Ujamaa inspired Tanzania into spending much of its meagre resources on liberating the rest of Africa and the world from the colonial yoke. At a time when Nairobi was drowning in crude elite grabbing, Dar es Salaam was a Mecca of the world’s national liberation movements, and a hotbed of global intellectual thought. From this perspective, it is justifiable to say that Mwalimu Julius Kambarage, son of Chief Nyerere, is the greatest and most successful leader that Africa has ever produced since the European colonial regime collapsed 50 years ago.
[ 'Mwalimu' Julius Kambarage Nyerere ] It takes extraordinary personal strength for a leader to admit in public that he is a failure.
Julius Nyerere is the only one I know who has ever done it.
Some time towards the end, he stood on a podium to announce that he had failed to achieve the social goal that had driven him into leadership.
But if you have genuinely tried, failure is to be respected.
Julius Nyerere is among the extremely few world leaders who have selflessly attempted great things for their national peoples.
Mwalimu Nyerere was the first — probably the only — African nationalist leader to cast a serious moral and intellectual eye upon Africa’s “extended family” tradition and weave a practical national development philosophy around it.
Ujamaa had two basic components.
The Ujamaa Village was an attempt to revive traditional rural communalism — bringing groups of villages together, investing collectively in them and running them through modern democratic precepts.
Since the turn of the 21st century, Kenya’s own leaders have divided and sub-divided what used to be called districts into veritable village units, claiming a purpose similar to “Nyerereism” — to bring utilities and social services “closer to the people.”
The second component was much more theoretically shaky — a series of nationalizations intended to bring urban commerce and industry under state control, the state purporting to be the public’s trustee.
But the 1967 Arusha Declaration in which this doctrine of “socialism and self-reliance” was enunciated opened a Pandora’s box of ideology. Ideas ran from the extreme right to others that were so leftist that, in the circular prism of ideas, they actually bordered on the right!
In a single-party system, all these ideas were forced to contend with one another within that party.
It was no wonder, then, that Marxist-Leninists, Bepari (capitalists) and even Kabaila (feudalists) held central positions both in the party and in government.
This, indeed, was where Nyerere began to reveal his greatness.
In other “socialist” situations — such as Sekou Toure’s Conakry — every thought and activity deemed dangerous would simply have been banned, often on pain of death.
Nyerere encouraged even his bitterest opponents to express themselves freely and without fear.
And he often took them on — not by means of such state machinery as our Nyayo House basement, but intellectually, replying to each critic point by point.
The Nationalist (the party’s own organ) and The Standard Tanzania (the government publication on which Ben Mkapa and I worked — later renamed Daily News) routinely published news, features, columns and letters expressing the most diverse views.
Nyerere demanded only that his detractors produce the facts and figures and weave these into cogent thought.
“Argue, don’t shout!” he once admonished his equivalents of the loudmouthed but empty-headed coalition that rules Kenya.
No, Mwalimu was not a revolutionary in any Marxist sense.
Like all of Africa’s petty bourgeois radicals in power at that time — Ben Bella, Kaunda, Keita, Nasser, Nkrumah, Obote, Ore — he rejected outright all of Marx and Lenin’s theories on class, revolution and party organisation.
His, said he, was a national mass movement in which every Tanzanian must participate.
Such a policy might sound noble, but it was what finally proved Dr Nyerere’s Achilles heel.
You cannot implement any “socialist” program except through a committed vanguard.
For his Ujamaa Village projects, he relied on the peasantry, a property-owning class whose members, as a rule, are interested only in their small individual property.
For his nationalization program, he relied on another property-owning class, what the Kiswahili Academy called vibwanyenye.
This propertied urban class was led by the educated elite who monopolized the civil service, the police, the provincial administration, the army, the classroom, the shrine — a social stratum deeply drilled right from the classroom in liberal Western individualism and self-pursuit.
In 1972, goaded by Idi Amin’s overthrow of Milton Obote — the ally across the Great Lake — Mwalimu issued a set of ruling-party “Guidelines” called Mwongozo, which, among other things, introduced an elaborate leadership code.
But to no avail. Soon the Ujamaa Village administrative network, as well as the two custodians of nationalized property — the National Development Corporation and the State Trading Corporation — were drowning in a well of corruption deeper than Lake Tanganyika.
Mwalimu reacted by decentralizing the leaderships of both those bodies and the central governance system — succeeding only in spreading bureaucratic ineptitude thinner on the ground, thus making corruption much more difficult to detect.
