When Dancers Play Historians and Thinkers-Part 18

As Ghana prepares to celebrate the Fiftieth Anniversary of its declaration of sovereignty from British colonial rule in March 2007, it has become imperative to recall the country's chequered (checkered) political culture during the period under discussion. This has become even more imperative because of the brazen and intemperate efforts of ardent Nkrumaists and Nkrumacrats to unduly capitalize on the youthfulness of the majority of the current Ghanaian populace, more than 60-percent of whom are fifty years of age or less. Which means that most Ghanaians living today were either not born or were too young to remember or effectively assess the volatile political culture introduced into the Ghanaian mainstream by then-Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah and his so-called Convention People's Party (CPP). In the preceding installments to this series, we afforded ample opportunity to the putative heroes of what has come to be known as “The 24th February Revolution” in postcolonial Ghanaian political parlance. Notable among these heroes was the late Brigadier-General A. A. Afrifa. In this segment, we have decided to cede the historical platform to the putative leader of the 24th February Revolution, the late Lt.-Gen. E. K. Kotoka, through the quite comprehensive biographical monograph on the latter subject authored by Professor L. H. Ofosu-Appiah and titled The Life of Lt.-General E. K. Kotoka: The Hero of Ghana's 24th February Revolution (Accra, Ghana: Waterville, 1972).

Like the rest of his revolutionary colleagues, Gen. Kotoka has been almost so irreparably maligned that even in 1998 this writer had the quite innocent (albeit an embarrassing one, in hindsight) temerity to appear on the University of Ghana's Radio Univers and call for the summary deletion of the name of General Kotoka from the august façade of the erstwhile Accra International Airport. Interestingly and, in hindsight, ironically, early that same year, just before his mother's death, this writer had had a routine Nkrumaist conversation with his now-deceased father, an ardent Nkrumaist, which was abruptly and unusually interrupted by his then terminally ill mother. The exact thrust of the conversation, which occurred nearly nine years ago, has virtually receded into the labile human mnemonic bank. Still, what remains vivid in this author's memory, almost as if it had happened yesterday, is his mother's carping remark to his father poignantly thus: “Kwame, isn't it about time that you began telling this child the unvarnished truth about the chaotic and dictatorial politics of the Nkrumah era?” The proverbial die, in effect, had been cast. And for the first time as never before, my father began acknowledging the fact that the Nkrumah regime had been anything but unreservedly roseate and culturally democratic.

But that it was with great reluctance, verging on outright resistance, that my father acknowledged the unflattering and blotchy political record of Kwame Nkrumah and his Convention People's Party (CPP), is borne out by the fact that the Old Man, as I affectionately called my father, kept almost ruefully insisting that such untold atrocities as were perpetrated by the cynical operatives of the CPP were more symptomatic of temporal exigencies rather than being inherent within the CPP ideological apparatus itself. “As a pioneer, it was inevitable that Nkrumah would make a lot of mistakes.” My one regret is that while he had lived to the mature age of 72, my father does not appear to have lived quite long enough to have critically examined the morally and politically unedifying record of the CPP and the latter's cultic figure, President Kwame Nkrumah. Had he done so, it is almost certain that the Old Man would have promptly and drastically revised his opinion of the man who callously assassinated Dr. J. B. Danquah, the putative Father of Ghanaian and African Nationalism, and the Old Man's maternal granduncle.

But that the advent of Kwame Nkrumah at the helm of postcolonial Ghanaian politics was anything but morally edifying, is tersely captured by this epigraph from Professor Ofosu-Appiah's Life of Lt.-General Kotoka:

And surely to a man of courage, the degradation of cowardice must be by far more painful than the unfelt death which strikes him in the midst of his strength and patriotism. – Thucydides, From Pericles' Funeral Oration.

