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“Defending the
indefensible,” Really?
E. Ablorh-Odjidja January 19, 2012.
In
the article “Defending the indefensible”, a writer
points out the most outrageous, illogical accusations
at Nkrumah and also at those who defend him.
Central to these accusations is this writer’s thoughts
on socialism. How socialism leads to the one-party
state system, the outcome of which are the extreme
economic ills and the pogroms of the world.
To
complete his thoughts, he conflates awkwardly all the
shades of socialist systems.
He says,
"Marxism, better known as communism, and
euphemistically called socialism, is the single worse
political and economic ideology that ever happened to
the world, and for that matter Africa."
Under
this writer’s magic penmanship, all the systems become
one. Not apparent in the alchemy he concocts are the
differences between the systems.
The fact is
socialism comes in different shades (structures within
governance), just like its counterpart, capitalism.
The western countries of Europe, for instance, are
descriptively more socialist in governance than the
United States.
But in Ghana, he says, one must
never mind the differences in types.
He says.
Ghana was heading toward the most virulent type of
socialism or communism, had the country not been
rescued from Nkrumah.
The catastrophe would
have peaked under Nkrumah in 1966, and then the severe
mass killings of citizens would have followed. It all
would have started after 1964, and then would have
been like Pol Pot’s Cambodia, where 1.5 to 2 million
people were slaughtered!
Not only is this
conclusion pure speculation, but it is also
nonsensical.
Socialism does not necessarily
lead to a pogrom. But who must tell this to a writer
who has the intention to make Nkrumah a mass murderer
by branding him as a socialist first?
But the
writer has not bothered to know very much about
Nkrumah. Unlike Pol Pot, Nkrumah was not even
recognized as a classic socialist. And by Nkrumah’s
description of himself, he was Nkrumaist. Given time
to read his peace, we soon find out that the writer is
a fabricator.
“Ghana did not experience
anything comparable to the killing field of Cambodia
or events behind the Iron Curtain, but ideas like the
intolerable one-party state is a pointer to what could
have happened if events had not changed,” he writes in
a prophetic tone and with certainty.
In other
words, Ghana would have gone straight to hell under
Nkrumah. And there would have been no cultural brakes
in Ghana to stop the ride, had Nkrumah stayed beyond
1966.
“How can anyone practice a system that
requires the killing and maiming of their people to
get to their promised land?” This writer asks.
How the writer gets to this situation of killings, as
it relates to Ghana, is a mystery. For, under the
Nkrumah's socialist regime, as he calls it, not a
single soul was ever executed. Rather, the killings
came after 1966 and under capitalist-inclined regimes!
Intentionally, this writer fails not to note the
brutalities that came after Nkrumah.
Rather, he
manages in his mind to pull in brutalities that
happened in far-off places under other socialist or
communistic regimes that had nothing in common with
what happened in Nkrumah’s Ghana.
He
deliberately lies about Nkrumah but gets worried when
others defend him.
As for the genocide Nkrumah
would have brought to Ghana should we ask first what
other genocides there were in Africa?
For
instance, what was the politics of the genocide
perpetrators of Rwanda, a country much closer
geographically to Ghana than Pol Pot’s Cambodia?
At this point, we must infer that this writer,
with this piece of writing, has little understanding
of what genocide is, and why it happens.
A Yale
University program that studies genocide has this to
say about the subject:
“As in the Ottoman
Empire during the Armenian genocide, in Nazi Germany,
and more recently in East Timor, Guatemala,
Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, the Khmer Rouge regime headed
by Pol Pot combined extremist ideology with ethnic
animosity.”
I invite the writer to disagree
with Yale University’s understanding of the subject of
genocide and to point out where the ethnic animosity
was in Ghana before 1966.
The simple truth is,
under no other regime has Ghana ever been so uniformly
nationalistic than during Nkrumah’s period. Under
Nkrumah, Ghana gets its first experience of the
nation-state.
Tribalism, the engine of “ethnic
animosity” was mostly absent during Nkrumah’s era.
There were profound political acts, driven by tribal
passions, that ultimately could have led to serious
civil strife before Nkrumah.
