by Guy Arnold
COUNTRY POPULATION (,000) DENSITY (sq.km.)1
Gambia, The 364 32
Ghana 9,026 38
Liberia 1,171 11
Sierra Leone 2,512 35
Nigeria 55,074 60
Dahomey
2,686
24
Guinea 3,921 16
Ivory Coast 4,310 13
Mali 4,438 4
Mauritania 1,171 1
Niger 4,016 3
Senegal 3,925 20
Togo 1,862 33
Upper Volta 5,384 20
Cameroon
5,836
12
Central African Republic 1,612 3
Chad 3,706 3
Congo (Brazzaville) 936 3
Gabon 500 2
‘The great contrast in West Africa is between the southern forest zone and the northern savannah lands. The forest has here been the area of difficulty – difficult to penetrate and difficult to settle without the importation of alien food crops.’2 Apart from this distinction, the vast size of some of these countries with their tiny populations made effective central government extremely difficult to exercise. In political terms the crucial factor setting immediate post-independence parameters for the whole region was the colonial background that had seen West Africa divided between the British and French. Most of this huge area had belonged to French West and French Equatorial Africa and almost all the Francophone states, the exceptions being Guinea and, for a time, Mali, maintained close post-independence relations with France, which was to keep military bases in Central African Republic, Gabon, Ivory Coast and (sometimes) Chad. Most of these states would also remain bound to France economically through the franc zone, which provided for the free movement of currency among its members and gave them a guaranteed franc exchange rate. Members of the franc zone were Dahomey, Upper Volta, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo (Brazzaville), Gabon, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo although Mali left the franc zone in 1962 to establish its own currency but was obliged to rejoin it in 1968. Guinea was punished for its intransigence in 1958 by being expelled and Mauritania also decided to leave.
The exceptions to France’s dominance of the region were the British enclaves along the West African coast: Nigeria, the colossus of West Africa, Ghana, Sierra Leone and The Gambia; Liberia; Portuguese Guinea (later Guinea-Bissau), Cape Verde, São Tomé and Principe; and Spanish Equatorial Guinea consisting of Rio Muni and the island of Fernando Po. Any consideration of political problems and slow economic development must take account of the size of these territories related to their populations and their spread.
AN ECONOMIC OVERVIEW
It is impossible to over-emphasize the extent to which the pattern of economic development had already been set along lines favourable to the metropolitan powers prior to independence. This was not simply a question of the direction of trade but of who had been given control: ‘In all the West African territories, with the exception of Guinea and possibly of Mali and Ghana, the colonial Power not only set a ceiling upon the economic potentialities of Africans but also largely determined who would be given access to political power… overall economic control remained in the hands of expatriates. The possession of political power was not the same as the possession of economic power.’3 Moreover, the colonial governments were only prepared to hand over power on a territorial basis, within the frontiers that they themselves had once drawn on the map. During the 1960s almost all oppositions disappeared and by 1967 only Sierra Leone and The Gambia had legal oppositions and in those two cases they were totally ineffective. In general the new leaders played down tribalism as a threat to the new state. The real division, which quickly became apparent, was that between the new elites and the rest and already by the middle of the decade there were growing signs of popular disillusionment with the new rulers. Attempts to change the inherited patterns of trade were made especially by Ghana, Guinea and Mali but the more conservative states such as Nigeria also tried to alter the balance of their trade relations. The expatriate presence remained pervasive in government, educational and commercial levels for years after independence and in some cases was crucial to the smooth working of the state. There were considerable differences in the British and French approaches.