In other words, for Professor Ofosu-Appiah, as it must also have been for General Kotoka and his 24th February Revolutionaries, as well as the overwhelming majority of Ghanaians, conformity to Nkrumah's pseudo-socialist dictatorship was tantamount to a summary condemnation to an eternal death of the human soul and spirit. And Kotoka ought to have appreciated the preceding fact better than most Ghanaians because like Afrifa, Kotoka had acquired the highest level of professional military training then available to the brilliant Ghanaian subject of British colonial domination. To this effect, Professor Ofosu-Appiah writes: “Kotoka was one of the ten candidates at ROSTS at Teshie who did well enough to gain admission into Eaton Hall in England in June, 1954. Of the ten cadets, seven were Gold Coasters, and three were Nigerians. The course at Eaton Hall involved training in Military Tactics, Fieldcraft, Shooting, Command, Administration and moral and physical training. Naturally those with secondary education found the course easier, especially the academic side. Kotoka [who had failed to obtain a scholarship to attend the elite Achimota School], however, managed to pass all the examinations, and was commissioned a full lieutenant[,] together with a few others. The reason for this jump was that by Army Regulations[,] one was allowed to count half of one's Other Ranks Service towards commissioned service; and as Kotoka entered Eaton Hall after seven years in the Other Ranks, he had an advantage over those who entered after only a year in the army. For anyone in the army who, on the date of his commission, had done at least four years, was commissioned as a full lieutenant. The officers' training course in Britain was very strenuous and taxing, but the Gold Coasters were able to endure the rigorous tests because of the good grounding they had had at Teshie. Naturally, the West African cadets took their training more seriously than their British counterparts. For whereas the West Africans had chosen the Armed Forces as a career, most of the British cadets were doing compulsory national service, which they regarded as a nuisance” (Life of Kotoka 24-25).

But that the major players in the putsch against Nkrumacracy, or the CPP's pseudo-socialist dictatorship, were more intimately familiar with Nkrumah's political shenanigans than most Ghanaians could ever hope to be, is expansively recalled by the author of The Life of Lt.-General E. K. Kotoka as follows: “At independence[,] Ghana was a British Dominion with Queen Elizabeth as the legal Head of Government. The Queen was represented in Ghana by a British Governor-General, who was the Commander-in-Chief of Ghana, and who alone [theoretically speaking] could sanction the use of military forces and changes in the Armed Forces. It was therefore possible during the period of Dominion Status from March, 1957 till June, 1960 to keep the Army out of politics. But it was a difficult problem because of the political history of the country between 1949 [when the megalomaniacal African Show Boy split from the seminal United Gold Coast Convention to found his personality-driven Convention people's Party] and 1957 [the year of Ghana's reassertion of her sovereignty from Britain]. The repressive methods adopted by Nkrumah after independence[,] culminating in the passage of the Preventive Detention Act in 1958[,] led some members of the Opposition United Party to despair of a smooth change of government through the ballot box. The CPP Government passed the Preventive Detention Act under the pretext that the United Party was planning a violent overthrow of the legal government of Ghana. It was therefore not surprising that in December 1958, two Parliamentarians of the United Party, Mr. R. R. Amponsah and M. K. Apaloo, were arrested and accused of attempting to use an army officer, Major Benjamin Awhaitey, to stage a coup detat, and assassinate the Prime Minister. The two Parliamentarians were detained under the Preventive Detention Act, but Major Awhaitey was court-martialed. His charge at the Court Martial was 'neglect to the prejudice of good order and military discipline…in that he, at Accra, on the 18th and 19th December, 1958 failed to report, until after he had learned that the matter had been reported by others, that he had been informed of a proposed coup detat being organized by one Reginald Reynolds Amponsah and others, which coup detat involved, inter alia, the seizure of the Prime Minister, Dr. Nkrumah, and other Cabinet Ministers by army personnel on the 20th December, 1958. The Court Martial was presided over by Major A. K. Ocran, who in 1966 took part in the overthrow of Nkrumah, Major Charles Barwah, who, as Nkrumah's Deputy-Commander of the Armed Forces, was killed on 24th February 1966, and Major J. A. Ankrah, who was invited to head the National Liberation Council on 24th February, 1966. The Court Martial sentenced Awhaitey to be dismissed from the Service; and, on the advice of Geoffrey Bing, the British Attorney-General, a Commission of Enquiry was set up to go into the circumstances leading to the arrest of Amponsah and Apaloo. The Commission took a long time to complete its work, and issued three reports. The first, a unanimous report, found that Amponsah and Apaloo, 'since June 1958 were engaged in a conspiracy to carry out at some future date in Ghana an act for unlawful purpose, revolutionary in nature.' The majority, Sir Tsibu Darku, a Ghanaian, and Mr. Maurice Charles, a West Indian, found Awhaitey, Amponsah and Apaloo 'were engaged in a conspiracy to assassinate the Prime Minister, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, and carry out a coup detat.' Mr. Justice Granville Sharp, the British Chairman of the Commission, however, found that Amponsah and Apaloo had withdrawn from the conspiracy when they suspected that the police was privy to it. He therefore concluded that 'there did not exist between Amponsah, Apaloo and Awhaitey a plot to interfere in any way with the life of the Prime Minister on [sic] the airport before his departure for India.' After the publication of the Report, Major Awhaitey was detained under the Preventive Detention Act and remained in prison till the 24th February coup of 1966” (Life of Kotoka 27-29).

