Contents Chapter 1 Leadership in Postcolonial Africa: An Introduction 1

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for and perpetuate the injustices they struggled against. It was, 

to borrow an apt phrase from Kim et al. (2008), truly a case 

of “rooting for (and then abandoning) the underdog.” After 

independence, the African underdog became the enemy, pre-

sumed to eye the coveted power of her former champions and 

severely punished for her imagined crime. What were expected 

to be spaces of freedom and hope during the anticolonial 

struggle morphed into spaces of oppression and fear policed by 

independent regimes often more tyrannical than the departed 

colonialists. 

 The hegemon-subject relations of colonialism morphed into 

ruler-ruled relations in which the distribution of power was 

totally weighted in favor of the rulers, just like they were under 

colonialism. The new African rulers emerged not as dedicated 

servants to the ideals of freedom and human rights they fought 

for, with and on behalf of their people, but as masters of their 

people who assumed the infallible right to define and decide 

what was best for their countries, what constituted human 

rights and freedom, and who among their people deserved to 

enjoy or be denied such human rights and freedom. Generally 

included in most independence constitutions but gradually nul-

lified, the doctrine of citizen rights and obligations that char-

acterized the Western nation-state system had no comparable 

presence in Africa. This doctrinal absence and its attendant-

imposed uniformity in African politics led to the eruption of 

civil conflicts and instabilities—military coups, assassinations, 

assassination attempts, and, in some cases, bloody civil wars 

that exacted a heavy toll on the continent’s human and material 

resources. To parody J. F. K’s famous saying, Africa’s postcolo-

nial rulers made peaceful change impossible and therefore ren-

dered violent change inevitable. Yet political change in Africa, 

when brought about by violent means, rarely if ever brought 

about the desired results. 

 It would be simplistic to give the impression that African lead-

ers of the postcolonial era did nothing good for their countries. 

A case in point is that in the majority of cases they were able to 

hold together their countries, the fragile creatures of colonial 

partition in Africa, in some cases violently and at great cost. 

In Senegal, successive governments since 1982 have militarily 

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struggled to keep the southern province of Casamance from 

seceding. In Nigeria, Yakubu Gowon had to fight a long and 

bloody war to keep Biafra from seceding. In Sudan, the north 

was forced to fight a hard, long, and futile battle to keep the 

south from seceding. But by and large, the fragile and utterly 

artificial boundaries of the colonial territory survived intact as 

markers of the new nation-state system in Africa. 

 Some first-generation postcolonial African leaders also 

registered notable successes in building infrastructures and 

launching initiatives that directly improved their people’s lives. 

Among other things in Ghana, Nkrumah “established 52 state 

enterprises, including 25 manufacturing and industrial enter-

prises . . . instituted a free education and a free textbook scheme” 

and built two state universities in addition to the University of 

Ghana at Legon (Dekutsey 2012). “To give a boost to Black 

Studies, Nkrumah established the Institute of African Studies 

on the campus of the University of Ghana, Legon . . . On the 

sea, Ghana was sailing its own fleet of ships under the Black 

Star Line brand. In the sky, Ghana was flying its own airline, 

Ghana Airways” (Dekutsey 2012).  

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   Similar developments took 

place in other countries such as the Ivory Coast. 

 However, alongside these “good” things ran a concurrent 

pattern of political intolerance in Nkrumah and other lead-

ers’ behavior that made it impossible for African countries to 

flourish as viable nation-states and eventually to flounder on 

the rocks of severe and long-running political instability and 

developmental crises. In Ghana, what Nkrumah considered the 

demands of the new postcolonial situation bore little semblance 

to the actual demands of that situation. This was not because 

he did not see what needed to be done. Rather, it was because 

he assumed monopoly of knowledge of what needed to be done 

and insisted he was the only one who knew how best it could be 

done. Nkrumah’s vision of Ghana as a socialist republic led by a 

single vanguard party dictated his policy options and actions. He 

had larger goals, such as making Ghana the capital of a united 

states of Africa. But these goals were contingent upon Ghana 

becoming a powerful socialist republic. In pursuit of this goal, 

Nkrumah increasingly monopolized the political space, gener-

ated a slew of repressive legislation that systematically muzzled 

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dissent and opposition, was declared president for life in 1963, 

and imposed a one-party state on Ghana in 1964. He was over-

thrown in a military-police coup on Februrary 24, 1966. His 

immediate political legacy was two decades of civil crises in 

Ghana, with military coups toppling sitting governments on 

January 13, 1972; June 1978; June 1979; and December 31, 

1981. The second republic under Kofi Busia (1969–1972) and 

the third republic under Hilla Limman (1979–1981) were both 

ousted in military coups. It took massive civil society action 

for most of the 1980s to force Flt. Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings 

to institute multiparty politics in Ghana. The fourth republic 

has held since 1993; however, in 2014, Ghana seems to need 

better and more creative leadership than it has had since 1993. 

Growing unemployment, crumbling roads and other infrastruc-

ture, frequent power outages in a country that used to export 

electricity and now produces about 100,000 barrels of oil per 

day, and a growing sense of popular frustration call for bet-

ter and more responsible leadership in Ghana. The culture of 

political exclusion created by Nkrumah remains quite visible in 

Ghana, in spite of the noticeable freedoms—of expression and 

association—that characterize the country’s political landscape 

since 1993. 

 Nkrumah, a former “freedom-loving” nationalist leader, 

used the Preventive Detention Act (PDA) of 1958 among other 

laws to eliminate any Ghanaian who dared suggest other forms 

of history writing in the country. Passed into law barely a year 

after independence, the PDA generated an obscene culture of 

political repression in Ghana that arguably remains unrivalled 

in postcolonial Africa. The PDA gave Nkrumah and his gov-

ernment the power to order the arrest and detention for up to 

five years, later increased to ten years, without charges, trial, 

the benefit of habeas corpus, or the intervention of any judicial 

or legislative authority, of any person suspected of “acting in 

a manner prejudicial to the security of the state or endanger-

ing Ghana’s relations with other nations.” What was prejudicial 

to the security of the state or what constituted endangering 

Ghana’s relations with other nations was exclusively defined by 

Nkrumah or the supporters of  Nkrumahism  who often used the 

PDA  to  settle  personal  scores  (Omari  2000;  Dekutsey  2012). 

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