ANALYSIS
By Robert Tignor, Princeton University
Read the original article on The Conversation Africa.
By Robert Tignor, Princeton University
Ghana, the first sub-Saharan
country to gain independence, celebrates the 59th anniversary of its freedom
from British rule this year. According to Nelson Mandela
Ghana's independence on March 6, 1957, provided much strength and great
inspiration to African liberation movements. This article is a foundation
essay. These are longer than usual and take a wider look at a key issue
affecting society
Ghana was to become the
testing ground for Arthur Lewis' ideas on economic development. The excitement
surrounding Ghana's independence in 1957 as tropical Africa's first decolonised
territory captivated Lewis as thoroughly as it did African nationalists and
Afrophiles around the world. Lewis, a St Lucian, went on to win the Nobel
Memorial Prize in Economics in 1979.
A veritable who's who of
intellectuals of African descent living in the Americas flocked to Accra. They
were determined to show the world that Africans could govern themselves and
achieve more for their people than the colonial rulers had. They were eager to
make Ghana a shining example to inspire independence movements across the
continent.
If, then, Lewis saw Ghana as a
proving ground for his ideas on economic development, later scholars have
viewed the Kwame Nkrumah years (1951-66) as a case study of striking failure.
From a country that seemed on
the threshold of robust economic progress, it descended into economic misery
and political instability.
Although Lewis was remarkably
well informed on Ghana and knew many Ghanaian officials personally, he was not
fully prepared for the complexities of his new position. Nor was he prepared
for the fragility of Ghanaian economics and politics.
Seek ye first the
political kingdom
The expectations surrounding
Lewis at the time of his arrival were staggering. Since they were also highly
contradictory, he could not meet all of them.
The Ghanaian politicians
insisted that Lewis assert Ghana's economic independence from its former
colonial rulers and from the outside world. They looked to him to design
financial institutions that would free Ghana from the British economy and
promote rising standards of living as well as economic strength. Lewis was
supposed to make possible Nkrumah's famous slogan:
Seek
ye first the political kingdom and all things will be added to it.
On the other hand, the
British, the Americans, the international financial community, and
representatives of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, wanted
something quite different. They looked to Lewis to be a moderating influence -
procapitalist and pro-Western.
The radical wing of the
Ghanaian political elite alarmed the British and the Americans. Perhaps no-one
more troubled the Westerners than the Ghanaian prime minister himself, whose
political and economic preferences were far from clear at this time.
The dramatic and heavily
charged clash between an economic expert (Lewis) and a political leader
(Nkrumah) was repeated again and again in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This
was happening as African states, emerging from colonial rule, sought to
buttress their political independence with economic progress. Economic advisers
and ministers, some of whom were Africans and some not, regularly had to
sacrifice their economic projects to the patronage-building ambitions of
politicians.
Rarely, however, are observers
afforded the opportunity that the Lewis
Papers provide to view the underlying tensions involving the political and
economic elites that were so often covered up by anodyne formal announcements.
The two men saw Ghana's independence from different vantage points even though
they were united in wanting the country to enjoy economic progress.
Politicians versus
economists
Nkrumah believed that the
political leadership had the obligation to set the economic agenda and that
economists should then design programs that would make it possible to achieve
these goals.
In contrast, Lewis believed
that only the economists could determine what could achieved, and only they
could delineate the appropriate methods for realising these goals. The proper role
of the political leaders was to speak the truth to the people and to promote
realistic views of what economic experts told them that their countries could
accomplish.
Lewis complained that Nkrumah
regarded economists as mere technicians, whose task it was to realise the
economic dreams of the public and the politicians - no matter how unrealistic.
Nkrumah countered, depicting
Lewis and the other economists with whom he worked politically naive, badly
misunderstanding the pressing demands that ruling over a decolonised polity
placed on the political elite.
Political
leaders in fragile, newly independent polities had to build coalitions, use
patronage to solidify their political authority and even coerce the opposition.
They had to be responsive to the high hopes that their peoples carried about
the meaning of political independence.
Even so, Lewis was hardly the
dominant economic policymaker in the first two years of Ghanaian independence as
some have wanted to argue. He tried to impose his precepts on Ghana for the
first eight months when Nkrumah and other ministers regularly sought him out.
But Lewis ceased to count
after that. He was distressed as he witnessed the alteration of his development
plans to the point where in private correspondence he described the final
document as "awful" and "one of the worst plans ever
written".
A policy fraught with
danger
As Lewis made clear in all of
his writings in this period, the most critical issue in achieving development
was raising the investment rate from the customary 4% or 5% that characterised
mostly less-developed economies to something in the order of 15% to 20%.
What better way to achieve
such a breakthrough than to capture the windfall profits from the rising world
prices for cocoa. Yet the chief economic adviser was aware that this policy was
fraught with danger.
The state was taxing Ghana's
most dynamic and prosperous region, from which half of the country's cocoa
exports and all of its timber and gold came. It was also the area in which the
opposition to the Convention Peoples' Party (CPP) was the most intense. It was
using a large portion of this wealth in other parts of the country.
In his opinion, the monies had
to be spent in ways that could be seen to contribute to economic and social
betterment. If not, the political anger would be irrepressible.
Yet Lewis was also aware that
the pressures on Nkrumah and the CPP leadership to use these funds to solidify
their political support and build patron-client relationships were substantial.
The tensions between what the CPP leaders wanted to do with the funds and what
Lewis thought the monies should be used for were a constant source of conflict
between Lewis and the CPP leadership.
Lewis
was right that Nkrumah's profligate use of political patronage was bound be
self-defeating in the long run. Equally valid was his insistence that Ghana's
five-year plan needed to be fiscally sound and should be shorn of its many showy
but economically wasteful programs.
But believing that Nkrumah
would give Lewis a free hand in economic matters, as Lewis claimed he had been
promised, revealed a high degree of political insensitivity - even naivete.
Tensions tearing at the
Ghanaian cabinet
Lewis's position from the
outset was an awkward one, if not impossible. On the one hand, the Ghanaians
wanted him to lead the country to economic prosperity and economic autonomy.
The officials at the United Nations, who paid his salary, as well as those in
Britain and the US, looked to him to steer Ghana in the direction of the
Western capitalist world.
The tensions tearing at the
Ghanaian cabinet, to say nothing of the pressures that came from the growing
opposition in Ghana, put Lewis under even greater pressure. The left wing in
the party favoured radical political and economic policies. They wanted Lewis
to promote state intervention in the country's economic affairs.
Just as adamant, however, was
the right wing of the party, who believed that Ghana continued to need support
from the great capitalist powers in the world.
Even for an individual of the
most extraordinary personal flexibility, let alone a person like Lewis, who was
a rationalist through and through, believing that politicians should embrace
the right economic thinking - even when the short-run political consequences
were unfavourable - navigating these stormy waters would have been problematic.
This is based on an extract
from W Arthur Lewis and the Birth of Development Economics by Robert L. Tignor.
© 2005 Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission
Disclosure statement
Robert Tignor does not
work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or
organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no
relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
Ghana
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