African Development for the Completely Bloody Ignorant

You won’t have missed all the fuss in the media a few weeks ago about the fiftieth anniversary of the independence of Ghana.

Following on from our recent dash through African history since independence, I thought it would be a good time to focus briefly on Ghana for a slightly more detailed look. Ghana was not only the first African country to achieve independence from colonialism, but in many way encapsulates the journey many African states have gone through since the end of the colonial period: the euphoria of independence, centred around a charismatic leader; the struggle to establish a functioning independent state, often along socialist principles; the transition of beloved leaders into unpopular tyrants; coup and military rule; and finally the hard transition to democracy.

Ghana’s 50th anniversary celebrations were criticised by some for their lavishness and expense. What is clear, though, is that while celebrating independence, African leaders are more prepared than ever to acknowledge the mistakes of the past and less likely to accuse critics of imperialism. This speech by Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo at the Ghanaian celebrations is a good example.

Ghana’s independence on March 6th 1957 and Kwame Nkrumah’s steadfast commitment had by the mid 1960s heralded independence for over eighty per cent of the countries of Africa. This was a period of great expectations and exciting possibilities for the continent. Fifty years on, one cannot help but ask: where did Africa go wrong? At what point did Nkrumah’s lofty dream begin to dissipate? Until the relatively recent emergence of the more pro-active African Union (AU), all the promise of stability, security, and prosperity which political independence held for us had all but fizzled out. … It is very critical that we avert our minds to properly understanding and appreciating the mistakes of the past so that we do not condemn our collective posterity to repeating the vicious cycle that only perpetuates underdevelopment, poverty, and instability.

How did Ghana’s dreams of independence fare, and what can we learn from its experience?

Kwame Nkrumah, the activist who led Ghana to independence, had a famous saying, adapted from the Bible: “Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all else shall be added onto you.” With independence, the hardest part of the struggle was surely over. Sadly not. Within nine years, Nkrumah was to be removed in a violent coup.

Like many African leaders, Nkrumah set the freshly independent Ghana on a path of socialism. His plan was to quickly industrialise the economy under state control. Massive infrastructure projects, notably the mammoth Akosombo Dam, were begun, with the support of the UK and US governments and the World Bank. But such projects proved ruinously expensive, and many were not completed. Although the dam was to prove highly effective, the majority of its electricity has always gone to foreign companies, as a result of the conditions Nkrumah agreed to to get it built. And its construction was financed with massive borrowing. In addition, Nkrumah placed punitive tax rates on the country’s one thriving industry, cocoa export. Ghana’s economy slid into freefall.

What’s more, Nkrumah’s rule quickly changed in character. Nkrumah had begun his regime as a popular hero, known as ‘Osagyefo’ or ‘victorious leader’ Within months, however, opposition to his regime began to develop, as is natural. In response, Nkrumah convinced parliament to pass the Preventative Detention Act, giving the government the right to imprison without trial those suspected of plots against the state. In practice, hundreds of political opponents were imprisoned. By 1964, Nkrumah managed to transform Ghana into a one-party state, and declared himself Life President. In 1966, days after the opening of his prized dam, while Nkrumah was out of the country visiting Viet Nam, the military seized power in a coup that may have been supported by the CIA, alarmed at Ghana’s drift towards the Soviet Union. Nkrumah spent the rest of his life in exile.

So began over ten years of political instability. Elections in 1969 heralded a return to civilian government, but from the beginning it struggled with massive inflation problems. Growing discontent culminated in another military coup in 1972. Military rule proved as prone to corruption and confusion as civilian rule had, and further coups followed. In 1979, Fl Lt. Jerry John Rawlings, a young Air Force officer, became leader of the military government and engineered new elections. However, after two more years of economic decline, Rawlings seized power again in 1981 - and stayed for 19 years.

Rawlings is emblematic of the “big men” who dominated African politics for decades after independence. Just 32 years old when he first took power, half-Scottish Rawlings had trained with the RAF before joining the Ghanaian air force. Like many of Africa’s longest-standing leaders, Rawlings was an accidental ruler. His initial rebellion was aimed primarily at securing better conditions for junior military officers. Once he found himself in power, he executed several senior officers before handing power over to civilians. His regime in the 1980s was marked by human rights abuses, tribal nepotism, and some suppression of dissent: what one imprisoned journalist calls “a period of sheer terror and repression”.

Rawlings didn’t share the interest of some other African leaders, like Tanzania’s famous Julius Nyere, in marxist theory. Nor was he instinctively in favour of free markets. “I don’t know any law and I don’t understand economics”, he said, “but I know it when my stomach is empty”.

