Preliminaries in the Gold Coast
After the excitement of the general election the Gold Coast is finding the preliminary stages of making the constitution work something of an anti-climax. The Assembly has had one brief and more or less formal meeting at which 'a Speaker has been elected (incidentally with appropriate unanimity), but its real task will start at the end of next month when it gets down to business. The interval will be spent in discussions between the Governor and the party leaders, in the course of which a list of Ministers will have to be drawn up and their portfolios allotted. Whether the Ministers are all to be drawn from the Convention People's Party, or whether they should include members of other parties, will be the main subject for bargaining. There is no precedent on which the Governor or the politicians can act, since no constitutional experiment of the same nature has been tried anywhere before. The empirical nature of the whole experi- ment reduces the value of all prophecies and promises. All that is certain is that the Colonial officials are determined to work the constitution because they believe it is valuable, whereas Mr. Nkrumah is determined to work the constitution to prove his contention that its value is severely 'restricted. It will be interest- ing to see whether these two opposite approaches to the same problem do not prove in the long run to be more compatible with each other than might have been expected. Meanwhile, it is just as well that the Governor should have reminded all con- cerned that there is a great deal of work waiting to be done— which, in fact, has got to be done, whoever in the end does it. Mr. Nkrumah's capacities will begin to be assessed for the first time when it appears whether he can compress his emotional national- ism into the necessary strait-jacket of a parliamentary Bill.
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