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The Ghana Navy And "Back To Bataan"!

Feature Article The Ghana Navy And Back To Bataan!
JUL 24, 2019 LISTEN

I am very delighted to add my voice to those of the many well-wishers who have joined hands to congratulate the Ghana Navy on the 60th anniversary of its birth.

When the Navy first came into being in 1959, it was seen by many only as a source of employment for the type of unemployed school leavers whose lives I portrayed in my novel, The Gab Boys. Who was going to attack Ghana by sea? it was wondered.

But it was a very serious undertaking. At least two of my school-mates, Atta Boadi No.2 and Kwasi Ampofo, joined the Navy as “ratings” and we greatly admired their dazzling white uniforms, which they never failed wear, at least once, when they came home on leave!

We also learnt from them that far from being the joke we thought it was, the Navy was a very powerful institution and that their British instructors took them through a very thorough military training programme, which included almost everything that was taught to regular army personnel, but with the additional advantage of being taught how to handle all manner of unimaginably sophisticated weapons. Plus, of course, all the complex technical aspects of modern seacraft.

But were still not over-unimpressed. Bush people that we were, sea warfare mattered little to us. After all, to us, the only "guns" were -- those used to kill grass-cutters, squirrels and antelopes!

However, as luck would have it, I had a personal experience of how effective our Navy can be in defending our national interest when I became editor of the Daily Graphic in 1970. At the time, there was a massive reappraisal of the viability of the state enterprises which the Nkrumah regime had established before it was overthrown on 24 February 1966. Among the enterprises at risk was the State Fishing Corporation.

Say what you like about it, it was a very useful state enterprise. It opened “Cold Stores” all over the place where frozen fish was available at reasonable prices. Because its prices were reasonable, market women and private cold-store owners didn’t like the Corporation at all. For its existence threatened the enormous profits such private fish retailers had been known to make. So they lobbied the National Liberation Council (NLC) heavily against the existence of the Corporation.

They accused the Fishing Corporation staff of favouritism, smuggling, corruption and many other malpractices. Some of these accusations were justified, but in using them against the Corporation, the interested parties conveniently ignored the sardines, pilchards and tuna fish which the Corporation had been providing for canning locally, and which were put on the market at affordable prices.

The lobbying was, of course, successful with the NLC regime, which was openly hostile to anything “socialist” that Nkrumah left behind. When the Progress Party Government came to power in October 1969, this hostility continued through some of the PP apparatchiks, who had also wielded influence during the NLC days. As if industrialization was an invention of the Nkrumah regime, the dismantling of state enterprises was applied across the board -- Abbott Laboratories of the USA was practically "given" the GIHOC Pharmaceutical Corporation as a gift to please the US Government -- a transaction so transparently one-sided that even a non-socialist intellectual like Dr Jones Ofori Atta was inspired to lead a most brilliant attack on it. Through the efforts of himself and several courageous journalists, that heinous transfer of ownership died. Also affected was the Bonsaso Rubber Factory (handed to Firestone Company of the USA) and a factory that produced batteries locally.

As I have already stated, among the organizations most intensively targeted in the purge of state enterprises was the State Fishing Corporation.

And the most valuable possessions of the State Fishing Corporation were a number of fishing trawlers bought from the Soviet Union. The mere fact that they were “Russian trawlers” annoyed some of the ideologues in the PP Government, especially, Dr Kwame Safo-Adu, the Minister of Agriculture. But he could also have had ulterior, non-ideological motives.

Anyway, he decided to sell the trawlers!!

Opposition Members of Parliament, led by Mr Alex Hutton-Mills, kicked up a stink about the proposed sale of the trawlers, not necessarily because they approved of state enterprises themselves, but mainly because they suspected that the trawlers were being sold to the business associates of faceless PP Government high-ups! So, they got the Speaker of Parliament refer the proposed sale to Parliamentary committee.

However, the committee was made to sit in private!

I didn’t like that one bit: why were public matters being investigated under the cloak of secrecy?

