The spectre of the CIA in Ghana
For years the hands of the ubiquitous Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America have been in everything in Ghana. Talking Drums gives the background of the numerous CIA inspired 'mischiefs' in Ghana.What I can't understand is why the story did not first break in Ghana. For years the hands of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States have been seen in everything in Ghana. Or so at least the popular myth had gone. From the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah in February 1966, various incidents in Ghana's political turmoil have been blamed on the CIA.
Often it has been difficult to decipher the myth from even the probability because, to some people in Ghana, you could convince them easily that their wife was late with the dinner because of CIA activities.
It was one of those places on earth where the exploits of the CIA seemed to have assumed larger than life proportions and it was difficult to tell where paranoia took over from fact or even reasonable deductions.
Members of the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) at one time in the 1970s, decided to vote their executive out of office. They had held office for too long and the general feeling was one of extreme dissatisfaction with their performance. There was a groundswell of discontent and as the day approached for the meeting that had been called to demand an accounting from the executive, it became obvious that the incumbent President had noticed the writing on the wall that his days were numbered.
He had been enjoying himself tremendously as President of the Association; what with a lot of foreign travel and free tickets to state functions, he felt he was not anxious to go without a fight. He tried to rally support but by then it was an uphill task. Nobody seemed to care very much about who was going to be the new president, people had simply had enough. At a well-attended meeting on a Saturday morning the old executive was voted out.
In the ensuing uproar with everybody feeling quite pleased with the outcome of the meeting which had turned out to be shorter and the proceedings gone smoother than anticipated, the word went out: 'Let's go and drink to celebrate'. This writer had never been to any gathering of journalists in Ghana that did not end with a bout of drinking. 'Yes, let's go and drink with the CIA money'. It was a joke or, at least, it had to have been a joke and everybody laughed.
But then one never could be sure for every time the executive of a little village development committee was voted out of office, the word was that they had been done in by a CIA inspired and funded group.
The CIA surely must have grander things to preoccupy itself with, one had to say, to put things in perspective. One could see why the CIA would want to overthrow Nkrumah, but what about the executive of the Abokobi football club which played on a field half the normal size with a much repaired football?
If the CIA could overthrow a government they did not like, but could not keep one they like in power, many people reckoned they were better off without them.
If the CIA overthrew Nkrumah, the next civilian government was taking no building. such chances, the thinking being that if they were friendly with the CIA the government would last. From all the indications, only the CIA benefited from the close association. A Soviet spy was actually caught and expelled from Ghana in late 1971 amidst a lot of publicity and indignant and loud official talk that Ghana did not want to be drawn into superpower rivalries etc, etc. What was not said was that the hapless Soviet agent was only exposed through CIA help.
When it came to what was most important to the government, however, the CIA either could not or would not help, for barely two years after having been voted into power they were overthrown by a military coup; the supposedly efficient, all-knowing CIA did not get a whiff of the plot. The CIA was obviously so busy helping to install a new executive of the Dreamers Association or it did not have half the capabilities it was reputed to have.
If they could overthrow a government they did not like but could not keep one they liked in power, many people reckoned they were better off without them.
But it was not until the second coming of Flight-Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings that the USA and/or the CIA (in Ghana there does not seem to be any difference between the two in the public mind) came under such persistent public and official attack.
At a time when Colonel Gaddafy was seen as the Number 1 enemy of the USA, Flt-Lt Rawlings proclaimed him his best friend. The rhetoric and much of the heat of the early days of the revolution was directed against the USA. Very often it appeared the revolutionary cadres were going to seize control of the American Embassy
With Tehran still very fresh, the Embassy was reinforced and reinforced and then abandoned and moved to other premises better fortified. In the meantime the constant attacks on the US continued in the governmental press and among government-controlled officials. The United States was accused openly repeatedly of trying to overthrow the Rawlings regime.
At one stage, ex-Captain Kodjo Tsikata, the regime's security boss, was sure he had finally got the proof he needed to show that the US, indeed, was trying to overthrow the PNDC and he promptly released the text of what was supposed to have been a document from the West German Embassy in Accra. It would have been devastating to the Americans if it were true. Unfortunately for the PNDC, the documents turned out to have been a fake, the handiwork, some believe, of the East Germans. Quite ignominously the PNDC had to retract and apologise.
By this time, Flt-Lt Rawlings felt himself under genuine pressure; a combination of drought, a cata- strophic economic policy and the country not having worked for a whole year had reduced the country to unprecedented and widespread hunger.
Col. Gaddafy was not delivering on his promises of aid, the desperate delegations to the Eastern bloc countries had returned with a lot of sympathy and not much else. A desperate Rawlings turned to the IMF and World Bank (identified and vilified earlier as detrimental to Ghana).
In his own graphic way, Flt-Lt Rawlings has explained it as: "If you are drowning and somebody throws a rope to you, you cannot refuse it because you don't agree with that person... But there had to be a price, and he ordered the press to ease up on the United States and the West in general, falling out with his left-wing comrades in the process. But then aid poured in, food came in and loans came to avert the collapse of the country.
What was called the ultra-left was put to flight protesting that Rawlings had betrayed the revolution and that it had been hijacked.
People like Dr Kwasi Botchway went through a most striking metamorphosis in his new found advocacy of right-wing economics, many ideologues appeared ready to forget about their ideologies and announced beliefs for the sake of staying in power.
Ex-Capt Kodjo Tsikata, the "serious left-wing thinker" and guru stayed in place and an uneasy truce seemed to have been called in his running battle with the Americans.