There were
intense political rivalries before independence,
between the CPP and opposing parties, that did not
result in genocide like what happened in Rwanda.
Nkrumah quelled those passions.
But all
this writer has in his head are these unbelievable
misconceptions about the motives that drove Nkrumah's
policies.
Nkrumah’s policies were driven by
Pan-Africanism (black nationalism) and
anti-neocolonialism ideals.
But more
preposterous is this writer’s assertion that there is
ultimately the risk of that much evil had the
one-party state continued after that Nkrumah. And
wonder if he knew anything about Ghana’s history. On
the Gold Coast rule under the British, in essence, was
such a one-party rule. Sorry, we missed the ethnic
cleansing because the white man was in charge!
The writer crowds his writing with names like Karl
Max, Robespierre, Rousseau, and others, thinking to
point out failures within the socialist political
system. But by pointing to the experiences of
Robespierre and the French Revolution, he misses his
conceptual framework by more than a mile.
Before the French Revolution, there had been the
American Revolution. Both were more about the struggle
for liberty, rather than the imposition of socialism
on a society.
And the key to both these two
historic was the thoughts of John Locke, a classic
liberal, but not necessarily a socialist.
The
ideas of Locke, just like Nkrumah's, have nothing to
do with Pol Pot and his genocide, other than the fact
that together they contribute to our basic
understandings of the human franchise.
Socialism, ultimately, will not be the preferred form
of governance in Ghana for me. But as part of a
process to liberate a country from the colonial grip
of the time, it was the ideal instrument to use.
Nkrumah, probably, was motivated by the same idea
of using socialism as a tool for liberation.
So, in the 60s in Ghana, socialism became the tone of
the experiment of the new state; a) to build new
institutions, b) to form a foundational base for the
indigenous entrepreneurial class, c) inculcate
discipline for self-rule for effective governance of a
new nation.
Unfortunately, it was the 1966
coup, the event this writer wants to uphold as the
glorious moment that aborted the experiment. And with
this coup, we lost the momentum to build an effective,
developed nation-state; as India did.
Nkrumah
was not a classic socialist. Socialism for him was a
bulwark against neo-colonialism. His policies were not
far from that preached by leading developmental
economists of his time.
Writing about
Nkrumah's era, Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw
state in the book “Commanding Heights” that “Nkrumah’s
“rejection of capitalism did not signify his adoption
of scientific socialism.”
He said, Nkrumah
“considered (scientific socialism) unacceptable for
Africa in its ‘pure form” and he (Nkrumah) argued that
it had to be adapted to specifically African
conditions.”
We can argue about how much
Nkrumah's brand of socialism impaired Ghana's economic
development. But to insist that two years of one-party
socialist state rule under Nkrumah in Ghana could have
led to a Cambodia-style pogrom is irrational.
Eleven years of brutal military dictatorship under
Rawlings in Ghana did not lead to a pogrom.
Comparatively, Felix Houphouet-Boigny’s capitalist and
dictatorial rule in the Ivory Coast, which led to a
bloody civil war after his death does not raise
genocidal concerns in this writer's mind.
He
seems to prefer Houphouet-Boigny’s heavy-handed rule
in the Ivory Coast; a preference that betrays this
writer’s bias against Nkrumah.
“The cult of
Nkrumah will forever remain as long as there is a
nation called Ghana. The position he occupies in
Ghanaian political history cannot be wrestled away
from him. Nobody can deny the fact that he had the
interest of the nation at heart…" he writes.
But the last sentence of the commendation is not
intended.
"We have to celebrate him as a leader
who selflessly fought for our independence, and not
retrogressively tries to keep his name alive by
implementing his dead economic and social policies.”
The writer concludes.
There you have it, "not
retrogressively keep his name alive..." But one is
allowed to tarnish retroactively Nkrumah’s reputation
by creating a false equivalency between his system and
that of Pol Pot - thus to arrive at the final mission
of the search to destroy Nkrumah’s legacy.
E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Publisher
www.ghanadot.com, Washington, DC, January 19, 2012.
Permission to publish: Please feel free to publish or
reproduce, with credits, unedited. If posted on a
website, email a copy of the web page to
publisher@ghanadot.com. Or don't publish at all.
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