The Deadly Sins Of Kwame Nkrumah

By Dr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo

Below is a brilliant response Prof. Asare (a.k.a. Kwaku Azar) gave as far back as in 2006 to two authors who were trying to justify the Preventive Detention Act that gave Ghana’s first President Dr. Kwame Nkrumah untrammeled power to jail his opponents without trial:

“Soon after winning the 1951 elections, Nkrumah outlawed the UGCC. His motto was CPP is Ghana and Ghana is CPP. He set out with his “CiPPification” agenda which entailed going after leading opposition members. It was Nkrumah's outlawing of a nationalist party after the 1951 elections that led to the mushrooming of regional parties, such as the NPP (Northern People's party).
Nkrumah's urge to control was not directed at the opposition only. He devoured his own Party members who had the chutzpah to dissent. The Ga incident which probably was the immediate excuse for the PDA must be recounted here. The Ga community's resolution in 1956 complaining that dissent was not allowed in the CPP and that the Party had marginalized them was revived on a grand scale in July of 1957. At a rally attended by Nii Amunakwa II and Nai Wulomo, the Osagyefo was publicly denounced, something unheard of in the CPP.

To make matters interesting, the Tokyo Joes (Ga wing of the Veranda boys) decided to continue with the denunciation and to do so while Osagyefo returned from a trip from the Commonwealth of Nations. They gathered at a number of points at the Castle carrying placards, many of which read "Welcome Mr. Dictator." It was because of this rebellion that ultimately explains the “PDAfication” of Coffie Crabbe, Tawia Adamafio, Dzenkle Dzewu, Ako Adjei, etc., not the phony charges that were usually attached to the PDA.
Friends, when Nkrumah was jailed in the early 1950s, it was his friend Komla Gbedemah who ran the CPP and led the CPP to victory in 1951. At various times, Gbedemah was in charge of propaganda, Evening Times, Finance, etc. Gbedemah was the brain in CPP. What happened to him? In 1961, Gbedemah had seen enough of this destruction of political allies. Nkrumah had introduced a bill to create a Special Court whose decision will be beyond appeal. Speaking strongly against this bill, Gbedemah lamented how the PDA had been used as an instrument to foul the political landscape and how too many innocent people were languishing in jail. The PDA enforcers went after him, but Gbedemah had arranged with Mark Cofie to drive him out of the country. Afro Gbede too became a victim.
What happened when Nkrumah prosecuted his CPP friends for trying to bomb him? Nkrumah's intelligence revealed that Kulungugu was the work of the extreme leftist group in the CPP. He held Tawia Adamafio, Coffie Crabbe and Ako Adjei responsible for the plot. These three were prosecuted but found not guilty, leading Nkrumah to fire Sir Arku Korsah, then Chief Justice. Nkrumah was later to declare the Court's judgment null and void after Parliament had quickly amended the Criminal Procedure Act in December to empower him to quash Court's decision retroactively and prospectively.

