Black History Month 2018: Is Ghana a Shithole Country?

Nana Akufo-Addo, the president of Ghana, recently took offense and shot back at President Trump’s comment that Africa is full of “shithole countries”::

The language of @realDonaldTrump that the African continent, Haiti and El Salvador are “shithole countries” is extremely unfortunate. We are certainly not a “shithole country”. We will not accept such insults, even from a leader of a friendly country, no matter how powerful.

— Nana Akufo-Addo (@NAkufoAddo) January 13, 2018

In a sense, Nana Akufo-Addo was right. Ghana wasn’t a shithole country when it became the first African colony to be granted its independence in 1957. From 1902 until 1957, it had thrived under British colonialism which abolished slavery and human sacrifice, which were traditional Ashanti customs. It was one of the wealthiest countries in the tropical world with an average per capita on par with South Korea.

The British had built roads, railroads, schools, hospitals, a modern communication system and vast cocoa plantations in Ghana. Unlike other African countries, they educated and trained an indigenous elite and much of the economy remained in the hands of the peasantry. It was a place where the peasantry panned gold in its rivers and even the value of bananas was measured in gold dust.

Unlike South Korea, which endured 35 years of far more brutal Japanese colonialism, the Second World War, the partition of Korea and the Korean War during which a million South Koreans died and its infrastructure and manufacturing base had been obliterated, Ghana was granted its independence by the British without a shot being fired. In fact, it was the toast of the world.

Vice President Richard Nixon visited Ghana in 1957 and kissed black babies:

Queen Elizabeth II visited Ghana and danced with President Kwame Nkrumah in 1961:

As hard as it is to remember now, the world once thought Ghana would succeed. It seemed poised to become a rich, developed country. It was Europe and East Asia that were a wreck.

Ghana fell like an apple into the hands of Kwame Nkrumah. Although he is largely forgotten in the West today, Kwame Nkrumah was a major figure on the world stage in the 1950s and 1960s. He set the tone for post-colonial Africa as the first president of Ghana by creating an obsequious cult of personality in which he was referred to as “the liberator, the Messiah, the Christ of our day.”

Nkrumah saw himself as the liberator of all of Black Africa. He developed his own ideology called Nkrumahism which was a combination of anti-imperialism and African socialism and assumed grand titles like ‘Man of Destiny’, ‘Star of Africa’, ‘His High Dedication’ and ‘Redeemer’. Believing himself to be the Lenin or Mao of Africa, Nkrumah assumed near total control over Ghana’s political system and economy and embarked on a Soviet-style industrialization program. He created all kinds of corrupt state-owned enterprises and attempted to collectivize agriculture. In less than eight years, he managed to drive up the debt and bankrupt the country in pursuit of his grandiose projects.

Kwame Nkrumah and the First Republic were overthrown in a coup d’état in 1966. Over the next 30 years, Ghana experienced three more military coups and went through three more republics. Under President Nana Akufo-Addo who enjoys the distinction of being the first opposition leader to have assumed power through an election, it is now on the Fourth Republic and has spent the last 40 years to plummeting to the bottom of the UN’s Human Development Index.

The rest of the world has left Ghana in the dust. This is so obvious that many people in Ghana agree with President Trump that Ghana is in fact a shithole in spite of its natural resources. It became a shithole not because of slavery or colonialism, but because of its inept post-colonial leadership.

Ghana is now a country of internet scammers and a garbage dump for obsolete computers: