The Climber

To Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, 50, there seems to be one thing wrong with little (pop. 4,900,000) Ghana: it makes him feel hemmed in. Months ago he began railing at the new states of West Africa to join him in a Union of African States to foil a "colonialist plot" that aimed at "Balkanizing" the continent. His neighbors, fearing that Nkrumah had in mind a little colonizing of his own, brushed aside the scheme. Undaunted, Nkrumah has even written his Pan-African hopes into a new constitution that would give him power to dissolve Parliament and veto its acts whenever he felt that an emergency required it. "In the confident expectation of an early surrender of sovereignty to a union of African states and territories," says Nkrumah's draft constitution, published this week, "the people now confer on Parliament the power to provide for the surrender of the whole or any part of the sovereignty of Ghana."

Apparently Nkrumah figures on his neighbors' doing some surrendering too. Looking north, he saw that certain tribes in the Upper Volta Republic should remember their "common heritage" with Ghana and join up. To the east, he has used the sprawling Ewe tribe as a basis for suggesting that parts of Togoland, which becomes independent in April, be taken over as Ghana's "seventh province." To the west, where Ivory Coast's Premier Felix Houphouet-Boigny is having trouble with dissident Sanwi tribesmen, Nkrumah said he is "studying the possibilities of regrouping" the Sanwi people on that frontier.

All this is making no friends for Nkrumah. In big (pop. 35 million) Nigeria, Prime Minister Alhaji Sir Abubakar Tafewa Balewa refers to Ghana's leader with scarcely veiled contempt. "I do not know why you attach any importance whatsoever to what Mr. Nkrumah says," he recently snapped to touring British reporters. In Togoland, popular Premier Sylvanus Olympio is even blunter. "The man must be crazy," he says. "Does he really think he can absorb us with his puny bunch of tin soldiers and those two minesweepers he calls a navy?"

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