British policy was on the whole pragmatic, able to accommodate both Kwame Nkrumah and the Sardauna of Sokoto and the very different parties they led. French policy was in contrast guided by doctrine and attempted to treat its possessions in West Africa as a whole. Both powers were, of course, attempting to ensure that any African leaders to whom they handed political power would be sympathetic to their long-term economic and strategic interests.4
By 1967, with the fall of Nkrumah, the collapse of Mali’s independent economic experiment and Guinea entering a period of crisis, the West could relax for the would-be radicals were in disarray. Instead, moderate pro-Western leaders were in the ascendant: Presidents Houphouët-Boigny in the Ivory Coast or M’ba in Gabon were the guardians of French interests in the region while Gen. Ankrah had brought Ghana back into the Western capitalist fold. By this date, moreover, the process of aid-giving had been formalized and the rich countries were providing enough to ‘buy off’ the poor revolutionaries whose anti-Western instincts were reduced by a relatively small inflow of dollars, pounds or francs. More important for the future were the changes to its aid policy announced by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in April 1967. Following the Korry report of the US Ambassador to Ethiopia, USAID decided, as far as possible, to co-ordinate its aid programmes with other donors through the international agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and either channel aid to the few countries that had the most favourable prospects (from a Western point of view) or concentrate on regional projects. This new policy signalled the rise of the international agencies as the arbiters of development in the Third World. The failure of the radical states to keep to their independent development paths and the growth of aid dependency suggested that few states in this whole vast region could be considered as economically viable.
The belief that a constant inflow of foreign investment was crucial to development was generated at this time and for small economies such investment becomes a far more significant planning factor than it does for larger ones. Most West African countries were also subject to export instability because they were mainly dependent upon primary exports of agricultural commodities or minerals while a large part of their import expenditure was on manufactures and services whose prices were less changeable than those of primary products. Although in the 1960s the GNP growth rate was fairly rapid and more or less in line with the growth of populations, this did not provide an accurate measure of developing wealth whether nationally or on a per capita basis. Agriculture, which accounted for 50 per cent of GDP in the region as a whole in 1960, had been reduced to less than 30 per cent by 1979 while industry – mining, manufacturing, construction and public utilities – had expanded from 15 to nearly 40 per cent although this was a lopsided picture resulting from the huge structural changes in Nigeria as a result of oil. In 1960 Nigeria contributed 45 per cent of West Africa’s GDP but by 1979 this had risen to 70 per cent. As a general rule aid inflows were more than compensated for by net outflows. This is well summed up as follows: ‘Some of the countries in the region, such as Upper Volta, dispose of more income nationally than they produce domestically. In others, like the Ivory Coast and Liberia, there are large net outflows of factor payments and current transfers, attributable to their employment of foreign owned capital and immigrant labour.’5
Although self-sufficiency in agriculture was generally accepted as desirable, many countries of the region faced rising import bills for food products that were the result of rising living standards and the demand for foods which could not be economically produced at home. A majority of staple exports were agricultural and while countries such as Ivory Coast were efficient producers of food commodities for export they were not
similarly efficient in substituting for the rising list of food imports. Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s the composition of exports, agricultural commodities and minerals, did not change very much for most West African countries. Only Nigeria with its rapidly expanding oil industry provided a major exception to this rule. Thus, in 1960 Nigeria’s main exports were cocoa, groundnuts and palm produce, which together accounted for 80 per cent of exports. By 1980 they had been reduced to only 2.5 per cent. What did persist throughout these years was the huge differential in pay made to expatriates and Africans working in comparable formalized employment. The Francophone economies were far smaller than the two leading Anglophone economies in 1960 when Nigerian exports accounted for 36 per cent of total West African exports while Ghana came next with 22 per cent.
Aid at this period probably made less impact upon the economies of West Africa than it did upon education or health programmes although most countries were acquiring all the techniques necessary to impress would-be donors with their needs. Even then, unfortunately, the belief that aid was essential to development had been implanted in the thinking of the political elites and the consequent debt trap was a rapidly growing problem. Donor governments, with occasional exceptions, used their aid programmes for political purposes: to repay debts, to undermine political (which generally meant radical) opposition and to maintain behind the scenes political controls and more overt economic ones. Aid was not in fact given either to relieve poverty or to reduce inequality. The concept of aid was closely aligned to the idea that foreign direct investment was crucial to development although at least one economist rejected this approach: ‘The doctrine that investment governs growth is both unhistorical and, from a strictly economic standpoint, untheoretical. It survives not only because of intellectual conservatism, but also because commercial interests are entrenched in flows of government contracts and international aid.’6 Aid and the commercial interests of the donors went hand in hand from the beginning.