By replacing the colonial educational structure with what he called Elimu yenye Manufaa (“functional education“), he enabled Tanzania to kill up to five birds with one stone.
Tanzanian is the only African country that has totally banished illiteracy, and the Three Rs are solidly linked to vocational interests.
In the process, Tanzania became the African country with the highest degree of national self-consciousness and — through it and through Kiswahili — has almost annihilated the bane of Kenya that we call tribalism.
But, as a rule, internal policy is what guides a country’s foreign policy.
Any nation that tries to cultivate self-sufficiency, self-efficiency, self-respect and self-pride will find it morally compelling to share these ideals with other nations the world over.
Ujamaa inspired Tanzania into spending much of its meagre resources on liberating the rest of Africa and the world from the colonial yoke.
At a time when Nairobi was drowning in crude elite grabbing, Dar es Salaam was a Mecca of the world’s national liberation movements, and a hotbed of global intellectual thought.
From this perspective, it is justifiable to say that Mwalimu Julius Kambarage, son of Chief Nyerere, is the greatest and most successful leader that Africa has ever produced since the European colonial regime collapsed 50 years ago.
About The Author: Philip Ochieng — is a Kenyan Luo, and an Editor with the Nation Media Group. Like Obama Senior, he too went to the US on the famous Tom Mboya Airlift of 1959 [ when hundreds of Kenyan students were given scholarships to American universities ]. He first met Obama Senior in Tom Mboya’s Nairobi office [ Mboya was then the secretary general of the Kenya Federation of Labour ]. Obama and Ochieng met up again on returning to Nairobi and remained drinking buddies for many years.
Africa has produced many crazy dictators but none of them ever dreamt of turning into a one-man electoral commission like Nkrumah. In a yet to be broken record in the continent, the late Ghanaian leader ‘elected’ an entire parliament of 198 MPs single-handedly within minutes. In February 1966, while Nkrumah on a state visit to Vietnam, his government was overthrown in a military coup — backed by the CIA.
By: Rashid Suleiman
The behaviour must have been quite comical. An exiled former powerful president and hero of the African anti-colonial struggle cowering in his bedroom in fear, though nobody was really after him.
[A Young Nkrumah][Enlarge] Unbeknown to many, this was the other side of life Ghana’s founding father, Kwame Nkrumah, led in exile in Guinea-Conakry. This was despite holding the title of co-president bestowed upon him by his host, Ahmed Sekou Toure. In his home away from home, he spent most of his time hallucinating about his abduction and assassination by Western intelligence agents.
When his cook died in Conakry, he hoarded food in his bedroom fearing he would be poisoned. One of his waking nightmares was that someone was going through his mail.
While paranoia was the middle name of most African dictators of the one-party era, Nkrumah gave new meaning to the word. He saw plots against him everywhere even after he was overthrown.
At one time when he was in power and his country’s problems were mounting, he went underground because he feared assassination. His fears and insecurities led him to make the outlandish suggestion that Africa should form a standing army to repulse attacks by foreign troops. Other African leaders rightly saw it as a ploy by a paranoid man struggling to deal with his insecurities.
[President Nkrumah][Enlarge] Though Nkrumah is hailed in many quarters as a genuine African hero because of his rabid anti-imperialist stand and overzealous pursuit of Pan-African ideals, a look at his record reveals he was one of the worst dictators in the continent. Even his supposedly hallowed reputation as a Pan-Africanist par excellence is marred by his thinly veiled ambition to dominate the continent and his deliberate de-stabilisation of French-speaking Africa.
At one time, he threatened to organise a coup to remove Togo’s respected first President Sylvanus Olympio because of his pro-French leanings. When Olympio was overthrown and killed in black Africa’s first military takeover in 1963, even one of Nkrumah’s few friends, Sekou Toure, had had enough. The Guinean leader was fiercely anti-French, but he wasted no time in publicly criticising Nkrumah over the Togo coup and accused him of involvement.
Overzealous pursuits
In 1963, Nkrumah’s suggestion to form a union government of Africa was rejected after he was accused of harbouring ambitions to rule the entire continent. Many fellow African heads of state were always wary of him because his overzealous pursuit of Pan-African unity betrayed a grand plan to dominate the continent.
Nkrumah Calls For A United States of Africa
Nkrumah & Ghana’s 50th Celebration of Independence [Pt1]
On the domestic front, a liberal mixture of extreme paranoia, a verbose sense of grandeur, a misguided notion of messianic calling and know-it-all attitude turned Nkrumah into the worst dictator Ghana has ever seen.
