Beyond Leadership Incapacity and GIHOC Collapse by Rawlings and the P/NDC Governments

I read Mustapha Bature Sallama’s quite interesting news feature with quaint humor closely verging on decided contempt (See “Beyond Finished Goods: What the Russia-Africa Media Forum Says About Moscow's Pitch” Modernghana.com 10/28/26). The article is about the periodic economic confabulations hosted by the Russian Socialist Republic - formerly known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) - with governments and leaders from the African Union (AU) countries, the latest of which, as of this writing (10/28/26), was being held in the Russian capital of Moscow.

We are informed that this year’s conference attracted one of the largest numbers of African countries, with some 46 out of the officially recognized 54 African countries in attendance. But, as usual, what is of utmost significance is the terms of reference of the Moscow-engineered and driven Neocolonialist Confabulation. “Neocolonialist” in tone and tenor because a cohesively organized African Union institutional establishment would have ensured that the Continent would be represented as one geopolitical body or entity and not as a colonially determined splinter group of 46 countries and nationalities with diverse political and ideological proclivities.

Even so, what is most strategically disconcerting here are the demands being reportedly made or tabled by the President John Dramani Mahama-led government of Ghana’s National Democratic Congress (NDC), the very government whose immediate institutional and ideological progenitor, matrix or antecedent, namely, the late President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-founded junta of the erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), thoroughly bankrupted and collapsed the seminal industrial hub of the country, namely, the Kwame Nkrumah and his Convention People’s Party-founded Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), originally composed of between 107 and 120 factories and industrial manufacturing plants and installations, depending on who does the count, during the 10-year period spanning between 1982 and 1992, when the Provisional National Defense Council hermetically dominated Ghana’s geopolitical terrain and literally determined which of her citizens lived or died.

A thoroughly vision-bereft PNDC, at its political and strategic wit’s end, would voluntarily invite the very Western-Imperialist Nations because of whose officially purported sinister designs the then recently “prematurely” retired former Ghana Air Force’s Flight-Lieutenant Rawlings had shot himself and his ragtag AK-47/AR-15-cradling gang of desperate economic predators back into the nation’s seat of power and government for the second time, to oxymoronically determine for Ghanaians the best and the most ideal course of its socioeconomic destiny. And over the course of the next aforementioned decade, the “Western-Imperialist Succubus” would callously albeit predictably counsel the immediate and the thorough “De-Industrialization” of Ghana and the primitivistic resort to an exclusive focus on proto-colonialist production of industrial raw materials, including an unprecedentedly exponential production of raw cocoa beans and the crude extraction of minerals and timber, among a host of other industrial primary commodities.

All the preceding catastrophic and apocalyptic events, verifiably, occurred under the extremely toxic and the blasphemously noetic economic policy agenda of what was then euphemistically labeled as the “Structural Adjustment Program” (SAP) or Policy Initiative. Which is essentially and precisely why the widely reported cavalier demand from the Russians for “Technology Transfer” by Ghana’s President Mahama, a Russian-educated Communications Propagandist, is all the more unspeakably preposterous and one that deserves the round and the abject contempt of the Russians. After all, have the Russians so relatively and temporally soon forgotten what became of the Russia-established Ghana Atomic Energy Commission (GAEC) at Kwabenya, in the northeastern suburbs of Ghana’s capital city of Accra, in the wake of the military overthrow of President Kwame Nkrumah and his fanatically pro-Russian government of the Convention People’s Party (CPP)?

Now, for those of our readers who may not know or remember the latter incident of inexcusable political suicide and nose-cutting/slashing and face-spiting dervish of patent political and ideological foolery, either because they were simply too young or even not yet born at the time, forensically reliable legend has it that the morally and the intellectually bankrupt bevy of Oxbridge and Ivy-League schooled clinically clueless “New-Age Politicians” who replaced the movers-and-shakers of the Convention People’s Party’s “Verandah Boys,” comically self-styled as the Progress Party (PP) Missionaries of First-Rate Democratic Development, would literally disengage the “Core Machinery” or the essence of the Russian-made system of the “Technologically Transferred” Kwabenya Nuclear Reactor and cheaply sell it to one of the more strategically enlightened “Progressive Allies” of the Busia regime hereabouts in the West, on the clinically lunatic grounds that Ghanaians were darn too ill-equipped to own and possess a Nuclear Reactor.

Which, in essence, is another way of saying that well before the Russians commit themselves to an ineffably treacherous and unspeakably untrustworthy Ghanaian leadership, in particular but not exclusively so, the Kremlin needs to demand strict accountability and a comprehensive National Industrial Development Plan and Agenda from any Continental African Government that seriously and genuinely aims for the admittedly direly needed transfer of technological know-how of the kind and the sort that could exponentially elevate the entire woefully underdeveloped and kleptocratically and pathologically blighted, consumerist oriented and morally and intellectually bankrupt of the kind that immediately succeeded the Nkrumah government.

Now, what we are talking about or dealing with here and now regards what sort of critical and significant measures it is that these earnest supplicants of Russia’s Scientific and Industrial Technology have already put in place - in terms of the palpable college and university-level training of the potential and/or the prospective direct recipients of such technology transfer and know-how - in order to ensure that such materially and socioeconomically fetching incentive and facility would not, once again, literally go the proverbial way of the dogs, or the way of the Biblical Sower who idiotically scattered his seedlings in the bare and rocky open field, rather than deep down the mulch-enriched soil.

Now, what the foregoing observation means is that the Kremlin may very well need to dispatch experts to the countries of each and every one of those African leaders avidly demanding the otherwise patently undeserved privilege of Nuclear-Technology Transfer to thoroughly study and critically examine the level and the quality of education and the vocational curricula maintained by any of these supplicant nations in order to ensure and guarantee that such sensitive technology transfer as is being demanded is apt to be put to maximum and the most effective use. For, as the tired, old maxim goes: “One does not simply supply a naked man [or woman, for that matter] with a qualitative bolt of cloth or a pair of Wall Street-Quality Business Suit [You can ask Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Ofori-Atta]. Even more importantly, one also has to show or teach the naked recipient of such rarefied largesse how to make one for themselves.” Are we addressing any wise leaders here? We are, of course, addressing both sides of the conference table.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]