Perhaps it’s not surprising then that Ghana’s economic policies under Rawlings veered wildly from left to right. Rawlings came to power criticising the market-friendly policies of the outgoing civilian government, which had led to high prices. The civilian government had, like many African governments of the 1980’s, initiated reform in order to secure loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Such reforms - “structural adjustment” - have been a controversial part of Western involvement in Africa over the last twenty years, just as Marxist policies had divided opinion in the 1960s and ’70s. Rawlings came to power criticising “Western Imperialism” as represented by the IMF, and expressing enthusiasm for Cuba’s Fidel Castro, as many socialist leaders in Africa had done before. Within two years, however, Ghana’s crises of health and education services, agricultural productivity, and collapsing basic infrastructure forced Rawlings to change course, and the country went back to the IMF, prepared to reform.

Ghana’s market reforms were as typical of African economic policies in the 1980s as its previous socialist regime had been of that period. The currency was gradually devalued, large numbers of public servants made redundant, and state business privatised. We’ll talk later on about the theory behind these reforms.

Just as Ghana had been seen as a model colony under British rule, and had inspired all of Africa with its independence, so it now became the model for IMF-led structural adjustment. Like in many African economies, market reforms proved effective at increasing economic growth, to a respectable 6%. But equally typically, the benefits didn’t seem to accrue to those at the bottom of the pile, and poverty remained stubbornly high. And Ghana’s debt spiralled, leaving the government burdened by payments and policy more and more ceded to the IMF’s economists.

Once again like many African dictators, Rawlings was forced by public pressure to introduce democratic reforms in the early 1990s. Elected in 1992 and 1996 in elections condemned by opposition parties as rigged, he then retired in 2000 after two terms as president. His chosen successor was defeated in 2000 by the current president, John Kufuor. The transition was the first peaceful handover of power in Ghana’s history.

Like his predecessors, Kufuor is a classic example of the African leader of his age. Unlike little-educated military men like Rawlings, he studied at Oxford. In contrast to Rawlings’ military background, Kufuor he served as a Member of Parliament in democratic periods and as Secretary for Local Government in the first few months of Rawlings’ second regime. Following a falling-out with Rawlings, though, he focussed on business, and was as lauded on his election for his business connections and economic instincts as his democratic political experience. And while “big men” like Rawlings tend to be highly charismatic, Kufuor is low-key and a little bland, preferring consensus-building to stirring rhetoric. He’s representative of a new, educated, business-savvy generation of African leaders that is supposedly transforming the continent’s fortunes.

Under Kufuor, Ghana has taken steps to remedy its economic malaise that are, true to form, representative of those taken by many poor countries. It entered the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC), better known to most of us as “debt relief”. In exchange for commitments on democracy, human rights, and anti-corruption efforts, Ghana has seen its debt burden reduced by $3.5 billion. But like in other countries working closely with the IMF and World Bank, related reforms like water privatisation have proven highly controversial. Kufuor has also embraced the new wave of African governance reform: he was the first African leader to submit his government to the New Partnership For Africa’s Development (NEPAD)’s Peer Review Mechanism, a system for collaborative transparency between African leaders, and has recently begun a term as Chair of the African Union.

Now, Ghana faces an equally emblematic set of challenges. Progress is being made on poverty, and the country is on course to meet the Millennium Development Goal of halving extreme poverty (the proportion of people earning less than a dollar a day) by 2015. But over a third of the country is still poor. Still heavily dependent on exports of cocoa and gold, the country faces the challenge of diversifying its economy to protect itself from price fluctuations. And even as the country seeks to increase economic growth, it faces increasing concern about the effects of growth the local environment.

It’s too easy to oversimplify Africa’s problems, when its 54 states all face unique challenges. But many aspects of Ghana’s story in the fifty years since independence are archetypal: a turbulent transition through socialism and military rule, structural adjustment and debt, towards democratisation and diversification. But more importantly, the debates that Ghana’s experience touches off - on the benefits and costs of aid and debt; the effectiveness and side-effects of market-reform policies; and the extent to which we should have faith in the new generation of African leaders - are some of the crucial debates we’ll be continuing to look at over the next few months. For now, though, let’s raise a glass to the 50th anniversary of Ghana - and of the start of the strange, sad, but unfinished tale of modern Africa.

We have no illusions about the size of the problems that we face. How can we, when there are daily stories of young Africans undertaking perilous journeys across the Sahara desert, sometimes on foot and in flimsy boats on raging oceans in a bid to get to Europe and elsewhere? How can we when old and new diseases like Malaria and HIV/AIDS still plague Africa and reap a grim harvest on the youth?

But there is no doubt that Africa and many of its nations are making progress… even as we celebrate, we must not become complacent but keep on striving towards achieving excellence. Our destiny is with the most advanced in the human community, and we must pursue it.”

- John Kufuor, Accra, 03/03/2007