Because he guided Ghana to become the first black African country to gain independence in 1957, it may be safe to say that later dictators in the continent learnt from his book of political tyranny. He set the stage and record for one-party dictatorship, personality cult, ruthless suppression of political opponents, detention without trial, paranoia, grandiose projects, economic mismanagement and election rigging.
Africa has produced many crazy dictators but none of them ever dreamt of turning into a one-man electoral commission like Nkrumah. In a yet to be broken record in the continent, the late Ghanaian leader ‘elected’ an entire parliament of 198 MPs single-handedly within minutes.
The moment of history was June 1965, when a Nkrumah-weary Ghana was poised for elections. On the morning of polling day, the Osagyefo (‘Redeemer‘) as Nkrumah was fondly known, entered the national radio station to announce there would be no election. He proceeded to read the names of those he had selected to become MPs and the areas they represented.
It was a fait accompli — the actions of a man who loved and worked to obtain absolute power. The move was inspired by Nkrumah’s deep fear that his enemies would win the elections, though Ghana was a one-party state under his beck and call.
Ironically, Nkrumah performed the civilian coup despite the fact that he was in firm control and could easily decide who goes to Parliament from behind the scenes. He did not need to be this crude and rash.
Right from Ghana’s independence on March 5, 1957, Nkrumah made it clear he wanted to be an unchallenged dictator. He wasted no time in introducing measures meant to concentrate absolute power in his hands.
Detention without trial
In the year of independence, he masterminded the enactment of the Deportation Act, which empowered him to kick-out anybody whose presence in Ghana he considered detrimental. A year later, the Preventive Detention Act followed to check the growing strength of the opposition alliance. The Act allowed Nkrumah to detain without trial anybody suspected of engaging in ‘anti-state activities’ for five years or longer.
By the time he was kicked out of power in 1966, it is estimated that at least 1,000 Ghanaians had been detained under the Act. The detainees included one of Nkrumah’s most prominent opponents, Joseph Danquah. The lawyer politician who came second to Nkrumah in Ghana’s presidential election in 1960 died in detention in 1965.
[Nkrumah with Wife and Chieftains -- Accra, Ghana, Jan. 20 1963]
When Ghana became a republic in 1960, the hitherto Prime Minister Nkrumah became President with unbridled power. He made sure the constitution gave him the mandate to rule by decree. He formed an intricate network of spies to keep tabs on his real or imagined enemies.
In January 1964, Nkrumah contrived a special plebiscite to consign his opponents to the political wilderness. The referendum was to decide two major issues. The first was whether the country should become a one-party state under Nkrumah’s ruling Convention Peoples Party. The second was to grant or deny Nkrumah powers to sack judges. After massive rigging and manipulation, the ‘Yes’ vote narrowly carried the day.
Tottering economy
Fresh from the stolen victory, Nkrumah flexed his muscles by sacking Chief Justice, Sir Arku Korsah, who had acquitted his opponents in a treason trial. He then made himself life President though he was by then presiding over a tottering economy and a country where human rights abuses were rife.
After entrenching himself in power in the 1960s, Nkrumah seemed to have lost touch with the realities in Ghana. He preferred to pursue grand Pan-African schemes and paid little attention to the deep discontent in Ghana. Some of his close advisers even said he did not care about Ghanaians’ suffering.
By this time, he had cemented his position and felt safe in power. To guard against a coup, Nkrumah opened a branch of the ruling CPP in the military academy. Next was the appointment of political officers in the army but this did not come to pass because he was overthrown.
To prepare for the total emasculation of the military, he retired two senior infantry officers, Maj-Gen John Ankrah and Maj-Gen SJA Otu in 1965. He sacked many senior army and police officers and replaced them with his loyalists. It was virtually impossible to remove Nkrumah from power by any means, as he had blocked all avenues.
However, he opened a weak chink in his armour when he ordered the military to undertake regular exercises in preparation for a war against the then white-ruled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
It is reported that Police Commissioner JW Harlley came up with the idea of a coup against Nkrumah, though the CIA has also been implicated in the plot. The main men who masterminded Nkrumah’s downfall were Col Emmanuel Kwasi Kotoka, commanding officer, Second Infantry Brigade at Kumasi; Col Albert Kwesi Ocran, commanding officer, Accra Garrison; and Maj Akwasi Afrifa, commanding officer, Tamale Garrison. The chief planner of the putsch was Afrifa.
The conspirators planned to make their move when Nkrumah was out of the country and such an opportunity presented itself on February 23 when the Osagyefo left for the Far East.