What the preceding extract indicates is the fact that courageous and conscientious Ghanaians have never cottoned up to political dictatorship as has often been perceived by those who regard the collective modern Ghanaian temperament to be one of servile docility, including some Ghanaian-born citizens of foreign ethnic extraction. Second is the fact that the various Reports published by the Bing-ordered Commission of Enquiry reflected, respectively, the ideological inclination – or leaning – of the Commission members towards either the person of then-Prime Minister Nkrumah and/or the latter's so-called Convention People's Party (CPP). Thus, we find Sir Tsibu Darku, an ardent Nkrumaist and prime beneficiary of the regime insisting, almost hermetically, on the criminal culpability of the anti-dictatorial Messrs. Amponsah and Apaloo. Then also, we find the Afro-Caribbean Mr. Maurice Charles, perhaps largely out of his personal friendship with Prime Minister Nkrumah, or his emotional and historical attachment to the political rarity of an independent Ghana, a Lodestar to the global African community, unreservedly siding with Sir Tsibu Darku. In sum, about the only judicially independent and legally clinical perspective comes from Commission chairman, Justice Granville Sharp, the only panel member who appears to have harbored no interest, whatsoever, beyond the purely professional practice of a highly-trained lawyer. Which is hardly an accident, since Mr. Granville Sharp also appears to have been the only Commission member who had formidable legal and judicial training and expertise. In the end, whether one decides on the guilt or non-guilt of Messrs. Amponsah and Apaloo, as well as, of course, Major Benjamin Awhaitey, depends almost squarely on the perception of the critic towards the ideologically charged climate then prevailing under the watch of Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah and his so-called Convention People's Party. One thing, however, is quite clear, on the eve of his historic ouster, President Nkrumah had inordinately politicized the Ghana Armed Forces to the extent that the latter's institutional professionalism had been seriously undermined. Professor Ofosu-Appiah sums up the preceding situation in this terse manner:

“On June 30, 1960 the Earl of Listowell, the last Governor-General and Commander-in-Chief of Ghana, left for Britain; and on July 1, 1960, Kwame Nkrumah was sworn in as the first President of the Republic of Ghana, and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. Nkrumah now felt that he was a real master in his own house, and set out to interfere with the running of the Armed Forces” (Life of Kotoka 31).

In essence, contends Professor Ofosu-Appiah, the 1966 military overthrow of the Convention People's Party was purely and squarely a suicidal act engendered by the megalomaniacal meddling in military affairs by the African Show Boy. Even so, as Major-General Paley, the British chief of the Ghana Armed Forces rightly indicated, the February 24th, 1966 revolutionary ousting of the CPP was more the creeping norm than the exception: “During the past few years[,] [General Paley maintained in a directive to the rank-and-file members of the Ghana Armed Forces,] a number of countries have seen their governments taken over by the army who have set up some form of military rule. Analysis of the causes of these military coups detat indicates three main reasons: (a) Interference with, and favoritism in appointments, promotions and posting of military personnel by Head of State (or Government); (b) Politicians swindling over rations and military barracks and, (c) Corrupt and inefficient administration” (Life of Kotoka 29-30).

