paid sick leave, overtime allowances and paid holidays.
Such contracts are opportunities to lift unemployed people from poverty - and ought to be seen as such by all Ghanaian politicians.
Nkrumah believed in the power of science and technology to transform Ghana's economy. Present-day politicians in Ghana must do more to encourage the teaching of science, maths and ICT in Ghana's educational institutions.
Coding, for example, ought to be taught from primary school to tertiary level in Ghana - to equip young people in our country with the skills needed for jobs in tomorrow's technology sector.
That is a goal that all the members of our political class must aim for and plan for. It is just the sort of national goal Nkrumah would have set for Ghana if he was alive and in power today.
The destruction of our natural heritage is something that Nkrumah would never have tolerated - as it has a direct bearing on the quality of life of millions of ordinary people across the country.
The egregious environmental destruction going on across the country today, is a result of the lack of discipline amongst our people, and the growing lawlessness in a democratic nation, in which the rule of law is said to prevail.
We will not make any progress as long as we remain a lawless and indisciplined people.
Neither will we make any progress if in the name of cultural pride we continue to tolerate the violence resulting from the actions and inactions of elements amongst today's progeny of the beneficiaries of the pre-colonial feudal system.
Our system must be underpinned by meritocracy - not held back by superstition-ridden dark-ages-feudalism (with its Antoa-Nyame pure nonsense on bamboo stilts) responsible for much of the rancour and divisiveness in Ghanaian society.
Nkrumah would never have tolerated lawlessness and indiscipline - especially the illegal logging, illegal sand-winning and illegal gold mining that is denuding our forests and poisoning soils, streams, rivers, groundwater and other water bodies, across vast swathes of the Ghanaian countryside.
Neither would President Nkrumah have sold out to foreign interests by allowing Ghana's food sovereignty to be ceded to foreign companies such as Monsanto. Today's politicians ought to be more protective of our nation's food security.
Above all, let today's politicians learn from President Nkrumah's selflessness and patriotism, in protecting the national interest at all material times, and promoting the welfare of all Ghanaians in all the policies implemented by his government.
President Nkrumah had his faults, but on balance, he was a truly great leader - and our country was fortunate to have a detribalised pan-Africanist, as its first prime minister after independence in 1957, and as its first executive president, when Ghana became a republic in 1961.
Championing the cause of ordinary people, as opposed to furthering the interests of the progeny of the pre-colonial feudal ruling elites, placed Nkrumah firmly on the right side of history - and is the reason why amongst all his peers in the struggle against the British colonial occupiers of our country, it is he, not his political opponents, who is in the Pantheon of 20th century greats.
It is no accident that in the eyes of the vast majority of members of the black race, Nkrumah is regarded as a pan-Africanist hero, and dedicated nationalist leader, who dwarfed his contemporaries - and that will be the case till the very end of time: because it is the plain truth. And no amount of revisionism by ill-motivated propagandists will change that. Ever.
President Nkrumah came to serve his people - not to enrich himself. Neither did he seek to use his position to turn his family members into zillionaires, nor did he ever manipulate the system in order to send his cronies' net worth into stratospheric heights: in return for kickbacks from them.
Today's Ghanaian politicians must follow his example of selfless and honest leadership. He was a true patriot and nationalist - who despised narrow-minded tribalism: and sought instead to unite Ghanaians as one people with a common destiny. Members of our political class would be wise to emulate that too.
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