How Volta Dam came back to life - History Remembered

Komla Gbedemah (in pic with Nixon), finance minister under Nkrumah (1957-61), talking about how his trip to America in 1957 brought the Volta Dam back to life.

While in America, Gbedemah had stopped to buy two glasses of orange juice from an outlet of the Howard Johnson’s roadside restaurants in Delaware. Gbedemah:
“My secretary — an African-American — told me: ‘Minister, this looks like one of the places that are very sticky about colour’. I said what’s that? And the girl at the counter said, ‘I’m afraid you can’t drink here’. I said, what? She said ‘you can’t drink here’. I said, call me the manager.

“The manager of the restaurant came and told me: ‘Because of your colour, you can’t drink here’.
I told him: ‘The people here are of lower social status than I am but they can drink here, and we can’t. You can keep the orange juice and the change, but this is not the last you have heard of this.

“Next morning, it was headline news. It was world news. President Eisenhower called me to the White House the next morning for breakfast.

He asked, ‘what are you doing in America’. I said, ‘I am here to talk about the Volta Dam. ‘How is the dam?’, he asked. I said, ‘it is shelved because we can’t find the money.’ ‘Have you talked to the State Department?”, he asked. ‘No’, I said. He turned to Richard Nixon and said: ‘Dick, would you take care of it?’ That was how the Volta Dam came back to life.

Nkrumah seized the occasion. He wrote to Eisenhower asking for help in building the dam. Eisenhower invited him to visit America. At their meeting in March 1958, Eisenhower told Nkrumah that the best way of getting the scheme started again would be to involve American industry.

Eisenhower contacted Edgar Kaiser. He was head of one of the largest aluminium corporations in the world. Kaiser was based in Oakley, California. It had mines and smelting plants throughout the world. At Eisenhower’s request, Kaiser flew from California to meet Nkrumah in New York.

At the end of 1958, a team of Kaiser executives and engineers flew to Accra to look at the plans for the scheme. Welcoming them, Nkrumah offered the Kaiser team a deal. If they agreed to build an aluminium smelter in Ghana, his government will be able to raise the money for the dam. In return, the dam will supply large quantities of electricity needed by the plant, the rest will go to power the future industries of the new Ghana. To the Kaiser team, Ghana seemed an attractive prospect.