Ghana at Fifty, India at Sixty: The Challenge of the Democratic Developmental State

Amos Anyimadu, Ph.D.

Africa Next Knowledge Brokerage and Interactionwww.AfricaNext.net

amos@cict.dtu.dk

Prepared for the Ghana High Commission to India/ Nehru Memorial Musuem and Library Seminar on Ghana’s Golden Jubilee, 7 March 2007, New Delhi

Greetings from a celebratory and colour-charged Ghana. In Ghana we are marking our Golden Jubilee, Ghana@50 as we futuristically call it, with zeal and vim which many Ghana observers, even those who experienced our specific joy at the last World Cup finals, find somewhat bewildering. Today, Ghana is again the name “we wish to proclaim” in high style, just as we did on the 6th of March 1957 at the Old Polo Grounds in Accra and everywhere else in the then Gold Coast.

Our current festival of freedom begun slowly and has been factored through the evolving and beneficial Ghanaian sense of hard politicking, but the party has now taken off in earnest. Having just come from Accra, I can tell you that the fever of celebration has hit Ghana in a quite unprecedented manner. A true people’s festival has begun. The lone black star in its red, gold and green tricolour, which is our proud flag, shines from almost every height and major lateral in Ghana. The Australians, I believe, lay claim to the largest flagpole in the world, a reminder of their bicentenary. Today we Ghanaians may lay claim to the largest flag in the world in recognition of our Golden Jubilee. I have seen the lone black star in its African tricolour entirely cover many-storeyed buildings in Accra. President Kufuor is today hosting the highest concentration of Heads of State in the world.

Mr. Chairman, coming to New Delhi for our Golden Jubilee was a pleasant duty for me. As a pioneering force in the anti-colonial movement, I have no doubt that our Indian family fully understand and share in our joy at fifty, a position you, yourself, were at a decade ago. Experiencing the colour of the Holi festival in Delhi last Sunday pointed up the fact that the colour and poignancy of our celebration of Ghana@50 would not at all be strange to you. Indeed I understand that certain aspects of the concept and practice of Durbar, as it has become very firmly engrained in Ghanaian governance and public

spectacle, came to us in Ghana from India through the British colonialists. I am further intrigued that the Teen Murti Bhavan, where we are now gathered at the Nehru Memorial Musuem and Library, used to be called Flagstaff House. As in some other former British colonies, Flagstaff House, Accra, is also a seat of power. Indeed the great Kwame Nkrumah of Africa and beyond took it over as his seat. I am happy to report that today Flagstaff House, Accra, is being restored as an All Ghana Presidential Complex with the generous support of the Government and People of India. Flagstaff House, Accra, I must add, abuts an avenue named in Accra for the great world statesman Jawaharlal Nehru.

Mr Chairman, I have come to Delhi to begin drawing a picture of our intertwined journeys from colonialism to wealth, dignity and justice in the best of worlds. Ghana at fifty and India at sixty encapsulate two deeply related tales of journeys out of the so called Third World. I would want to approach India’s importance as a leading case in World Development and a globally-significant large democracy. Mr Chairman, my handle on your important country is rather fragile. Nonetheless, in the following paragraphs I propose to point up issues concerning our obviously related paths from colonialism. My handle on our Ghana, a very much lived reality for me, is obviously much more firm. From this more trained vantage point, I would want to begin putting the question as to how we can build states which are democratic as well as developmental in our countries in the present world condition.

Mr Chairman, Indian independence directly shaped Ghanaian independence. It is fair to say that we shall not be celebrating Ghana at fifty today had India at sixty not been sown. Kwame Nkrumah was clear about the importance of the Indian experience to the struggle for freedom in Ghana. Thus in his autobiography he wrote:

“After months of studying Gandhi’s policies and watching the effect it had, I began to see that, when backed by a strong political organisation, it could be the solution to the colonial problem”.

The Nkrumah-Gandhi axis was driven much more deeply. I would suggest that it is not simply incidental that Gandhi’s favourite hymn was “Lead Kindly Light” and that this also became Nkrumah’s, and his party’s, favourite. It is not simply coincidental that Kwame Nkrumah’s most famous aphorism “Seek ye first the Political Kingdom and all things shall be added unto you”, is attributable not simply directly to the Christian scripture but, perhaps more directly, to Gandhi’s fundamental position that:

“You cannot serve God and Mammon is an economic truth of the highest value. We have to make our choice. Western nations are groaning under the monster-god of materialism. Their moral growth has become stunted … Under the British aegis we have learnt much, but it is my firm belief that, if we are not careful, we shall introduce all the vices that she has been prey to owing to the disease of materialism … Let us first seek the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and the irrevocable promise is that everything will be added unto us. These are real economics”

Mr. Chairman, what may be considered the three cardinal emphases of Gandhian thought, to rely on the reckoning of Hugh Tinker: “the cooperative society where intellectuals and manual workers find a common purpose”; “the attempt to give self-respect to those whom tradition had handicapped”; and “the philosophy and technique of non-violence” all resonate in the Ghanaian freedom struggle and our post-Independence march for democracy and development.

