Dr Kwame Nkrumah’s Economic Record Needs Serious Examination — Mr Kwesi Pratt

Veteran journalist and Pan-Africanist, Kwesi Pratt Jnr., has challenged the assertion that Ghana’s first President, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, destroyed the country’s economy, describing the claim as too simplistic to withstand serious historical and economic scrutiny.

Speaking at the first session of the 15th Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Lectures at the University of Cape Coast (UCC), Mr. Pratt argued that the economic assessment of Nkrumah’s administration should focus not only on the resources invested in major development projects but also on how effectively those projects were managed.

He said the correct economic question should be whether the projects undertaken under Nkrumah were effectively managed, rather than simply concluding that the projects themselves were responsible for Ghana’s economic difficulties.

According to Mr. Pratt, Nkrumah considered the attainment of self-government in the shortest possible time to be essential to Ghana’s development and regarded a more cautious and gradual approach to independence as too slow. He also explained that Nkrumah’s famous call to “seek ye first the political kingdom” was not an invitation for political office holders to enrich themselves.

Rather, he said, Nkrumah believed that political sovereignty was necessary for a country to fundamentally reorganise its education, health and economic systems according to its own national priorities. Mr. Pratt further argued that Nkrumah did not mechanically copy foreign political or economic models. He said the former President studied several traditions, selected lessons from them and adapted those lessons to the political realities and developmental needs of the Gold Coast and, subsequently, Ghana.

Describing Nkrumah as a “national development strategist,” Mr. Pratt said his administration used both accumulated national resources and borrowed funds to finance major development projects. These included investments in schools, electricity infrastructure, factories, ports and other projects intended to lay the foundations for Ghana’s development.

Mr. Pratt therefore rejected the broad claim that Nkrumah destroyed Ghana’s economy, arguing that such a position was too crude to survive serious historical and economic examination.

He maintained that a proper assessment of the Nkrumah era should consider the scale of his development agenda, the resources available to the government, the financing methods employed and, critically, how effectively the projects were managed and sustained.