Under cover of mandatory mobilisation exercises to fight the Rhodesians, Afrifa and Kotoka moved their forces South to join Ocran’s troops in Accra on the night of February 23. On the morning of February 24, the soldiers seized Accra and prepared themselves to fight a civil war if Nkrumah loyalists in the military resisted the coup. The resistance never came as jubilant Ghanaians celebrated the fall of a ruthless dictator who had traumatised them for nine years. The military officers who kicked out Nkrumah were not prepared to lead Ghana and hence they invited the retired Ankrah to be President.
Court poets and sycophants
Despite his high intellect, Nkrumah’s major weaknesses were paranoia and his love for flattery and quislings. This made it easy for him to be misled by court poets, sycophants, wheeler-dealers and influence peddlers. That is why he hand-picked socialist acolytes to top positions in the private and public sector. The appointees, most of them with shady backgrounds viewed their positions as a licence to loot and proceeded accordingly. Some of his loyalists used the detention law to arrest innocent people so they could inherit their business, wealth or positions.
Though Nkrumah had organised strikes to fight the British colonialists, he was a chief nemesis of workers when he took power. He passed the Trade Union Act in 1958 to deal with striking workers, many of who were arrested and detained with opposition leaders. He reasoned that strikes hindered rapid industrialisation of Ghana. He declared the fight for better wages must give way to patriotic duty because the needs of the nation superseded the good of individual workers. His ambition was to make Ghana an industrialised, unitary socialist state fast and a model African nation.
He embarked on lavish spending on parlous and grandiose ventures that bankrupted Ghana, one of the richest African countries at independence. He nationalised most commercial, agricultural, mining and industrial activities in Ghana.
At independence, Ghana was one of the wealthiest and economically advanced colonies in Africa. But Nkrumah’s penchant for grandiose projects, corruption, mismanagement and desire for rapid industrialisation brought economic ruin to the country.
When the price of cocoa rose sharply, Nkrumah went on a spending spree instead of saving and spending wisely. After wasting the windfall, he irked the people by increasing taxes on cocoa farmers to fund his lavish projects. He sought to industrialise Ghana at all costs and ended up with many projects, which became white elephants.
To date, Nkrumah’s most ambitious venture is the Volta River Project, which gave birth to the Akosombo Dam and the world’s biggest man made lake. The dam was financed by Britain, the US and the World Bank. Nkrumah performed the ritual of pressing the button that released power from the dam into the national grid in his last moment of glory on January 22, 1966 amid a blaze of world publicity.
Two days later, he was overthrown while on a peace mission to Vietnam in a grand tour that was supposed to take him to Soviet Union and the Far East. He was on a stopover in Burma, en-route to China, when he became an ex-president. He did not hear about the coup until he arrived in China where he caused protocol problems.
Bizarre state banquet
Unsure of what to do because Nkrumah was effectively yesterday’s man, then Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai, decided to go-ahead with the planned state banquet in honour of Nkrumah. It was one of the most bizarre state banquets as it honoured a non-entity who everybody knew was out of power.
After he recovered from the shock of the coup, he went to exile in Guinea-Conakry where he initially made radio broadcasts to Ghana urging the people to overthrow the military regime. He plotted a grand return to power but died of cancer in Bucharest, Romania, in 1972 before he could realise his ambitions.
Excerpt from Commanding Heights by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, 1998 ed., pp. 83-88.
Kwame Nkrumah (1889-1979) — Kwame Nkurmah, the leader of the Gold Coast’s movement toward independence from Britain during the 1940s and ’50s, headed the new nation of Ghana following its independence in 1957 until 1966, when he was overthrown by a coup.
Profile:
In the period of [African colonial independence] the beacon country from Africa was Ghana, first to achieve independence in 1957. The new nation’s most influential figure was its prime minister, later president, Kwame Nkrumah. When Nkrumah was born in 1910, Ghana was still the Gold Coast, a British colony known for its plantations and for being the world’s largest producer of cocoa. Its frontiers were the result of bargains among the colonial powers — Britain, France, and Germany — that did not correspond to the historical boundaries of the kingdoms that preceded colonization, particularly the once-mighty Ashanti empire.
Nkrumah, who came from a modest, traditional family, received his early education at the hands of Catholic missionaries. He went on to train as a teacher and for a few years taught elementary school in towns along the coast. He was popular and charismatic, and earned a decent living. But exposure to politics and to a few influential figures sparked in him a greater interest — to go to America. He applied to universities in the United States, and with money raised from relatives, he set out on a steamer in 1935. He reached New York almost penniless, and took refuge with fellow West Africans in Harlem. He then presented himself at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and enrolled; a small scholarship and a campus job helped him make ends meet.
