GHANA
Second chance
TIBOR SZAMUELY
Ten years ago somebody or other declared that the 1960s would be the decade of Africa. Many people took this quite seriously. But alas, the only criterion by which Africa can be said to have held the centre of the stage in the past decade has been the vast amount of gruesome news coming out of that un- fortunate continent. As Usual, the `progressive' friends of Africa have proved her worst enemies. By building up a nonsensical messianic vision of the liberated black man come to show us the paths of righteousness (shades of the noble savage!), by wildly acclaiming the transcendent qualities of first one venal tyrant, then another, and another, and another, by hiding the true facts until they could no longer be concealed from view, the 'friends of Africa' have helped create the deep disillusionment that exists today, and pretty well killed off all interest in the subject. This is a pity, because there are noteworthy things happening in Africa, and some rays of hope for the future are still to be discerned there.
One of the few hopeful spots on the map of Africa is Ghana. Since Kwame Nkrumah's overthrow four years ago nobody has heard much about Ghana. In a sense, this is no bad thing: the happiest na- tions have no history, it has been said—and in our age of instant history the same may apply to news as well. Nevertheless I believe
Ghana deserves more attention than she gets. She is embarked on a road no other na- tion has ever traversed : the re-creation of a democratic system after six or seven years of totalitarian dictatorship and three years of military rule (in Germany and Italy the dic- tatorship had to be destroyed by foreign military force).
So far Ghana has done remarkably well, considering the difficulties. The military regime handed over power, as promised, to a freely elected civilian government; the coun- try's desperate economic problems are being tackled. But a few weeks ago a cloud ap- peared on the horizon—a cloud no bigger than a judge's wig. Dr Busia's government has found itself in conflict with the judiciary. Back to Nkrumah's day? Not quite.
The facts of the case are fairly simple. A leading official of a public corporation was dismissed from his post. He appealed to the Supreme Court, which appointed a panel of five judges to review his case. The govern- ment objected to the panel's composition, and for very good reason : one of the judges was an intimate friend of the plaintiff, while another had a brother-in-law who was also dismissed from the public service, and on whose behalf he had already energetically intervened in private. The judges against whom these allegations were raised made no attempt to deny them and went ahead with hearing the case. One of their brother judges thereupon resigned in disgust, thus making the panel unconstitutional, yet to nobody's surprise the plaintiff won his case by a three to one decision. The government refused to accept the court's ruling; in a nation-wide broadcast Dr Busia explained—with numer- ous references to English case law—that 'one of the essential conditions of a fair trial is that a judge must have no interest himself in the matter he has to try'. This condition had been manifestly absent.
In a country with Ghana's recent political history one should not underrate the seriousness of the incipient constitutional crisis. Dr Busia directly accused certain judges of trying to misuse the courts for political purposes; the opposition has at- tacked him for flouting the constitution.
Whatever the rights and wrongs (or the consequences) of the case, we should by now have learned the lesson of not equating African with British conditions. The African attitude to the separation of the judiciary from politics is—to put it mildly—not quite the same as ours, and many Ghanaian judges, for all their robes and wigs, have shown themselves to be cast in a different mould from Chief Justice Gascoigne or Lord' Chief Justice Coke. It would be wise, therefore, to refrain from the automatic assumption that the Ghanaian government is once again, as in the bad old days, in- terfering with the course of justice. This time the boot is on the other foot.
Ghana is by no means out of the woods. The ex-Redeemer, skulking in nearby Guinea, still hopes to return; his black power disciples, led by Mr Stokeley Carmichael (who recently proclaimed Hitler as the greatest of white men), are busy stirring up trouble wherever they can—including Trinidad. Parliamentary democracy is a delicate plant, ill-fitted for the tropics. It can easily wither away. 'We know democratic rule and democratic life to be the most difficult to achieve,' said Dr Busia, 'but we believe them to be the best, and we believe that we can achieve them.'
We must hope he is right. This is Ghana's second chance at democracy—there will hardly be a third.
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