While Nkrumah strove to be Africa's Lenin, he also sought to become Ghana's Czar. It is even arguable that a Leninist Czar was what a country like Ghana needed for a while. Nkrumah's tragedy was a tragedy of excess, rather than of contradiction. He tried to be too much of a revolutionary monarch.

After Ghana's independence, Nkrumah's concept of organization became more clearly Leninist. The 'masses' were eulogized by CPP party ideologues right up to the end, but the party became increasingly elitist de facto. It got beyond even that, as authority became personified in Nkrumah himself- And in the end the CPP betrayed the very principle of organization on the basis of which it had once prevailed over its opponents.

Not long after independence the policy of harassing, and later persecuting, the regime's opponents was vigorously followed. Ideologues in Ghana turned their talents to the rationalization of a one-party state.

What was overlooked was the danger to the organizational health of the ruling party that too great a sense of security might bring. Lenin, in his State and 'Revolution, had expounded the Marxist prophecy of the 'withering away' of the state. But the risk which Ghana, as most other African countries, faced was the 'withering away' of the successful ruling party. Julius Nyerere saw this danger very soon after independence, but Nkrumah did not.

The formation of the United Party, a coalition of the regionalist parties like the NLM (Asante) and the NPC; (north) in October 1957, and the spread of the UP throughout the country alarmed the CPP. Therefore, Nkrumah's government introduced the Preventive Detention Bill (July 1958), which empowered the government to imprison without trial any person suspected of "activities prejudicial to the State's security'. This Act was designed to destroy the UP and thus avert the necessity of facing its challenge at the ballot box.

The Republic Constitution of July I960 gave the president further dictatorial powers, and retained the Preventive Detention Act. From 1960 to 1965. 1361 people were detained, including the opposition leaders J.B. Danquah and William Ofori Atta. Danquah died in prison. Other detainees included CPP leaders like Tawia Adamafio, Kofi Crabbe and Ako Adjei, innocent victims of Nkrumah's suspicion after the attempt on his life at Kulungugu in August 1962. New security organizations were set up to protect the President and to spy on actual and potential opponents.

The presidential Detail Department was run by Russians and the Special Intelligence unit was led by Ambrose Yankey, who employed spies throughout the country.

In the January 1964 plebiscite voters were required to decide whether Ghana was to become a one-party state and whether the President could dismiss High Court judges at any time for any reason. The voting was rigged, with 2 773 920 in favour and only 2452 against.

Finally, on the day of elections to parliament in 1965 Nkrumah announced on the radio the names of people whom he had selected as MPs and which constituencies they would represent. Some of the MPs did not know where their constituencies were. Thus Nkrumah destroyed the democracy in Ghana that he, more than any other man, had helped to create.

The destruction of the Ghanaian opposition meant that the extravagant personality cult of 'Osagyefo' (Redeemer) could be pursued without the restraints which a critical rival party might have imposed by its very existence in an open political system. The royalist or Czarist cult of Osagyefo helped to betray Nkrumah's old cry that 'We must organize as never before. The party of militant protest against British imperialism became a party of loyal protestations towards Osagyefo. To borrow the words of Dennis Austin, 'the effect was to reduce political life to" a barely discernible level of private conflict among his followers over the distribution of presidential favours'.9 To make the people's obedience more dependent on persuasion than on naked force, there is always a case for a limited personality cult.

Nkrumah's Czarist myths of splendour and sacred leadership might have served a purpose in Ghana's development. But Nkrumah carried it too far. He appeared to have become so obsessed with his own myths of grandeur that the whole organization of the Convention People's Party lost its inner efficiency.

                   

 Dr. Kwame Nkrumah posing with his newly married 25 year old Egyptian wife

Furthermore, the personality cult gradually made Nkrumah less and less accessible to frank advice. Presidential flatterers soon monopolized the business of advising the Osagyefo. This was bound to harm the level of decision-making in the country. The court of the Ghanaian Czar was soon intellectually impoverished - there were too few courtiers candid enough to warn the ruler against certain courses of action.

One of the reasons for the Ghanaian military coup of 1966 was the impossibility of f removing Nkrumah from power by constitutional means.

Another was the way he ruined the economy of Ghana by persisting in heavy public expenditure on socialist enterprises, at a time of falling cocoa prices when the country could not afford such expenditure. From 1957 to I960 Nkrumah, a socialist since the 1930s, deliberately followed a policy of laissez-faire that favoured foreign capitalists, though a number of European trading and mining companies and Syrian and Lebanese retail companies pulled out of the cocoa- buying field following their failure in competition with the United Ghana Farmers Council. The laissez-faire policy was pursued in order to attract foreign investment and financial support for the Volta River Project, which was the key to industrialization in Ghana, and the source of the country's hope of ending its neo-colonial dependence on Britain.

But by the end of I960 Nkrumah felt able to apply socialism in Ghana. By then the Americans had committed themselves to financing the Volta River Project. Moreover, the new Republican Constitution of July I960, which made Nkrumah President, gave him the powers he needed to force through socialism against any opposition. He could rule by 6 decree. From I960 he appointed socialists to key posts in the CPP, the Trade Union Congress, banks, the civil service and journalism. An Ideological Institute was created at Winneba in 1960-1 to provide socialist education to political leaders and administrators.

Between I960 and 1966 the state sector of the economy was greatly increased. The mining industry and cocoa marketing became scale monopolies. The state played the dominant role in banking and insurance, the import trade and construction. State-run farms and 27 state factories were established. Attempts were made to diversify the agricultural economy, as the government set up palm-oil and rubber plantations in the south-west. Then on 23 January 1966, the government-owned Volta River Project was officially opened.

However, Nkrumah's socialist programme helped to drive Ghana into bankruptcy by the end of 1964. The state-owned industries and corporations failed, due to bad management, lack of skilled labour and lack of raw materials. An acute shortage of essential goods including drugs, sugar, milk, rice, flour, cement, raw materials for factories and spare parts for vehicles lasted from 1964 until the coup. Much of this was not Nkrumah's fault. The economic problems Ghana faced in the early 1960s were in large part caused by the dramatic fall in the price of cocoa on the world market.

Thus Ghana saw its principal source of foreign exchange decline precipitously at a time when the prices of imported industrial goods rose rapidly. However, Nkrumah was partly responsible for the collapse because he made no effort to trim his economic projects according to the fall in the price of cocoa. He could have saved Ghana from bankruptcy by reducing his industrialization programme and continued massive expenditure on health, housing and education; but he believed such a reduction would be surrender to the forces of neo-colonialism - a step that was unthinkable to the high priest of anti-neo- colonialist theory.