In the United States, Nkrumah saw alternatives to the British tradition of government. He also became suffused with an acute consciousness of the politics of race relations. Unlike many new African leaders, who sought to emulate their European instructors, Nkrumah plunged into America’s black communities. Founded before the Civil War, Lincoln University was America’s oldest black college, and its special atmosphere inspired and comforted Nkrumah. In the summers, he worked at physically demanding jobs — in shipyards and construction at sea. He studied theology as well as philosophy; he frequented the black churches in New York and Philadelphia and was sometimes asked to preach. He also forged ties with black American intellectuals, for whom Africa was becoming, in this time of political change, an area of extreme interest. Moving to London after World War II, Nkrumah helped organize Pan-African congresses, linking the emergent educated groups of the African colonies with activists, writers, artists, and well-wishers from the industrial countries. It was a time of great intellectual ferment, excitement, and optimism. India’s achievement of independence in 1947 stirred dreams of freedom for the other colonies. “If we get self-government,” Nkrumah proclaimed, “we’ll transform the Gold Coast into a paradise in 10 years.”
Returning to the Gold Coast in 1949, Nkrumah found that India’s independence had set in motion a process of gradual transfer of power in Britain’s other colonies. The terms and timing were highly unsettled, and indeed would provoke conflict and violent clashes, but the basic principle of self-government was becoming the consensus. Nkrumah was dissatisfied with the existing nationalist grouping, finding it staid and conservative, overly tied to colonial business interests. With several associates he set up a new party, the Convention People’s Party (CPP), in the process demonstrating his supreme organizational abilities. Within two years the CPP had won limited self-rule elections, and Nkrumah became “Leader of Government Business” — a de facto prime minister, responsible for internal government and policy. He set his sights firmly on independence. No amount of autonomy or self-rule, he argued, could match the energy, commitment, and focus of a government and people in a truly independent country. It was a precondition for growth. He summarized his philosophy in a slogan that became famous and influential across Africa: “Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all else shall be added unto you….”
Ghana’s route to independence became the model for the rest of the continent. By the mid-1960s, over 30 African countries were independent and many had charismatic leaders, including Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, and Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia. Their economic views were very much those of the time, in line with the consensus among development economists. Here again, only the state could mobilize the funds and coordinate the activities of economic transformation if it was to be achieved in the leaders’ lifetime — let alone during their time in office. Indeed, pessimism about markets was even greater in Africa than elsewhere. After all, the colonization of Africa had come with little regard for local education, health, or infrastructure. It was tainted with racism and contempt. As a result, people were not equipped to participate in markets, or so it seemed. Instead, the new leaders hatched schemes for “African socialism” that could somehow combine modern growth and traditional values. “Capitalism is too complicated a system for a newly independent nation,” Nkrumah argued. “Hence the need for a socialistic society.” Few disagreed. It was, after all, the received wisdom of the time.
Ironically, the economic device in which Africa’s new leaders invested their trust was itself a colonial invention — the marketing board, a public agency responsible for buying crops from farmers and reselling them for export. Seemingly innocuous and indeed almost boring in name, marketing boards were in fact powerful tools of control for the new governments. They were born of necessity, when the Great Depression drove down world commodity prices and the wartime boom drove them up again. African farmers lived on a shoestring and were highly vulnerable to such volatile swings in world markets. They might overplant in times of high prices and abandon crops when prices fell. Meanwhile, the state would lose both tax revenue and its ability to plan ahead. The marketing boards were set up to correct this situation. They would purchase crops at stable prices. In times of high world prices, they would accumulate a surplus of money; in times of low world prices, they would use that financial surplus to support the local price. This would protect farmers from the tumult of markets, over which they had no control. Because the marketing boards deliberately paid farmers prices other than the world-market prices, they could not function in a competitive market. Hence, they were granted monopolies. Virtually all crops for export had to go through the marketing board. This was the prevailing system at independence in almost every African country. All that varied from country to country was the exact number and range of crops concerned.
For Nkrumah and his peers, retaining the colonial marketing boards seemed the expedient, indeed the sensible, thing to do. The boards would provide the mechanism both to capture the “surplus” generated by agriculture and to raise revenues. The resources levied this way could be combined with investment and foreign aid to jump-start industrial development and the “great transformation” away from rural-based economies toward industrialization. There were some problems, to be sure. When the marketing board imposed prices lower than world prices, how would it stop crops from slipping away into a black market or crossing borders into neighboring countries? Frontiers were artificial and porous, and there was, after all, a considerable history of long-distance African trade. Moreover, if the marketing board did accumulate a cash surplus, who would oversee its sound management and investment?