General Paley further noted: “The Government of Ghana is determined to keep the administration of the defense forces as an independent organization free from any political interference and to make the welfare of the forces one of its chief concerns” (Life of Kotoka 30).

Interestingly, available evidence indicates that the “Afrocentric” welfare of the Ghana Armed Forces was the least item on the Nkrumaist political agenda. Rather, the proverbial African Show Boy appeared to be more interested in hurriedly supplanting one “vertical” imperialist overlord of the Ghana Armed Forces with another supposedly “horizontal” imperialist overlord who was deemed to be more benign and affable: “The Ghana Air Force in 1960 was being run by Indians and Israelis. This was Nkrumah's idea of non-alignment. This unsatisfactory arrangement was opposed by General Alexander. He managed to get Nkrumah to agree that the British, who were training his Army and Navy, should train his Air Force as well. Therefore, in May, 1960, the Indians and Israelis left, and the British took over. As with the Army, so with the Air Force, Nkrumah wanted the most modern type of aircraft and expanded Air Force. No arguments about the time and trouble it takes [sic] to train pilots for jet aircraft, or the expense involved in the buying of aircraft and the building of airfields would persuade him to be more modest in his demands. He was further urged [egged?] on by the powerful Russian Ambassador Radionov who assured him that such skilled pilots could be fully trained in Russia in six months! This was a period in Ghana when power was knowledge, [rather than the reverse], and there was little that a British 'imperialist' could do in the circumstances” (Life of Kotoka 32-33).

And here, we must significantly observe that many a fanatical disciple of Nkrumaism has tended to equate the exuberant but hardly creative zeal of the African Show Boy to rapidly militarizing a one-party Ghanaian state with unique statesmanship. And here, also, we are compelled to riposte that there is nothing progressive about the inordinate and pathological entrenchment of a one-man dictatorship. For what were the benefits to be derived from heavy military build-up at the expense of rapid economic development? The fact, however, is that the corollary of Nkrumah's heavy military build-up was the CPP's calculated and systematic objective of destabilizing those African countries whose governments flatly refused to subscribe to Nrkumah's brand of pseudo-socialism, as shall be further expatiated in due course.

We must also politely disagree with General Paley's quite well-meaning observation that invariably a civilian government is to be preferred over a military one: “ 'It is the duty of each and every soldier, sailor and airman to give unwavering loyalty to the State of Ghana…. In accordance with the Oath…members of the defense forces may be good and honest, but as a rule they are not suitably qualified to run a government or administer its affairs: when they try to interfere with the administration of the state, they tend to do it inefficiently, and in the long run wreck the country and the forces [i.e. the military establishment itself]. An inefficient or corrupt government is preferable to a [sic] military rule.' Events were to disprove this last assertion after the 1966 coup” (Life of Kotoka 30).

It is not principally that we disagree, in toto, with General Paley's rather perspicuous observation; it is squarely that relatively speaking, just as some civilian governments have been known to be more efficient than others, some “transitional” military governments have also been known to be far better with governance than such protracted civilian dictatorships as the so-called Convention People's Party, particularly, for our specific purposes, the transitional government of the erstwhile National Liberation Council (NLC). Needless to say, General Paley's quite prophetic observation strikingly anticipated both the Rawlings-led juntas of the so-called Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), both of which were pseudo-socialist juntas operated by jaundiced military malcontents. Thus what Kotoka's biographer, Professor L. H. Ofosu-Appiah, ought to have stressed is the fact that some “transitional military governments” can in certain, special circumstances, such as prevailed in Ghana between 1966 and 1969, govern in a far better and transparent manner than an ideologically monolithic and hermetic dictatorship such as that of the so-called Convention People's Party.

