Your Ghana, My Ghana: Ghana’s wasted revolution

At Independence in 1957, Ghana’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita was slightly higher than South Korea’s. 

Under General Park Chung Hee, who led a coup in May 1961 and ruled the country for 18 years, South Korea went on to become one of East Asia’s “miracle” economies.

By contrast, Kwame Nkrumah’s promise to “transform the Gold Coast into a paradise” was shot down in 1966 when he was overthrown in a coup the CIA says it orchestrated. 

Today, Ghana’s per capita GDP is estimated at around $2,238 while South Korea’s is $32,344 (2023 estimates).

For decades, the East Asian economic miracle was touted as a market success story. But we now know that it was more a story of interventionism and state autonomy.  

“State autonomy” refers to the ability of a state to make decisions and implement policies, without being unduly influenced by external forces or domestic interest groups.  These include policies to override the market and drive industrialisation strategy.

State autonomy in developing economies is not often tolerated by western powers on the grounds that it can come at the expense of human rights. 

Advance of Communism

But after Japan was defeated in World War II, western powers feared the advance of communism. Needing a bulwark against China, they allowed the four East Asian countries  — South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore — the autonomy to develop their “tiger” economies in record time.

General Park gave generous subsidies to South Korea’s chaebols, or family-owned conglomerates, and developed new strategic industries, such as shipbuilding. But these subsidies came with strict targets and exacting punishments for non-compliance.

Park, who went on to serve three terms as an elected president, used the fight against communism to justify repression and to control the press, the universities, opposition parties and the judiciary.

In Ghana, by contrast, Nkrumah’s attempts to impose discipline on the Ghanaian economy were denounced as “dictatorship”. Despite embarking on an array of forward-looking economic projects that still stand out as unparalleled in Ghana’s economic history, he was overthrown and reviled.

His projects were decried as “white elephants” and the history books were rewritten to tarnish his name. 

Thirteen years after Nkrumah’s overthrow, Ghana again had a chance to curate its own development model when Flt Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings burst dramatically onto the political stage on June 4, 1979.

After the handover to President Hilla Limann in September 1979 and during the interregnum before his “second coming” on December 31st 1981, university campuses in Accra, Cape Coast and Kumase became hives of ideological debate between students and lecturers on revolutionary theory and praxis.

Groups sympathetic to Rawlings included the June Fourth Movement, New Democratic Movement, Pan-African Youth Movement, Movement on National Affairs, People’s 

Revolutionary League of Ghana and Kwame Nkrumah Revolutionary Guards.

Many of their debates turned on Marxist concepts such as the “objective” and “subjective conditions” for revolution to occur.

Even if Ghana had a subjective longing for revolutionary change, the comrades debated, did it have the objective conditions that would allow a revolution to flourish and sustain itself?

Did the material and social conditions exist for a socialist revolution that would go beyond mere populism?

Some comrades said they did not and distanced themselves from JJ Rawlings very soon after the December 31st ‘revolution’. 

Others believed there was revolutionary potential and threw themselves into setting up new forms of social organisation. 

They organised people’s defence committees (PDC), workers defence committees (CDR), people’s shops and, later, committees for the defence of the revolution. 

These were exciting times for anyone who embraced change, but the fall-out came early. The revolution was divided between those who saw the East as the natural ally and those who turned to the West.

In early 1982, some comrades had gone to the East to look for funds for the revolution but came back empty handed.

From October 1982, disgruntled soldiers launched a season of coup attempts. Some were rumours, some real attempts. 

As confusion reigned, many comrades fell out with JJ and the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) regime for differing reasons. Many scrambled into exile. Some lost their lives. 

Significant coup attempt

The most significant of these coup attempts occurred on June 19th, 1983, when rebels led by Lance Corporal Halidu Gyiwah moved from Burma Camp to capture Broadcasting House and it took the daring intervention of Captain Courage Quarshigah, a JJ loyalist, to land a helicopter atop the GBC building and take to the air waves to declare the coup attempt quashed.

Over this entire period, the Ghanaian economy faced some of its worst trials. The economy was already on its knees after the “lost decade” of the 1970s. The years 1982/1983 were particularly challenging. 

During the worst drought in living memory, tomatoes shrunk to the size of small peppers and the ground became so hard that almost no tubers could be dug up. Unripe, green pawpaw was added to stews because there was no okro, garden egg or kontommire. 

fires raged through forests and savannah farmlands, destroying crops and livestock. As food became scarce, people joked about the “Rawlings chain” produced by the protrusion of bones around the neck of almost all Ghanaians.

In the midst of this, the country had to absorb an exodus of 1 million Ghanaians, expelled by Nigeria in January 1983 in a population movement widely referred to as “Ghana Must Go”.

Everyone who lived through that period has a story to tell. 

In August 1983, with just two months of import cover left, the PNDC signed an agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This came as a shock to many comrades.

Gaddafi support

It had been expected that Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi would support the Ghana revolution with cash. His Green Book was passed between student study groups. He and his legendary entourage of female bodyguards visited Accra in 1987. But by then Ghana had already signed a series of IMF agreements.

Jerry Rawlings survived for 20 years in power not just because he was a strongman who knew how to crack the whip and still win elections, but because he genuinely won the hearts of people through qualities such as his hands-on approach to problem solving, natural charisma, loyalty to friends, respect for tradition and love for the people.

These qualities enabled him to transition from coup leader to twice successful presidential candidate.

In a sense, Ghana wasted the opportunity to use the state autonomy that Jerry Rawlings wielded to deliver a new, non-colonial model of development. 

Though Rawlings lacked the ideological conviction of a Kwame Nkrumah, he could have been the African General Park, a strongman with the wherewithal to protect the developmental state and deliver a more robust model of industrial development than the weakly articulated, lower middle income capitalist country that is today’s Ghana.

Today, in neighbouring Burkina Faso, we have a new strongman in the person of Captain Ibrahim Traore who could potentially play that role in the region.

In addition to the example left by assassinated Burkinabe revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara in the 1980s, are there lessons from Ghana’s extraordinary experience that can benefit the Burkinabe revolution?

Join us in our upcoming episode of “Your Ghana, My Ghana” on Graphic Online TV to discuss this topic with some members of the erstwhile revolutionary groups in Ghana that sought to give ideological coherence to the revolutionary movement.
 
The author is a journalist and economic historian specialising in economic development.