The United Nations was becoming increasingly concerned with the rapid increases in population then taking place in many countries of the Third World. Such increases were seen as an added burden upon small developing economies and development assistance had to take predicted increases into account. However, an altogether different view of population growth is given by the economist Douglas Rimmer: ‘Increase of population through maintenance or increase of a rate of fertility in face of falling infant and child mortality rates may be a source of values far greater, to those personally concerned, than any loss sustained in economic output averaged per head.’7 In fact, the growth of population was not a matter of great concern in West Africa at this time. Of far greater importance was the growing migration of job seekers and those wishing to improve their general standard of living from the rural to the urban areas. They swelled the ranks of the urban unemployed, caused labour shortages in the rural areas, and strained resources, which were used to deal with social problems at the expense of productive investment. Such problems did not prevent the rural exodus. The towns attracted the rural migrants for sound social reasons: they offered greater educational opportunities and health care, as well as greater availability of electricity, water and sanitation and such opportunities, as primitive as they might be, were still better than anything that was available in the rural areas.
Assessments of development are too often and too readily determined by figures for GDP growth yet parallel developments are as important. In West Africa during the 1960s there were significant advances in education and these are reflected in figures for educational enrolments over the years 1960 to 1979. Between those years enrolments as a whole rose from approximately 4.8 million in 1960 to 16.4 million in 1977: that is, a 30 to 60 per cent increase in primary enrolment, and a 3 to 12 per cent increase in secondary enrolment. Primary enrolment over this period increased from 4.6 million to 14.1 million; secondary enrolment from 200,000 to over 2 million; teachers in training from 37,000 to 159,000; and students in higher education from 6,000 to 117,000. Much of this increase was in Nigeria where, in 1960, primary school enrolments stood at 2.9 million, secondary enrolments (including trainee teachers) at 160,000 and students in higher education at 3,000. Official Nigerian statistics for 1978–79 showed the new figures to be 11.5 million, 1.5 million and 108,000 respectively while projected primary enrolment then stood at 17 million for 1984–85.8
GHANA AND THE NKRUMAH FACTOR
We have already seen Nkrumah the political visionary pushing for African unity; at home, however, the story was different. ‘Inside Ghana his slogan was “Seek ye first the political kingdom”. He was quick to seize and hold power, but he was far too impatient and dogmatic for the hard slog of day-to-day government. His regime, born of naïve idealism, sank into single-party authoritarianism. He ruined the Ghana economy as his grandiose foreign policy initiatives collapsed one by one.’9 Constantly and foolishly Nkrumah managed to upset other African leaders. He broke up various West African joint boards such as the West African Airways Board, which he considered to be relics of colonialism. Other more pragmatic West African states such as Nigeria saw these boards as a means of fostering closer regional union. In part Nkrumah’s huge influence in both West Africa and beyond had arisen as a result of Ghana’s independence ahead of other colonies in the region (and that was certainly his own achievement) but when in 1960 a further 14 West African countries became independent the balance had changed and other leaders, who wished for their own limelight, were not content to live in his shadow and ‘While he had from the first offered to surrender part of Ghana’s sovereignty in the cause of African unity, few others were ready to give up any vestige of their newly won independence, and regarded Nkrumah’s claims for African unity with suspicion’.10 Even so, Ghana was to continue in the role of mouthpiece for the genuinely independent African states for some time after 1960 and there was at least some truth in Nkrumah’s claim that the Francophone states were puppets of France, which continued to provide 80 per cent of their budgets. As all his overtures for unity were repulsed – Nkrumah offered aid in turn to Mali, Guinea, Upper Volta in part at least to induce them to support his unity plans – he became increasingly isolated. He met the nadir of his unity hopes during the OAU Summit Conference at the end of July 1964 in Cairo. On that occasion when he had argued that only a Union Government of Africa could guarantee the African’s survival, his concept of African unity was demolished by President Nyerere of Tanzania. Nyerere had once translated Julius Caesar into Swahili and on this occasion he used Mark Anthony’s technique in his funeral oration over Caesar, periodically referring to ‘the great Osagyefo’ (the title meaning Redeemer that Nkrumah had begun to apply to himself) and then pulling apart Nkrumah’s arguments. Nyerere rather than Nkrumah had the support of the majority of the OAU and the occasion must have been a humiliating one for Nkrumah.