The personal electricity between Nkrumah and Nehru, which clearly shoots out of the dramatic photograph of the two icons unveiled in our High Commission yesterday, carried these high principles into practical politics and was perhaps most successful in the International Relations precept of Positive Neutrality and organizationally in the Non Aligned Movement. Erica Powell, Kwame Nkrumah’s long-serving private secretary, in her important book on Kwame Nkrumah captures in different ways the deep personal friendship and political engagement between Nkrumah and Nehru. Thus, we are told, as Nkrumah set off for a much colder part of India during his 1961 visit, his ever thoughtful friend and ally, Nehru, realizing that Nkrumah did not seem to be carry adequate protection against the elements, fetched a comforting coat and gloves which he personally delivered to Nkrumah on a trot.

The days of Nkrumah and Nehru were charged with visionary politics. Today, our challenges appear much more mundane. It is clear that the distance between Ghana and Indian has widened. Recently the BBC World Service focused on India under the rubric “India Rising”. Today the same focus is on Ghana under the decidedly low-tempo, somewhat backward-looking rubric “Winds of Change”. India confidently embraces Globalisation. Ghana struggles to humanize Globalization for basic survival. The Economist newspaper recently said the Indian economy was overheating with near ten per cent growth. This, we are told, presents its own problems which the politics of your recent budget, I understand, seeks to address. In Ghana we seek all growth without the luxury of fine qualification. A thoughtful and balanced piece written by Michelle Faul of the Associated Press from Accra, and carried by many newspapers around the world yesterday, notes that Ghana’s “Golden Jubilee on Tuesday is prompting some sober reflection on why Africa has failed to translate its dreams, and its bounty of mineral and agricultural resources, into wealth”. The Economist newspaper’s online presence opines that Ghana “is an example of much that has gone wrong, and then right, in Africa”. On the homepage of the World Bank web pages yesterday, Mats Karlsson, the agreeable Swedish Country Director of the Bank in Ghana, tries hard to be totally optimistic and reports that:

The last five years brought higher economic growth (6.2 percent in 2006), after a steady two decades of moderate 4 percent growth. Inflation is lower (10 percent, down from 40), and so are interest rates (15 percent, down from 30), and poverty (33.4 percent in 2005, down from 39.5 percent in 2000, and 51.7 percent in 1990.

Mr. Chairman, the statistics may tell different stories but it may be clear that from the perspective of an Asian tiger it would seem that the African lion is meek indeed.

The idea of the Developmental State has often implied authoritarian governance. India presents an interesting challenge of a Democratic Developmental State. This is the agenda that the government of President Kufuor has set for us in Ghana as well under the grand promise “Development in Freedom”. What happens to the state in Development has arrested conceptual attention for centuries. The current history of India belies many of the general conclusions that have been assumed. Agrarian social structures were not supposed to yield democracy. Responsive politics in poor countries was not supposed to yield good economics. Here in India these received assumptions have been turned upside down. We have a large agrarian formation in the “BRIC” of the foundation of the engine house of the world economy, to use Goldman Sachs’ now famous code. This invites attention from Ghana-type societies in today’s world condition.

It is refreshing that the evolution of Ghana—India relations clearly points to a practical approach to the challenge of the Democratic Development State. India’s support to Ghanaian development today is distinguished not only by its surprising large size but also its strategic quality of having a clear potential to fundamentally uplift our march to democracy and development. For Africa as a whole, India has extended more than one billion dollars worth of technical assistance. I am particularly taken by the promising Pan-African e-Network Project recently begun by India for Africa. The Project envisages connecting the 53 African Union countries by satellite and fibre optic network, and once completed, it would provide tele-education and tele-medicine facilities from India to regional centres in Africa and also individually to each of the member countries. It would also provide effective communication and connectivity to all the AU countries including voice and video conferencing facilities among the Heads of States. This is an excellent example of South-South cooperation for meeting the challenges of the new Knowledge Economy in our shrinking world.

Ghana is a member of India’s Team-9 initiative. It is under this arrangement that Ghana has received concessional credit for the Presidential Complex mentioned earlier. Near the State House in Accra one finds a gleaming temple to the future. The India-Ghana Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in Information and Communication Technology was established with $2 million dollars assistance from India. This facility has fast become a crucial component of our digital future in Ghana. India’s fascinating emergence as a telematics giant is powerful instruction to us in Ghana. I am even happier that our relationship in this area is beginning to more fully cover the content side of this equation.

The most important point that I took away from the BBC’s India Rising season was the well-based transformation of the Indian public sphere through application of new as well as old communication technologies. I note the importance of your local language, including its press, in public life. The force of Indian television and film is truly remarkable. I understand India is one of the few places on our planet where the press is truly deepening. All these factors have significant pecuniary implications. They also have implication for mind and thought. They must be good for the quality of democracy in

India. It is not difficult to see that these factors form a crucial component of the seminal observation of Amartya Sen, the great Indian intellectual, that famine does not occur in democracies. It is for all these reasons that, even as I conclude my exploration, I am happy to report that we had the first official Indian Film Festival in Accra this year. I look forward to similar, mind-led conclaves linking our two countries in the near future. That way, Mr. Chairman, we shall much more certainly attack the challenge of the democratic development state with great Indo-Ghanaian confidence.

I thank you.