But amid the enthusiasm for independence and the overriding concern with market failure, these questions seemed of little import. Governments instead threw their energy into enlarging the existing marketing boards and creating new ones for commodities that were hitherto unregulated. They ran their economies through the boards. In Ghana, the Cocoa Marketing Board grew in size, staffing, and power. It was joined in short order by marketing boards for timber and diamonds, and a host of other state organizations aimed not only at exports but also at regulating local trade in foodstuffs, fish, and household goods. This pervasive, confident — or, as some would say, intrusive — involvement of the state in almost every aspect of investment and commerce made Ghana a case of “development economics in action.”
The same confidence extended as well to the other half of the process — industrialization. Nkrumah very much believed that the “big push” was necessary and could be rapidly achieved. He harnessed his hopes to a dramatic plan for a huge multipurpose undertaking known as the Volta River Project. Ghana had large reserves of bauxite and hence the potential to become a major exporter of aluminum. But this required building a smelter and a very large dam and power plant to feed it. That, in turn, would support a national electricity grid; and the cheap, abundant power would jump-start industrialization all over the country. It was a grand vision that accorded perfectly with development theory. The dam would set in motion the “forward and backward linkages” that the economists sought, and it would give Ghana economic independence. It would also create the world’s biggest manmade lake, forcing the resettlement of tens of thousands of people.
When it was all added up, the Volta River Project was the most ambitious and complicated development project of its day, and certainly one of the most prominent. It also gave rise to lengthy and arduous negotiations between the government of Ghana and its would-be partners — the World Bank, the governments of Britain and the United States, and the aluminum firms Kaiser and Reynolds, which agreed to build the smelter. Several years of frustrating discussion culminated in a series of contract documents that one participant described as the world’s “most complex since Queen Marie was selling Romanian bonds.”
But the deal was not yet done. As the negotiations dragged on, the stakes grew higher. Nkrumah’s views were hardening, reflecting an increasing attraction to “scientific socialism” and a mounting preoccupation with control. Already in 1960, he had made Ghana a republic and proclaimed himself its president. In April 1961, he delivered a “Dawn Broadcast” in which he lashed out at “self-seeking” and “careerism,” and which he used to force the resignation of potential rivals. Soon there were political arrests. He also threw out the British officers assigned to train his army.
All this occurred shortly before Queen Elizabeth II was scheduled to make a state visit to Ghana in November 1961 to celebrate the new area of decolonization. But then, after several bombs went off in the capital of Accra, sentiment mounted in Britain’s House of Commons that the trip should be canceled, because it was too unsafe. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan feared, however, that cancellation would provoke Nkrumah into leaving the Commonwealth and moving into Moscow’s arms. To prevent such a turn, he appealed to President John Kennedy to confirm that the United States would help underwrite the Volta River Project. When, on the eve of the queen’s departure, it became apparent that the House of Commons might vote to cancel the trip, Macmillan made clear that he would resign that very evening — even if it meant having to awaken the queen. The vote against the trip did not eventuate, and the queen took off.
As it turned out, the trip was a great success. The local press in Ghana hailed the queen as “the greatest socialist monarch in the world.” With the conclusion of the visit and the queen safely back in Britain, Macmillan immediately telephoned Kennedy. “I have risked my Queen,” Macmillan said. “You must risk your money.” Gallantly, Kennedy replied he would match the queen’s “brave contribution” with his own. The United States signed on to the Volta River Project.
In the same year, Nkrumah visited the Soviet Union and returned much impressed at the pace of industrialization there. He came back with a rigid Seven-Year Plan. “We must try and establish factories in large numbers at great speed,” he argued. State-owned companies and public authorities mushroomed in all fields. So did mismanagement and graft. The price was most painfully felt in the countryside as Nkrumah used cocoa revenues, controlled by the official marketing board, to cover the growing losses of public companies. The imposition of unrealistically low cocoa prices on farmers, combined with the bloated organization of the marketing board, devastated the industry. Many farmers switched crops altogether; others found ways to smuggle their cocoa through neighboring countries, where better prices were offered. Ghana lost its mantle as the world’s largest cocoa producer. Its currency reserves depleted, it fell back on barter trade and loans from the Soviet bloc.