Even so, for biographer Ofosu-Appiah, Nkrumah myopically ensured his own political suicide by rhetorically and rather unwisely presuming to play the Eastern ideological bloc against the West. The latter was partially engendered by the African Show Boy's sophomoric attempt at “Russianizing” the Ghana Armed Forces. On this score, Ofosu-Appiah writes: “Once politics had been introduced into the Armed Forces in the person of the President as Commander-in-Chief, the desirability of having British advisers was questioned. Nkrumah liked to feel that he had the men with experience to do the work. He also felt a little uneasy in the company of the British soldiers, who were always trying to restrain him from carrying out his grandiose schemes. When the Congo crisis erupted, Nkrumah had to use a British General to command his forces. This fact lowered him in the esteem of the Congolese, who felt that the ace leader of the African revolution had deceived them over his true relationship with the British imperialists! There were complaints from the Egyptians, who wanted to feel that Nkrumah was a free man in his own country and could use his armed forces as he wished. The sense of frustration, and the desire to balance Easterners against Westerners led him to finally dismiss General Alexander and the British officers in the Ghana Army. This was exactly what the Russian Ambassador was hoping for, and he was very pleased. The first step taken by Nkrumah to get the Russians to influence the Ghana Armed Forces was to ask for a Russian Military Mission. That Mission arrived in Ghana in mid 1960, and wrote a report condemning the British training and organizational methods. It recommended an expansion with which the Ghanaian economy could not cope, and suggested that several officer cadets should be sent for training in Russia. General Alexander was naturally opposed to the idea. But he had already been made aware of Nkrumah's craving for new things. As Chief of Staff[,] he had formed a President's Guard out of old soldiers who were not fit for active service to guard Flagstaff House and visiting dignitaries. Nkrumah[,] in 1961[,] asked the Minister of Defense, de Graft Dickson, to tell General Alexander to teach the Guards the Russian goose-step, and to equip them with Russian-type jackboots! Although the General managed to check this development because of the impending visit of Queen Elizabeth, the President's Own Guard was destined to play a crucial role during the Army' plan to topple Nkrumah's regime” (Life of Kotoka 33-35).

Indeed, the visit to Ghana of the British Queen was merely incidental to the myopic and disturbing fact that in creating his so-called President's Guard, the African Show Boy had unwisely alienated the larger and more formidable regular Armed Forces, as the Life-Chairman of the Convention People's Party also appeared to logistically prioritize his President's Guard over and above the Ghana Armed Forces. And by also cavalierly underestimating the extent of British sociopolitical and cultural impact on postcolonial Ghana, Nkrumah had, literally, played Russian roulette and thus inadvertently committed political suicide.

But that Nkrumah appears to have been politically too mischievous for his own good, is elicited from this brief narrative by Kotoka's biographer vis-à-vis the infamous Kulungugu affair: “The success of Kotoka and his soldiers was achieved in spite of several odds against them. Before the Second Battalion left for the Congo, there had been a bomb attack on Kwame Nkrumah at Kulungugu, and he was seriously wounded. At first it was announced that the grenades which caused his injuries and killed a number of people were of foreign origin. Later, however, it was discovered that they were grenades which Nkrumah had distributed to some dissidents from neighboring Togo to be used against President Olympio. These had got into the hands of some Ghanaian exiles in opposition to Nkrumah, and they had used them against him. Nkrumah [having partially hoisted with his own petard, literally speaking] therefore decided that no more grenades should be issued to the Second Battalion. And so it was with a poor supply of arms and ammunition that the Battalion went to the Kamina Base in Katanga” (Life of Kotoka 45).

The striking plausibility of the preceding narrative inheres in the fact that in 1962, or thereabouts, there were no known markets in Ghana and its environs that readily sold ordnance, or military hardware and accessories to consumers outside Governments and national armies. And it is also highly unlikely that advanced grenades of the kind reported to have been used in the Kulungugu episode could have been privately manufactured or readily imported without official consent of some sort, either internally or externally. A likely explanation by the Nkrumaist camp is wont to be that some Western imperialist enemies of the CPP supplied the Ghanaian political opposition expressly for the purpose.

