Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley’s vis­it to Ghana re­mind­ed me of the con­nec­tion that our coun­try shared.

Ghana’s first prime min­is­ter Kwame Nkrumah’s men­tors were our CLR James, who taught him “how an un­der­ground move­ment worked” and Arou­ca-born George Pad­more, who took him in as a stu­dent and ed­u­cat­ed him on Pan-African­ism. Pad­more has a Ghana­ian street and av­enue named af­ter him.

Nkrumah led Ghana to in­de­pen­dence, the first sub-Sa­ha­ran African coun­try to do so, which in­spired oth­er African coun­tries to fol­low. He es­poused, “the ide­ol­o­gy of a New Africa, in­de­pen­dent and free from im­pe­ri­al­ism”. He was a na­tion­al­ist and so­cial­ist.

Nkrumah was de­posed in 1966 by a CIA-backed coup that sup­port­ed pri­vati­sa­tion. Fol­low­ing the coup, Ghana re­aligned it­self in­ter­na­tion­al­ly, with the West­ern Bloc, invit­ing the IMF and the World Bank in. Re­gret­tably, this start­ed the era of eco­nom­ic im­pe­ri­al­ism.

Cold War pol­i­tics, pow­er-hun­gry young sol­diers, and eco­nom­ic in­duce­ments saw a tu­mul­tuous his­to­ry with a se­ries of coups. This oc­curred un­til Jer­ry Rawl­ings in­tro­duced elec­tions in 1992. Since then, there have been six elec­tions with the peace­ful tran­si­tion­ing of pow­er.

In Jan­u­ary 2024, Ber­nice Owusu pub­lished Ghana’s Democ­ra­cy un­der the Fourth Re­pub­lic: A Case for Po­lit­i­cal and Eco­nom­ic Lib­er­al­i­sa­tion in Africa. He wrote: “De­spite its com­mend­able suc­cess over the past 30 years, there are still some crit­i­cal chal­lenges that need to be ad­dressed, in­clud­ing low po­lit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion, cor­rup­tion, favouritism, nepo­tism, ex­treme po­lit­i­cal po­lar­i­sa­tion, win­ner-takes-all men­tal­i­ty, and politi­ci­sa­tion of il­le­gal min­ing.”

This sounds fa­mil­iar, doesn’t it?

The An­nals of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Craio­va for Jour­nal­ism, Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and Man­age­ment, Vol­ume 9, 2023, wrote on the World Bank sus­pen­sion of a $100 mil­lion wa­ter project, “due to a $5 mil­lion pay­ment up front by En­ron, which Ghana news­pa­pers claimed to have been used to bribe gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials to win con­tracts for its in­ter­na­tion­al oil, gas, and wa­ter busi­ness­es”.

Both the op­po­si­tion leader John Ma­hama and Pres­i­dent Aku­fo-Ad­do have had very close elec­tion vic­to­ries and each moved un­suc­cess­ful­ly with le­gal chal­lenges to change the elec­toral out­comes. Aku­fo-Ad­do in 2012 and Ma­hama in 2020.

Aku­fo-Ad­do vir­tu­al­ly won the 2017 elec­tion on an an­ti-cor­rup­tion plat­form against the Ma­hama gov­ern­ment, which was rocked by many cor­rup­tion scan­dals

In his May 11 pub­li­ca­tion, Fight­ing Cor­rup­tion Can’t be left to Politi­cians, Dr Samuel Kofi Dark­wa wrote, “The ex­pec­ta­tion was that all those in­volved in cor­rupt deals were to face the full rigour of the law. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, how­ev­er, once Aku­fo-Ad­do as­sumed of­fice, the nu­mer­ous cor­rup­tion scan­dals un­der the Ma­hama regime have not been dealt with, and his gov­ern­ment has al­so been rocked with many cor­rup­tion scan­dals …Politi­cians and mil­i­tary ad­ven­tur­ists have been known to ride on the is­sue to gain pow­er, but they do lit­tle to ad­dress it. In­stead, they tend to be­come more cor­rupt and fail to ful­fil their promis­es to the peo­ple.”

He added, “When out of gov­ern­ment, they of­ten crit­i­cise state in­sti­tu­tions cre­at­ed to fight cor­rup­tion and promise to re­form them once they come to pow­er. How­ev­er, once in pow­er, they tend to ap­point their peo­ple to these in­sti­tu­tions to pro­tect their cor­rupt ac­tiv­i­ties, amass more wealth to per­pet­u­ate them­selves in of­fice, and ha­rass their op­po­nents. As a re­sult, politi­cians do not trust these in­sti­tu­tions when they are out of gov­ern­ment but claim to trust them once they are in pow­er….The way peo­ple get in­to pub­lic of­fices must be re­vis­it­ed. Mer­i­toc­ra­cy rather than par­ti­san con­sid­er­a­tions should dri­ve re­cruit­ment in­to pub­lic of­fice if we are to make any head­way in the fight against cor­rup­tion.”

Leti­cia Os­ei re­port­ed that the Kel­niGVG Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions scan­dal saw, “No due dili­gence and haste in sign­ing a 180 mil­lion dol­lar con­tract as the min­istry of fi­nance signed a con­tract on Mon­day af­ter it was pre­sent­ed with it on Fri­day.”

The Na­tion­al Cathe­dral scan­dal il­lus­trat­ed Pres­i­dent Aku­fo-Ad­do at­tempts to build a cathe­dral. Kent Men­sah wrote, “The $400m state-fund­ed church has be­come huge­ly con­tro­ver­sial in Ghana, even as the coun­try pur­sues an IMF loan due to huge debt ($45B) and eco­nom­ic woes…rents, fu­el and trans­port prices have risen.”

This re­mind­ed me of a tem­ple some­one want­ed to build in T&T.

Ghana’s Trans­paren­cy In­ter­na­tion­al branch high­light­ed the gov­ern­ment’s in­ten­tion of “sell­ing 49 per cent of its gold min­ing leas­es to an off­shore com­pa­ny—Agya­pa Roy­al­ties Ltd—reg­is­tered in the no­to­ri­ous­ly se­cre­tive British Crown De­pen­den­cy of Jer­sey in the British Is­lands…we re­main con­vinced that the pro­posed sale would serve cor­rupt in­ter­ests and not the peo­ple of Ghana”.

A spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor ap­point­ed in 2018 to root out cor­rup­tion re­signed, cit­ing “po­lit­i­cal in­ter­fer­ence” af­ter rais­ing this is­sue.

It is ap­par­ent that this proud na­tion that could boast of hav­ing the great Ashan­ti Em­pire and a vi­sion­ary leader like Kwame Nkrumah still needs res­cu­ing from im­pe­ri­al­ists and some of its cor­rupt politi­cians.