My friends, anybody who can think at all understands that in our country, the State has immense powers and can quickly use the Police and Judicial process to deal with so-called bad behavior. If Nkrumah had evidence against traitors, he could have gone to Court, rather than convert himself into an accuser, prosecutor and judge. Why did Nkrumah not go to Court? Simple. The Courts are not some arena for settling political differences. You need facts and evidence before you can rob a man of his rights. The evidence against Antor and Ayeke and Amponsah were as laughable as the argument of those trying to defend the PDA. None of those cases could withstand judicial scrutiny! And if Nkrumah could not get the Courts to detain his enemies, then he himself would, hence the PDA.
Friends, let us stop our hero-worshipping. Nkrumah was brilliant in his fight for independence (although if the British had used a PDA, he'd probably not accomplish much). But like many African leaders then, he thought Ghana was his property after he had won independence for the country. That was sadly untrue and that was to explain his PDA, one -party State, life-president etc. and ultimately the 24th February 1966 coup that toppled him.
It is sad that we continue to justify PDA, something Gbedemah and many of Nkrumah's ardent followers rejected as far back as in the early 1960s. Let us remember that independence was not won by Nkrumah alone. It was a process that started as far back as the 19th century with the work of Casely Hayford, Mensah Sarbah, Paa Grant and others. This work was to be continued by Danquah, Awoonor Williams, Obetsebi Lamptey, Ofori Atta and Kwame Nkrumah. One person had to be President at Independence but that one person did not become God, Osagyefo, the Fountain of Honor or any of that stuff that afflicts megalomaniacal leaders.”
The above excerpt capsules Nkrumah’s propensity for dictatorship right from the early days of independence until his eventual overthrow on February 24, 1966. The man entered the corridors of power with the sole purpose of perpetuating his rule. We are willing to accept the hackneyed notion that Kwame Nkrumah was a visionary extraordinary whose genius dwarfs all the leaders after him. We can even justify his industrial and infrastructural development of the country one way or the other. We can finally grant that he is the best leader Ghana has ever had. However, those ready to make him a supreme god and fountain of honor should note the following:The Great Leader built what was then the largest prison in Africa not to accommodate criminals but to imprison his political opponents. The Redeemer declared the nation a one-party state with himself as life President, taking the sovereignty from the people and leaving just men with no alternative for a peaceful change of government except through his violent overthrow. In these and many other state actions, freedom of speech became anathema to the Ghanaian populace, and the court system which was initially seen as the guardian of the people’s rights came under siege when the Chief Justice was fired for failing to return a verdict favorable to the Great Redeemer. Nkrumah took away the natural right of habeas corpus by causing to be enacted the Preventive Detention Act (PDA), the power to imprison his political opponents without trial. He banned all competing political parties and declared Ghana a one-party state. He created a personality cult by putting his effigy on Ghana's currency and establishing brain-washing institutions whose residual effects are still found in some of our scholars of today. He neglected the business of the state in pursuit of his over-weaning ambition to rule Africa and to turn it into a communistic dictatorship which he had already begun to experiment in Ghana. He banned freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of the press and all other freedoms to which a proud and democratic people are justly entitled.
For these deadly sins, Nkrumah deserved to be overthrown because freedom and justice are fundamental and inherent rights of all humankind, and no known achievement will ever trump these rights. Indeed, the 1966 coup goes down in history as the most justified and justifiable. After this coup, there was no need for any other coup. While Nkrumah may well be the best leader Ghana ever had because of his unique place in our history, he is also the worst dictator Ghana ever had because of the untrammeled power he exercised over the people. Academic dunderheads may choose to apotheosize the man without mentioning his faults, but they neither educate nor fool anybody as their bias is treated with contempt by the intellectually insightful. For those daily assailed by the rebel passion to worship something, Nkrumah may be a perfect idol forever inhabiting their heads. After all, he made sure to screw up their brains for all time. But to some of us, the man epitomizes our political tragedy since he is so unsurpassable in his dictatorial tendencies.
Sovereignty resides in the people. This simply means that governments derive their legitimate powers from the governed; and therefore any government that does not show a clear and unimpeachable commitment to the protection of the inalienable rights of the people must be overthrown. The prefatory to Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence states in paraphrastic terms that all peoples have the inherent right to establish their forms of government, and that whenever governments so subvert the interest of the people for their own selfish ends, it is the right and responsibility of the people to replace the government with a more suitable form. Our own Ghana National Anthem says in part, "And help us to resist oppressors’ rule with all our will and might forever more..." It should not suffice that a people have food, infrastructure, comfort and security; they should also have a voice in their government and the ability to hold their leaders accountable. Furthermore, they should be governed by laws of their choice and have access to due process for the assertion of their rights or the deprivation thereof. That is what true freedom and justice is all about. If at any time, the government fails to institute freedom and justice for its people; to guarantee their right to the suffrage, their rights to free speech, to association, to the due process of law, and their right to validly and peaceably change their government, the leadership becomes fair game to the popular wrath of the people. And in asserting their sovereign rights to overthrow the government, no method is too improper nor action too dangerous! Kwame Nkrumah himself spoke for this popular proposition when he caused to be inscribed on the insignia of our nation the eternal words “Freedom and Justice”.
There are those who point to the turbulence of the times as an excuse for Nkrumah’s imposition of Marshal laws on the country, forgetting that those who choose security over liberty will have neither security nor liberty. To analogize this saying in our own traditional wisdom, the woman who sacrifices her happiness to endure a bad marriage due to the welfare of her children will lose both the welfare of her children and her own happiness. In short, the best government in the world is no substitute to the inalienable right of a people to be governed by a government of their own choosing in the context of their substantive and inalienable rights and freedoms.
Nkrumah’s leadership was a popular one whose proclaimed aim was to free the people from the yoke of a tyrannical colonial leadership. But over time, it took on the trappings of tyranny far worse than the colonial government which it replaced. There were imprisonment without trial, abridgment of the people’s rights to the freedoms of association, of speech and of worship….. There was neither a proper justice system nor any due process for the assertion of rights and the redress of grievance. We will concede that the people had food and clothing and shelter. We will even grant that they had every conceivable material thing for their satisfaction and that they lived in the utopia of perpetual fulfillment ……Will such material fulfillment take away the people’s inalienable right to self-determination and shut off their power to overthrow their yoke of oppression? The answer is a big no! And help us to resist the oppressor’s rule with ALL our WILL and MIGHT forever more..." “We prefer self-government with danger…..” These two statements capture the perpetual right of a people to be truly free and foreclose the morbid proposition that a tyrant can shortchange the inalienable right of the people by supplying all their physical and infrastructural needs. True freedom is ethereal and must necessarily trump every material need. Yet this is not by any means to aver that freedom is exclusive of material satisfaction; far from this. Total freedom embodies both the ethereal and the material, but implanted in the spirit of man is the instinct of his freedom, and the lessons of history teach us that freedom cannot be sacrificed on the altar of material acquisition.
What freedom was Nkrumah gallivanting on the continent and babbling about when the people’s rights at home were shortchanged to protect the personal aggrandizement of this notorious leader? When Nkrumah met other African leaders to demand in sonorous terms the total liberation of the African continent, exactly what did he mean? Freedom to kill, maim, imprison and persecute the African people? Freedom from accountability? Freedom for the unbridled expression of his perverted aggrandizement on a continental scale?
I repeat that the 1966 coup goes down in history as the most justified and justifiable coup d’etat. After this coup, there was no need for any other coup.

Samuel Adjei Sarfo, Doctor of Law, is a general legal practitioner in Austin, Texas. You can email him at sarfoadjei@yahoo.com.