Exactly two weeks from today, Ghana will be celebrating the 69th anniversary of its independence from Great Britain in 1957.
But Ghana’s independence story goes much further back than 1957. It started in 1951, specifically, on 20th February, when Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP) swept into power under “limited self-government,” having won 34 of the 38 seats in the general election in a complex political arrangement that also seated many independents as well as representatives from various groups in the Legislative Assembly.
Today marks the 75th anniversary of that momentous occasion, which eventually resulted in full independence in 1957, accelerating or triggering other independence movements across Africa.
Dr Nkrumah became the “leader of government business,” a dubious title that belittled the significance of the moment and had to be replaced, after much protest by the CPP, with the more fitting title of “prime minister” in 1952.
With an additional portfolio of Minister of Development, he began the Herculean task of transforming an economy hollowed by centuries of external exploitation and primed for liberation and reconstruction.
Achievements
Thus began the prelude to Ghana’s full independence, a period characterised by some of the greatest achievements of Nkrumah in his 15 years in office (from 1951 to 1966), achievements that tend to get overshadowed by stories of independence that begin from 1957.
For example, a recent report on human capital development policies in Ghana started with educational policies after 1957, but the bigger story of education under Nkrumah in fact began in 1952, with his Accelerated Education Programme.
This programme made primary education free for the first time in the Gold Coast, to be followed by the Education Act of 1961, which made primary education compulsory.
And it wasn’t just access to education that increased; there was a boom in education infrastructure at all levels as well, among the most notable being Opoku Ware Secondary School (in collaboration with the Catholic Church) and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, which for decades had the only Olympic-size swimming pool in Ghana.
The famous Akosa Primary School at Suntreso, in Kumasi, was named after the father of the now-world-renowned pathologist, Prof Agyemang Badu Akosa, who was a CPP commissioner at Sekyere District in Ashanti.
The Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (or Gee, named after the contractors who built it) was also constructed in Kumasi in 1954, as was the Ashanti Regional Library at Bantama.
These and other major accomplishments in Ashanti disprove the charge later hurled against Nkrumah by his adversaries that he had squandered the cocoa wealth from Ashanti on other parts of the country to the neglect of Ashanti.
Indeed, Ashanti saw its fastest socio-economic development at any time during the tenure of Nkrumah, becoming a major beneficiary of the 600 factories that Nkrumah built across the country.
As a result of this record, Nkrumah also drew strong political support from Ashanti, with the CPP winning eight seats (compared to the National Liberation Movement’s 12) in the 1956 election, and sweeping 43 per cent of the total vote, despite a wave of violence against its supporters in the lead-up to the election.
The year 1952 also saw the first local government council elections, where the CPP won nearly 90 per cent of the 270 seats, laying the groundwork for the popular participation that would propel it to a massive victory again in the 1956 election that brought full independence to Ghana the following year, with the CPP sweeping 71 out of 104 seats.
While much has been written about Nkrumah’s Seven-Year Development Plan (1963-1970), very little is known of his first (five-year) development plan (1951 to 1956), during which the implementation of the ambitious Volta River Scheme, for example, led to the construction of Tema Township and the Tema Harbour; the Akosombo dam; the Volta Lake (the largest man-made lake in the world), and the Adomi Bridge, the first suspension bridge in the Gold Coast, whose construction began in 1955.
Big dreams
To power his ambitious programme of rapid industrialisation and economic transformation, Nkrumah also restructured the Industrial Development Corporation in 1955 from a small-loans-disbursing outfit hurriedly set up in the dying days of colonialism into a more proactive one with a mandate that included “the investigation, formulation and carrying out of projects for developing industries in the Gold Coast.”
Particular attention was paid to “industries which will make use of local materials”.
There were many challenges, of course.
Land disputes were, as they are now, a major obstacle to development, particularly the establishment of new industries.
This forced Nkrumah to propose “industrial estates” for “all firms which seek new premises or the use of public services,” according to the Industrial Development Committee Reports and Accounts of 1954-5.
The 1966 coup undid much of the success of the initiative.
Equally crucial at the time was the shortage of business capital and the skills in both the public and private sectors to drive industrialisation, leading Nkrumah in 1954 to issue a policy statement welcoming foreign direct investment on condition that it brought with it new and better ways for manufacturing (knowledge and technology transfer) as well as the training of Africans for technical and managerial positions.
These particular challenges eventually led to the establishment in 1961 of the Institute of Public Administration (known today as the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration, GIMPA) and, three years later, the National Productivity Institute (known today as the Management Development and Productivity Institute) under the National Planning Commission.
The first institute was to build the capacity of the public sector, while the second one aimed at boosting efficiency in the productive sector, including state-owned enterprises.
It was the beginning of a productivity revolution, a precondition for raising the living standards of Ghanaians, which defined the legacy of Nkrumah until his tragic overthrow.
The story of Ghana’s independence is meaningless unless it is linked to the total realisation of what happened before 1957.
Source:
www.myjoyonline.com