Between Nkrumah and neoliberalism

The AIAC Podcast

Recorded on the anniversary of the coup that removed Kwame Nkrumah on February 24, 1966, and in the wake of Ghana’s recent presidential inauguration, this episode examines Ghana’s political economy to make sense of its democratic present.

A three-decade-long tradition of electoral alternation between two dominant political parties has earned Ghana a reputation as a bastion of democracy in coup-prone West Africa. Yet its spiraling inequality, recurrent debt crises, and growing civic unrest suggest a society that is far from prosperous. Ghana’s seemingly stable neoliberal present sharply contrasts with the more turbulent early years of its postcolonial history—characterized by the high-modernist project of the Nkrumah government to push through the industrial transformation of a primary export economy crashing against the rocks of vested domestic and international interests.

How did that period of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary ambition and intrigue give way to the seemingly tamed Ghana of today? Why has a two-party system characterized by alternation without change proven so durable? In light of the anti-galamsey protests, the emergence of social movements critical of the economic status quo, and the rise of the nominally anti-imperialist military regimes to its north, are there indications in Ghanaian society of what might replace the neoliberal two-party system? To examine these themes, Sa’eed Husaini, Africa Is a Country’s West Africa regional editor and cohost of The Nigerian Scam podcast, is joined by Gyekye Tanoh, the Ghanaian social activist, political economist, and former head of the Political Economy Unit at Third World Network-Africa