The Way of a P.M.

Few democratic statesmen have less to fear from their parliamentary opposition than Ghana's Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah; in Ghana's last general election three years ago, Nkrumah's Convention People's Party won 71 out of 104 parliamentary seats. But U.S.-educated (Lincoln and the University of Pennsylvania) Kwame Nkrumah remained unsatisfied, ever since has spent much of his time working toward the total eradication of the opposition.

In the process, Nkrumah has pulled every political trick he knows. He has deported some critics, jailed others. At least nine M.P.s belonging to the opposition defected to the C.P.P. when Nkrumah made it clear that, unless they did so, no government money would be spent in their constituencies. And in persuading ordinary villagers to see the light, Nkrumah's government got good service out of the Builders' Brigade--ostensibly a kind of Civilian Conservation Corps, but actually an army of young toughs in yellow shirts, green trousers and red caps.

But successful as his methods were, Nkrumah still had one powerful voice to silence. He turned the heat on Oxford-educated Kofi Busia, 46, head of the opposition United Party. In his efforts to undermine Busia, Nkrumah managed to get Busia's brother deposed as the Paramount Chief of Wenchi, and last June had himself installed as the yeferiheni (head) of the Wenchi royal family. Finally, Nkrumah got his chance to eliminate Busia himself when the opposition leader announced that he was leaving for a lecture tour of Europe. The government broadly hinted that if Busia ever came back, he might be thrown into jail under Ghana's egregious Preventive Detention Act. Busia took the hint (TIME, July 13), decided to stay abroad, and all that was left for Nkrumah to do was to get his own stooge elected to Busia's vacant seat.

This time Nkrumah added something entirely new to his already colorful manual on how to succeed in African politics. As United Party leaders got set for the election by taking the precaution of recruiting some young goons of their own, Nkrumah sent out secret orders for the Builders' Brigade to lie low. The result was a moral disaster for the U.P.: by the time election day came round last week, Ghana's uncorrupted, British-trained police had been forced to arrest 82 United Party toughs, while only seven of the C.P.P.'s boys got into trouble. And two C.P.P. men--the only martyrs of the whole election--lay dead, the victims of a U.P. mob. After that, Nkrumah's candidate was a shoo-in, and the P.M. himself could turn to other things. At week's end he turned up before the steering committee of the All-African People's Congress in Accra to deliver a stirring anticolonial address. Its theme: no African will ever be really free so long as other Africans are not.

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