When Ghana attained independence in 1957, Kwame Nkrumah stood before the world and uttered words that shook the foundations of empire. He declared that the Black man was capable of managing his own affairs.
For Nkrumah, the declaration was neither a slogan nor a boast. It was a declaration of war against centuries of colonial contempt made by a Man who came with both purpose and a mission.
Unlike the shameless windbag politicians who infest Africa today, Nkrumah was a theoretician who believed ideas must walk on two legs.
He did not merely write scholarly, brilliant books about development; he attempted to build it.
He was in a hurry because he understood a simple truth: political independence without economic independence is merely a change of overseers on the plantation.
Something our current mis-rulers in Africa refuse to understand.
Across Ghana, factories sprang up like mushrooms after a tropical rainstorm. The Tema Industrial Complex became the beating heart of Nkrumah’s industrial vision.
The Volta River Project was conceived not merely to produce electricity but to power industries. There were shoe factories, textile mills, food-processing plants, machine-tool workshops, pharmaceutical ventures, and state enterprises designed to move Ghana from a raw-materials producer to a manufacturer of finished goods.
The Akosombo Dam was not built so Ghanaian politicians could pose for photographs. It was built to electrify a modern industrial state.
Nkrumah dreamed of steel mills when others were dreaming of imported Mercedes-Benzes.
He envisioned nuclear research and scientific advancement, even as many of today’s African leaders cannot provide uninterrupted electricity, after almost seventy years of ostensible independence.
He established the Ghana Atomic Energy Project because he understood that science and technology would determine the future balance of power among nations.
But empires do not tolerate independent minds among their subjects.
The imperial powers looked upon Nkrumah’s programmes with alarm. Here was an African leader demonstrating that the Black man could govern, industrialize, and innovate a modern nation without permission from London, Washington, or Paris.
Such an example was not only dangerous; it would set a dangerous precedent that must be disallowed at all costs.
Fortunately for the imperialists, as they always do, they found willing accomplices among Africa’s comprador class – the educated plantation supervisors masquerading as patriots.
The betrayal came from within. The coup of February 13, 1966, was presented as a rescue mission. In reality, it was an act of economic vandalism whose consequences continue to haunt Ghana six decades later.
Factories were abandoned. State industries were dismantled. Long-term development plans were discarded. Scientific ambitions were ridiculed.
Even Ghana’s atomic reactor programme was terminated, with key components eventually leaving the country. The vision of technological self-reliance was sacrificed on the altar of dependency.
The trajectory of Ghana’s development was clipped, like an eagle’s wings.
The country was gently but firmly returned to its assigned role in the colonial division of labor: a supplier of raw materials and a consumer of finished goods.
The plantation had to remain productive, and the plantation managers had to remain obedient.
The descendants of those who sabotaged Ghana’s industrial future now lecture us about economic management. They mock the dreams of Nkrumah while presiding over economies that manufacture little and import almost everything.
Ghana, like almost all African countries blessed with abundant natural resources, still imports products that it should have been manufacturing decades ago.
What greater indictment can there be as we look across Africa today?
Where is the industrial manufacturing base and the machine-tool industries?
Where are the indigenous automobile industries capable of competing globally?
Where are African technological giants?
Instead, sadly, Africa remains a vast extraction zone where foreign corporations arrive with briefcases and depart with fortunes.
Unconscionably, Africa exports cocoa and imports chocolate. It exports crude oil and imports refined petroleum, and exports minerals and imports finished electronics.
This is not development. This is the organized underdevelopment that Walter Rodney described in his classic, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
The tragedy is compounded by the fact that many Africans have become comfortable spectators in the destruction of their own future. They grumble in taxis, complain in drinking spots, and curse politicians in private conversations, yet surrender the public square to charlatans and thieves.
A sleeping people inevitably awaken in chains.
Nkrumah’s greatest betrayal was not merely the coup that removed him from office. His greatest betrayal was the abandonment of the vision he represented – the conviction that Africans could build modern industrial states with their own hands and for their own benefit.
The time has come for us Africans to awaken from our complacent somnambulism.
We must remember that spectators do not make history, and cynics do not transform nations.
The future belongs to citizens who participate, organize, demand accountability, and refuse to be treated as subjects on somebody else’s plantation.
That is the duty we owe both to our children and to those yet unborn.
And we owe it to Kwame Nkrumah, who dared to believe that the Black man was capable of managing his own affairs long before Africa’s plantation supervisors sold that birthright for a seat at the master’s table.
©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀làfẹ̀ (1st Dan)
(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Geopolitical Analyst.)
