Redeemer's Woes

His High Dedication is the latest title given Kwame Nkrumah by his admirers, who once were content with Osagyefo, or Redeemer. By whatever title, Nkrumah is in bad trouble, and so is his country. Ghana, a little land once rich with promise, is slipping fast toward financial failure and harsh dictatorship. Thanks to Nkrumah's reckless spending, hard currency reserves are half what they were four years ago. And thanks to the pressure of left-wing extremists around him, Nkrumah is inching closer to the brink of Communist control of the country he led to independence in 1957.

One-Way Ticket. Hardly was he back from a good-will visit to Moscow in September when the ominous chain of events began. First he purged his Cabinet of some moderates who had been his main stay, notably the eminent Finance Minister K. A. Gbedemah. installed radical leftists in their places. Then fortnight ago. he cracked down on leaders of a strike, jailing them summarily along with dozens of others who had dared to criticize the government. To prison went the respected Dr. J.B. Danquah, Nkrumah's own mentor in the original independence movement, and young Joe Appiah, a politician who is married to the daughter of Britain's late Sir Stafford Cripps. Peggy Cripps Appiah was ordered to leave the country immediately; later the government backtracked, announced it merely wanted to pay her way back to England if she and her children wanted to leave.

The jailed men had been doing some grumbling about Nkrumah's confiscatory new wage taxes and other drastic money-raising schemes. But neither, so far as anyone could see, was involved in the "plots against the state" that Nkrumah suddenly claimed to have discovered.

Ugly Little Bill. What Kwame Nkrumah really discovered, when he got back home from his heady talks with Nikita Khrushchev and his glittering attendance at the Belgrade parley of the neutralist nonbloc, was the looming failure of his dream of a Nkrumah-controlled Pan African empire. His influence in the Congo had fallen away, and the expensive Ghana-subsidized alliance with Sekou Toure's Guinea and Modibo Keita's Mali was getting him nowhere. Moreover, the day was fast approaching when Ghana's dwindling exchequer would have to put up $226 million for the ambitious Volta River power and aluminum project, if the U.S. and the World Bank went ahead with their part of the deal.

Amid all this uncertainty, Nkrumah turned more and more to the support of his Communist friends. Off to Russia went 68 Ghanaian cadets to attend a Moscow military institute, and onto the agenda of Accra's Parliament went an ugly little piece of legislation setting up special courts to mete out death sentences for "offenses against the state."

Kwame Nkrumah now seemed as much a prisoner of his leftist colleagues as he was of his own Pan African dreams. There was only one way out--more bluster. When word trickled into Accra that Washington was pausing to reconsider its offer of the U.S.'s $133 million Volta River loan. His High Dedication fired off a letter to President Kennedy asking for a decision by Oct. 13. But only irigid silence came out of Washington; hastily, Nkrumah got off a second letter. Take your time, wrote Nkrumah reassuringly last week. Somehow, he had found a way to extend the deadline by 60 days.

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