Cribbing from Moscow

"Kwame Nkrumah is to Africa today what Lenin was to the Soviet Union in 1917," Ghana's Defense Minister said recently. The parallel is most apt, for Nkrumah is rapidly turning his country into an absolute dictatorship. Items last week:

> Government police arrested Dr. Joseph Danquah, 68, Nkrumah's opponent in the 1960 presidential election. A revered pioneer in Ghana's independence movement, Dr. Danquah was Nkrumah's first political mentor, but the two fell out and became bitter foes. Though police specified no charge, the government-controlled press called Danquah "a tribalist fiend and confusionist agent of Western imperialism."

>Two top police officials were arrested and nine others, including Police Commissioner Erasmus Madjitey, sacked.* This was seen as a move to turn all law-enforcement duties over to the Red-lining army. > The government press called for the expulsion of the 150 U.S. Peace Corpsmen in Ghana, calling them "spies and meddlers."

In a national referendum next week, Nkrumah has offered a constitutional amendment making his Convention People's Party Ghana's only legal political party. The proposed amendment was lifted from Article 126 of the 1936 Soviet constitution.

* A new version of the recent assassination attempt on Nkrumah leaked out of Accra last week. When the assassin opened fire, the police scattered, and Nkrumah raced back into his official residence and sought refuge in the kitchen. According to one report, the pursuing killer was felled not by Nkrumah -- as the official story had it -- but by the kitchen's swinging door.

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