Opposition in Flight

In the two years since it became an independent state, Ghana has moved farther and farther away from the democratic principles that its leaders presumably learned under British tutelage. Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah's government has clamped 41 supporters of the opposition United Party in jail under Ghana's Preventive Detention Act. Last week the harassed United Party suffered a further jolt: its parliamentary leader, Oxford-educated Dr. Kofi Busia, 46, turned up in England and said he might not return to his homeland.

For weeks Nkrumah's government had been trying unsuccessfully to tie the quiet, scholarly Busia to an alleged plot to assassinate the Prime Minister. A three-man investigating commission failed to implicate Busia in its report, and an English lawyer on the commission went farther, questioned whether there had even been an assassination plot. Knowing that Busia planned to make a three-month summer tour of Europe and resenting anti-Nkrumah remarks he had made abroad in the past, the government fortnight ago issued a white paper decreeing that "persons in Dr. Busia's position who go abroad and deliberately make false statements . . . shall be put on trial for their offense and their conduct thus publicly exposed."

Busia had heard that police were on the lookout for him to seize his passport, and slipped quietly out of Ghana and into Sierra Leone, boarded a ship for England. His wife and children had gone aboard the ship earlier at the Ghana seaport of Takoradi. In England, Busia opened up on Nkrumah. "In Ghana," he said, "you take a big risk in being a member of the opposition. The real question is whether it is possible to maintain an effective, worthwhile opposition in the circumstances created by the Ghana government."

Would he go back? He was considering the offer of a professorship at The Hague's Institute of Social Studies, but he said, "I would be prepared to go back if there were any chance of democracy."

Ghana was given its independence in 1957, accompanied by many earnest wishes that it would carry on the democratic heritage from Britain. It had an elite of educated intellectuals and the beginnings of a two-party system. But on the ground that its authority had to be established in the hinterland, Nkrumah set out to create a personality cult around himself. Monuments were built to him, streets and squares renamed after him, coins minted with his portrait. But he was not content to prevail over feudalistic chiefs. By means of repressive legislation and arbitrary police acts, he has set out to eradicate any possibility of an effective two-party system. Authoritarian rule, say some of his sympathizers, is inevitable in this stage of Africa's evolution. This may prove to be the fact, but Ghana was one place where the opposite once gave the most promise of being true.

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