It is also interesting to point out that ardent Nkrumaists tend to cavalierly ignore the fact that Nkrumah's naïve fascination for and association with the erstwhile Eastern Bloc countries prompted the African Show Boy to summarily abort Ghanaian democracy, as negotiated with Britain on the eve of Ghana's independence, and thus proscribe the Ghanaian republican Constitution by, for instance, creating a private and personal army, which Nkrumah then played against the regular national armed forces. On the preceding score, the biographer of the Life of Lt.-General E. K. Kotoka recalls: “The bomb attack on Nkrumah at Kulungugu had made him so suspicious of everybody that his first concern was his personal security. His visits to the Soviet Union, China and the Communist states of Eastern Europe had fired his imagination and made him determined to establish a centralized authoritarian state in which the President controlled everything. Nkrumah decided to reorganize the Security System on the lines of the Russian and Nazi secret services. He also decided to raise a private army[,] contrary to the Republican Constitution which states clearly in Article 51: 1, that 'Neither the President nor any other person shall raise any armed forces except under the authority of Parliament.' But then [through self-serving and devious Parliamentary edicts] the Republican Constitution had given Nkrumah powers to legislate without Parliamentary approval, so every action of his was [rendered] legal [by the CPP-dominated Parliamentary rubber-stamp]. That army came to be known as the President's Own Guard Regiment. As disclosed in the chapter [of Professor Ofosu-Appiah's biography of General Kotoka] headed 'Kwame Nkrumah and the Ghana Armed Forces,' the President's Guard was established by General Alexander to guard Flagstaff House and to escort visiting dignitaries. From 1962 [onwards], it was to be turned into an elite corps of the S. S. type in Nazi Germany without the efficiency and ruthlessness of the Nazis. In order to make service in the Guard Regiment attractive, Nkrumah raised the pay and improved conditions of service of the other ranks and their officers, while he neglected the welfare of the members of the regular army. The President's Own Guard Regiment was under the command of Lt.-Col. David Gbon Zanlerigu, whose salary and allowances exceeded those of the Chief of Defense Staff and army Generals in the Ghana Armed Forces. For the training of the Guard Regiment, Nkrumah sought the aid of Russians, and he kept all decisions in his own hands. The Commanding Officer of the Guard Regiment had direct access to the President, and his requests took precedence over the requests of the Regular Army. This was a situation which the Armed Forces were not likely to accept tamely; and it was a situation which led some army officers to remove Nkrumah” (Life of Kotoka 48-49).

Indeed, like the Eurocentric madman that he was, Nkrumah set about arbitrarily creating several divisions of his personal army with exclusive Russian advice and the total and abject disregard of the Ghana chiefs of the Regular Army. This administrative lunacy prompted then Lt.-Col. E. K. Kotoka in one instance to address the following memorandum to the head of the so-called Guard Regiment: “The formation of the President's own Field Regiment is news to this Department (Ministry of Defense, Operations), as no unit has ever been formed without a formation order being issued by the G. S. Department. You will recall that the President's Own Guard Regiment was formed [up-]on the formation order being issued by the G. S. Department. The distribution of the formation order of Guard Regiment will suggest to you the need for its issue [issuance?] No unit can be successfully formed without a formation order. You will agree [with me] that without knowing the establishment and the UET there is scarcely any help that this Department can give. You are please advised to process the formation of the unit properly to enable this Ministry to help. (Sgd). E. K. Kotoka Lieutenant Colonel GSO” (Life of Kotoka 51-52).

Indeed, Nkrumah's subversive activities on the African continent, even as he rabidly turned his own country into a police state and a virtual personality cult, belied his stentorian and purportedly unifying rhetoric of pan-Africanism: “It was not only in the Ghana Armed Forces that Nkrumah used Russians and other experts from the communist states of Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, and Cuba. Since he was planning to subvert most of the [newly-independent] African states, whose governments did not accept his ideas on Pan-Africanism, he had to get skilled men to train the 'Freedom Fighters' who had been brought into the country under the auspices of the African Affairs Bureau” (Life of Kotoka 52).

And, to be certain, from 1964 onwards, Nkrumah began to Sovietize and Russianize the Ghana Police Force, which was virtually rendered professionally otiose. Now the CPP had plainclothes civilian spies and terror-mongering detectives snooping on the people for the interest of the President and his lackeys: “To pave the way for the reorganization of the Security Service of Ghana by Russian and East German experts, Nkrumah abolished the Special Branch of the Police Service on October 1, 1964, and transferred its security functions to the President's Security Service under the title [of] 'Special Services.' After this change had been made, the Police had nothing to do with security and detention. Soviet Security experts had advised Nkrumah to add a Civilian Unit to the Guard Regiment as far back as August 1962; and those civilians snooped around among crowds to ferret out troublemakers and remove them” (Life of Kotoka 52-53).