[Osagyefo's Final Resting Place -- Accra, Ghana] Nkrumah became increasingly remote, preferring to focus on grand schemes of African unity than on running the country. He turned the country into a one-party state in 1964, and took to indulging in a sordid cult of personality, dubbing himself Osagyefo, “the Redeemer.” It did not take long for resentment to set in. He evaded several assassination attempts. On January 22, 1966, he inaugurated the Volta Dam, proudly pressing the button that released power into the new national grid unaware that even this project would be only half a success. Ghana’s bauxite mines would never be developed; the smelter found it more economic to process bauxite imported from Jamaica. The inauguration would be his last moment of glory.
On February 24, as he stopped in Burma on his way to China at the start of a grand tour aimed at solving the Vietnam conflict, army officers intervened at home and took power. “The myth surrounding Kwame Nkrumah has been broken,” announced an army colonel on the radio. Nkrumah did not learn of the coup until he arrived in China. Premier Zhou Enlai, unsure of the protocol to follow, went ahead and hosted an eerie state banquet in his honor. Nkrumah ended up taking up exile in Guinea, where another experiment in “African socialism” was in progress. Guinea’s president, Sekou Toure, his own rule increasingly repressive and arbitrary, endowed Nkrumah with the title of “co-president.” Nkrumah made regular shortwave broadcasts to Ghana, published ideological treatises, and plotted a triumphal return to power until he grew ill and died in 1972, still in exile. The “political kingdom” had crumbled as fast as it had been built. “The Redeemer,” who had once inspired a continent, had fallen far from grace.
Fresh details of a conspiracy that could have provided a motive for the assassination of Cabinet Minister Thomas Joseph Mboya have emerged ahead of the 39th year since his death.
Kenyatta The CIA appears to have recruited the flamboyant minister and former trade unionist in a heavily funded “selective liberation” programme to isolate Kenya’s founding President Jomo Kenyatta, who the American spy agency labelled as “unsafe.”
Declassified information in an undated issue of Ramparts, an American political and literary magazine published in the 1960s and early 1970s, accessed by The Standard at the Kenya National Archives, shows an elaborate conspiracy by CIA to prop up Mboya and isolate Kenyatta.
Ramparts closed shop in 1975. Whether this scheme sowed seeds of suspicion and mistrust between Kenyatta and Mboya, who at the time of his assassination was the Economic Planning minister and Kamukunji MP, is a matter for further investigation.
The revelations come four months after Mboya’s widow, Pamela, wrote to Mr Kofi Annan, former UN secretary-general who also chaired talks that ended political violence in Kenya early in the year, asking that the matter be investigated afresh by a truth commission.
“The assassination of my husband, like others after him, is a matter that has remained shrouded in mystery and speculation, and which has been avoided by successive regimes in this country,” she wrote.
Trail of Questions
In a telephone conversation with this writer last month, Mrs Mboya promised to “drop the bombshell” in an interview. But she later changed her mind. Her last word was that she would spill the beans at an “appropriate time.”
Questions also abound on whether the convicted assassin, Nahashon Njenga Njoroge, was actually executed. The testimony of the assassin’s own brother and anecdotal evidence that he has been seen by a retired military officer, among other claims, pile on the doubts of his execution.
Mboya Secret letters, also declassified, further show that Mboya had a particularly tumultuous relationship with Mr Mbiyu Koinange, a minister and power broker of the Kenyatta presidency.
In one instance, Koinange wrote an emotional letter to Kenyatta to defend himself against allegations of disloyalty by Mboya.
“Sir, you know my loyalty to you personally, to our Kanu party; of my long loyalty to Kenya and latterly my loyalty to our new independent Council of Ministers.”
“My loyalty is beyond doubt, therefore, my Prime Minister. I frankly feel that there is no need for me to reply to Mr Mboya’s letter.”
“It is unfortunate, ill-timed, egoistic and, if I may say so, an irresponsible letter which is skilfully designed by one of my colleagues to endanger the good working spirit among us.”
Koinange was then Minister of State in the Office of the President and one of the most powerful figures in the Government. He died in September 1981.
The secret letters in our possession cover the period between 1961 and 1966. Desperate to extricate himself from the tag of traitor, Mboya, in a letter on March 11, 1961, pleaded with Kenyatta, who was languishing in a Lodwar jail: “I’d hate to appear a hero at your expense.”
He attached copies of various statements he had made in meetings with the Governor for Kenyatta’s perusal. The move appeared to capture his own internal consciousness that Kenyatta may have begun to perceive him as a threat.
The letters also reveal how the CIA used Kenyatta to finish Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, his Vice-President, politically by amending the Constitution to his office of all powers.