So I pestered MPs I knew, asking them for facts, and it slowly emerged through leaks from the committee that the putative buyer of the trawlers was a British businessman called Victor L. Passer. All that was then known about him was that he operated from an office at Crawford Street, London, England!

How had an unknown British businessman got to know about trawlers bought from Russia by Ghana and why did he want to buy them? Obviously, something very “fishy” (pun intended!) was going on! Were foreign intelligence agencies involved? (Russian trawlers were known to act often as disguised spy-boats!) So, nothing could be dismissed from the affair.

Well, as the Parliamentary enquiry went on, I got wind of some of the details regarding the relationship between Passer and the trawlers, and I published them all in the Daily Graphic. My view was that since public money was used to buy the trawlers to benefit the public, the public was entitled to know all about the proposed transaction. Was it in the public interest for the trawlers to be sold? It was up to the public to say and they could only have a say if they has the facts. The Daily Graphic was a publicly-owned enterprise. And so it would give the public the facts.

Ha -- some of the MPs on the Parliamentary committee (which, no doubt, included allies of Dr Safo-Adu) strenuously objected to the publication in the Graphic of details regarding a matter on which a Parliamentary enquiry was being conducted. They got the Speaker at the time, Nii Amaa Ollenu, to write a stern letter to me to explain why I should not be summoned to come to Parliament to defend myself against a charge of “contempt of Parliament”!

But as providence would have it, even as I was preparing my defence against the potential charge of “contempt of Parliament,” something most extraordinary happened.

I got an anonymous telephone call on my direct line (!) telling me that: “VICTOR PASSER IS SNEAKING AWAY WITH THE BOATS!”

I thought this was very rich indeed: the sovereign Parliament of Ghana was in the process of examining the proposed sale of trawlers belonging to the state of Ghana and the potential buyer was taking the trawlers away before our Parliament had established whether the sale was in the public interest or not?

I immediately rang up the office of the Prime Minister, Prof. K A Busia.

I spoke to his Executive Secretary, Mr Boye-Anawoma.

Within minutes, he called back to say that -- the boats were being recalled before they left Ghanaian waters! The Ghana Navy had been ordered to board them and bring them back to Tema port, he specified.

I rushed to Tema with a photographer. We saw some Navy personnel waiting on the quays for the boats to be brought back. I introduced myself to them and one of the officers suggested that when the boats got near enough, I should go in a Gemini “dinghy” to meet them!

I accepted with alacrity.

Now, I had never been to sea before, and the Gemini dingy wasn’t the most comfortable of sea-faring crafts. But the adrenalin pumping in me summoned up for me, the courage of ‘Sinbad the Sailor’!

I mounted the craft. The up and down movement of the sea waves predictably played serious tricks with my innards. But I stayed on board and my dingy headed the convoy of trawlers and naval vessels, as they made their way back to port.

The next day’s Daily Graphic had one of the most memorable front pages the paper has ever had:

“BACK TO BATAAN!” it read.

“Back to Bataan”?

Yes! A Hollywood film of that title, based on a heroic adventure by American soldiers during the Second World War, had been very popular when it was shown in Ghana. The title had caught on with many Ghanaians and whenever something was “reversed”, people said it was “Back to Bataan!” The expression was particularly popular in the game of “MONOPOLY”: the card that reads, “GO BACK TO JAIL!” was usually rendered as “Back to Bataan”.

But a few days later, the boats were eventually allowed to sail away, under the ownership of Mr Victor L. Passer! He took them to Brazil, where I am sure he sold them for a tidy profit. The Busia Government never explained why it had allowed them to go, but I was sure Busia had come under strong pressure from the British Government to respect an “agreement” between a Ghanaian Ministry and a British businessman. Dr Kwame Safu-Adu had thus triumphed over the national interests of Ghana.

But although I felt depressed by the denouement of that episode, I took consolation from the fact that the Ghana Navy proved its readiness to effectively serve the national interest of Ghana, at a moment's notice.This is good to know, especially now that we have oil-drilling installations to defend. Apart from petroleum, our offshore riches include fish. So we must support our Navy very well indeed.

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