Nkrumah would also seek to undermine and, where possible, thoroughly destroy all postcolonial African regimes that were loath to the wholesale acceptance of Eastern imperialism which, in the stolid and naïve imagination of the African Show Boy, was a salutary and logical substitute for Western imperialism: “The Russians also trained recruits for Nkrumah's Guard Regiment at a special camp, and provided four patrol boats which served as the naval arm of the National Security Service. These armed boats were manned by Russians and were used to deliver arms to Ghana-backed opponents of the Governments of neighboring African states” (Life of Kotoka 53).

But, perhaps, even more eerie and outright bizarre in thrust was Nkrumah's attempt to play “Big Brother,” in Orwellian parlance, by bugging almost every publicly owned institutional façade, as well as other major Ghanaian centers of tourist attraction: “Apart from running training camps for subversive activities in African countries, the Russians used the African Affairs Bureau to train people in the use of electronic devices for 'bugging' – or recording – conversations of people in small groups or in hotel rooms. A secret establishment called Technical Unit 3, which was charged with recording the conversations of foreign visitors with Ghanaians, was headed by a Russian. Technical Unit 3 was created on the advice of two top Russian security experts, Robert I. Akhmerov, a senior KGB, or Russian Secret Service official, who lived in Ghana for three years as a diplomat, and another man known as 'Sweskov,' and [later] identified as Colonel Vladimir Sverchkov, who specialized in the protection of important visitors. Under the supervision of a Russian technical adviser called Andreas Andreyev, several listening devices were bought. These included a complete Russian radio station which could be hidden in the operator's dress; and 8 wristwatch microphones and cameras hidden in buttons and belts. Technical Unit 3 under Andreyev's supervision installed listening devices in the Ambassador Hotel and in other first-class hotels in the [Ghanaian] capital and in the Regions. In this way[,] the conversations of heads of African states who might visit Ghana could be played back to the Osagyefo” (Life of Kotoka 53-54).

Equally disturbing was Nkrumah's single-minded attempt at playing big-power politics with Ghana's developmental resources in order to perennially entrench himself, particularly in the wake of the Show Boy's then-recently declared life-presidency of Ghana, as well as to hermetically perpetuate his one-party terror-mongering political machine, the so-called Convention people's Party: “But for training Ghanaians in intelligence methods, Nkrumah turned to the East Germans, who sent him Major Jurgen Kruger from the State Security Headquarters of the German Democratic Republic in November, 1964, to begin courses on 'Secret Service and Intelligence Work' and 'Intelligence Work Under Diplomatic cover.' Those who completed the courses successfully were sent to test their skills in the embassies of the United States, West Germany, Ivory Coast, Niger, and the Nigerian High Commission. Training in communist ideology was provided by the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute in Winneba. Apart from the full-time students of the Institute, there were periodic courses [set up] for top civil servants, ambassadors and selected army officers. It was only from that Institute that, at the suggestion of the Russians, Nkrumah decided to recruit personnel for his Security Service in future” (Life of Kotoka 54).

It was thus under this hostile and dangerous political climate that the salutary and revolutionary events leading up to the historic overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah and his so-called Convention People's Party are to be seen. In the next segment of this series, we shall examine the divisive political tactics of the African Show Boy, a trait which sharply contradicted his stentorian pontification of a salutary and unifying pan-Africanist political culture. It is our firm contention that seen from this vantage perspective, the landmark overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah and his so-called Convention People's Part shall begin to make logical sense to the woefully under-informed, as well as the grossly misinformed student of postcolonial Ghanaian history. The preceding facet of the Nkrumah regime, for obvious reasons, has been almost totally ignored by many a self-proclaimed indigenous Ghanaian and African scholar or specialist of Nkrumaism, a largely protean and callow political ideology that has yet to objectively and palpably reveal itself beyond the vapid level of pseudo-socialist minstrelsy.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., teaches English and Journalism at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of twelve books of poetry and essays, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005).

   Comments1