Traitor or nationalist?
Ramparts reported that: “The CIA programme in Kenya could be summed up as one of selective liberation. The chief beneficiary was Tom Mboya who, in 1953, became general secretary of the Kenya Federation of Labour.”
Koinange Both a credible nationalist and an economic conservative, Mboya who was popularly known as ‘TJ’, was ideal for CIA’s purpose. The main nationalist hero and eventual chief of state, Kenyatta, was not considered “sufficiently safe” owing to his initial deep socialist leanings, the dossier said.
Ramparts quotes Mboya as saying: “Those proven codes of conduct in the African societies, which have over the ages conferred dignity on our people and afforded them security regardless of their station in life.
“I refer to the universal charity, which characterises our societies, and I refer to the African thought processes and cosmological ideas, which regard men, not as a social means, but as an end and entity in society.”
This powerful quote not only captures Mboya’s own prescription of African socialism, which endeared him to the West and made the CIA view his policy as safe, but it also paints the picture of an articulate, sophisticated and ambitious political thinker.
Soon after, Mboya joined the CIA jet set, travelling around the world from Oxford in the UK to Calcutta in India on funds from such conduits as the Africa Bureau and from the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).
ICFTU, which played a key role in Kenya’s independence through trade unionism, is an aggregation of international trade union secretariats set up in 1949 to counter an upsurge of left-wing trade unionism outside the communist bloc, according to Ramparts. The CIA allegedly funded operations at the time.
But when George Cabot Lodge, one of the directors of the ICFTU, made the statement (believed to have been in specific reference to Mboya at the time) that “the obscure trade unionist of today may well be the president or prime minister of tomorrow,” he left no doubt about Mboya’s personal ambitions and by extension the CIA’s scheme of things.
Initially, CIA’s natural strategy was to underwrite Mboya and his labour federation as a force against Kenyatta. But when tact changed in accordance with the world order and the CIA’s new priorities, it was agreed that Western labour groups stop funding Mboya.
An accommodation with Kenyatta was now thought necessary, particularly to ensure that he did not support rebels in Congo, and to get him to close ranks against the agitating Kenyan left.
But the die had been cast. The CIA, through its activities, had effectively propped up Mboya as a possible future President of Kenya. That threat was real during Kenyatta’s time and even at the dawn of the second decade of his leadership, according to Ramparts.
It was a strategy that the CIA would use again to the benefit of Kenyatta against Odinga — use the credibility of the appropriate militant to crush the rest. The CIA link, which Mboya vigorously fought to distance himself with, would be used later to fight him politically by branding him a traitor and a man who could not to be trusted. He wrote lengthy responses in his defence.
But had the CIA sowed enough seeds of wrath between Mboya and the political establishment in Kenya to provide someone with enough reason to kill him?
It takes extraordinary personal strength for a leader to admit in public that he is a failure.
About The Author: Philip Ochieng — is a Kenyan Luo, and an Editor with the Nation Media Group. Like Obama Senior, he too went to the US on the famous Tom Mboya Airlift of 1959 [ when hundreds of Kenyan students were given scholarships to American universities ]. He first met Obama Senior in Tom Mboya’s Nairobi office [ Mboya was then the secretary general of the Kenya Federation of Labour ]. Obama and Ochieng met up again on returning to Nairobi and remained drinking buddies for many years.
Nkrumah became increasingly remote, preferring to focus on grand schemes of African unity than on running the country. He turned the country into a one-party state in 1964, and took to indulging in a sordid cult of personality, dubbing himself Osagyefo, “the Redeemer.” It did not take long for resentment to set in. He evaded several assassination attempts. On January 22, 1966, he inaugurated the Volta Dam, proudly pressing the button that released power into the new national grid unaware that even this project would be only half a success. Ghana’s bauxite mines would never be developed; the smelter found it more economic to process bauxite imported from Jamaica. The inauguration would be his last moment of glory.
The CIA appears to have recruited the flamboyant minister and former trade unionist in a heavily funded “selective liberation” programme to isolate Kenya’s founding President 
Secret letters, also declassified, further show that Mboya had a particularly tumultuous relationship with Mr Mbiyu Koinange, a minister and power broker of the Kenyatta presidency. 
Both a credible nationalist and an economic conservative, Mboya who was popularly known as ‘TJ’, was ideal for CIA’s purpose. The main nationalist hero and eventual chief of state, Kenyatta, was not considered “sufficiently safe” owing to his initial deep socialist leanings, the dossier said. 