In any case, by then, the tide was turning against Nkrumah in Ghana itself. There had been an assassination attempt on him at Kulungugu in August 1962 and the trial of the three principal suspects had lasted for more than a year. The pro-Nkrumah press had assumed a conviction but at the end of 1963 the Chief Justice, Sir Arku Korsah, handed down a verdict of not guilty. Nkrumah reacted angrily by dismissing the Chief Justice and pushing a bill through the Assembly to give the President (himself) the power, in the national interest, to set aside any judgment in the country’s courts. Huge protests, from both within and outside Ghana, followed and many erstwhile friends assumed that he was now intent on setting up a dictatorship. By 1965 it seemed that everything was going wrong for Nkrumah: there had been two assassination attempts, his state enterprises were failing, there were growing pressures from the left, he was in urgent need of Western aid for the completion of the giant Volta Dam project and his overtures were constantly rejected by other African leaders. One of his last constructive acts, which gained him prestige in Africa, was his suggestion at the Commonwealth Summit of 1965 in London that a secretariat should be created – and th
is was adopted. He also managed to have the question of UDI in Rhodesia (declared on 11 November 1965) brought before the Security Council. Despite these positive achievements Nkrumah continued in the face of the rest of African opinion to insist that everything that went wrong did so because there was no union government for the continent. In fact Africa faced more mundane problems at the time, most notably those connected with the establishment of sound government. In his last attempt to play a major role on the world stage, Nkrumah left Ghana on 21 February 1966 for China and Hanoi on a peacekeeping mission for Vietnam. The effort was doomed to failure for the day after his departure the Ghanaian Army carried out a coup and seized power.
Nkrumah was derided after his fall and his enemies, who were many, proceeded to tear his reputation apart. His impact, nonetheless, had been profound: in Ghana as the architect of independence; in Africa as the (ultimately rejected) idealist; and in the West as a dangerous radical, not because he turned to the Communists but because he refused to be subservient to Western interests. Indeed, Western paranoia about Nkrumah was demonstrated by the lengths to which the West, led by the CIA, went to get rid of him. The ex-CIA agent John Stockwell, testifies to this in his book In Search of Enemies in which he says, ‘The CIA station in Ghana played a major role in the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah in 1966…’11, while a detailed investigation by West Africa in 2001 revealed the extent of the Western conspiracy to destroy him.12 A different kind of judgement about Nkrumah was made by John Hatch, a main-line member of the British Labour Party, who said: ‘Since independence, Ghana has on several occasions been the butt of hostile criticism in the British press. Much of this has been malicious, expressed by the same people who have never been reconciled to accepting Indians or other non-whites as full and equal members of the Commonwealth.’13 Nkrumah’s determination to throw off the post-independence shackles of a reluctantly departing imperialism made him many enemies, including African ones who were content to allow such shackles to remain if they kept them in power. As another commentator put it: ‘Since the fall of Nkrumah in Ghana in 1966, less had been heard of European interference in African affairs, and more of inadequate European support for Africa.’14