Goodbye to the Aweful

The world has known many tyrants, but few were as reckless, as demanding, as pretentious, as noisy and, at the end, as rejected as Kwame Nkrumah. He was the founder of his country and had been the very symbol of black African independence. Yet last week when he was overthrown, scarcely a tear was shed for him in Africa or anywhere else in the world.

The end came while Nkrumah was flying toward Peking on a self-appointed, self-inflated peace mission. Like the Nigerian coup six weeks earlier, it was led by Sandhurst-trained officers who knew precisely what they were doing. At 4:30 a.m. in the predawn darkness of Accra, two brigades of Ghanaian troops quietly took over the airport, the cable office, all government ministries and the government radio station. While early-morning market mammies stared, Jeeploads of soldiers moved into the suburban gardens of government Ministers and tanks deployed around Nkrumah's presidential compound itself.

White Handkerchiefs. There was little resistance. Nkrumah's presidential guard, dug in behind the four concentric walls surrounding the compound, held out for several hours; but by noon, downtown Accra was jammed with jubilant Ghanaians, dancing in the streets, cheering, singing, many of them wearing white handkerchiefs around their heads and white clay on their faces as a token of victory. "Fellow citizens," announced Colonel E. K. Kotoka, one of the coup leaders, in a broadcast over Radio Ghana, "I have come to inform you that the military, with the cooperation of the police, have taken over the government. The myth surrounding Nkrumah has been broken."

It was quite a myth while it lasted. In his 15 years as Ghana's Prime Minister, Founding Father, President, Commander in Chief and Osagyefo (Redeemer), Francis Nwia Kofie Kwame Nkrumah, son of a village goldsmith, had striven with some success to make himself all but synonymous with God. His face appeared on Ghanaian stamps and coins, statues of him littered the country, and his name flashed in neon in Accra. Ghanaian schoolchildren began each day by reciting that "Nkrumah is our Messiah, Nkrumah never dies." Among his official titles were Victorious Leader, the Great Messiah, His Messianic Majesty, the Pacifier, the Aweful, and His High Dedication.

Maginot Hilton. Ghana used to be known as the Gold Coast, and independence, in 1957, came with a silver lining. With cocoa exports thriving and the beginnings of a modern industrial plant, the country had $560 million in foreign currency reserves, boasted one of Africa's highest per capita incomes. Nkrumah squandered it on such expensive status symbols as an international jet airline, which loses almost twice as much money as it earns, and a $20 million international conference site which includes a bulletproof, bombproof, twelve-story apartment hotel that Accra wags call "the Maginot Hilton." To promote his image abroad, he opened 61 foreign embassies; his entourage to Peking last week numbered no fewer than 71 persons.

He spent wildly and badly on crash industrial schemes. Since 1962, he has launched 47 state enterprises that have invaded almost every sector of the economy. All but three of them are deep in the red, and the Kwame Nkrumah Steel Works had to close down after three months because it had used up all of Ghana's scrap iron, its only source of raw material. Government payrolls swelled to an amazing 250,000 people --two-thirds of all salaried workers in Ghana--and corruption was rampant. The wife of one of Nkrumah's Ministers imported a gold-plated bed, and one of his close advisers emptied his private swimming pool to provide storage space for the stream of "gifts" he exacted from local and foreign businessmen.

The $198 million Volta River Project will eventually turn Ghana into West Africa's major producer of electric power and irrigate 6,000 sq. mi. of new farmland. But not for many years will there be customers for all the juice it will generate. All in all, Nkrumah's reckless spending has brought Ghana as close to bankruptcy as any nation can get. Foreign currency reserves were wiped out long ago, and the nation's foreign debt now totals a staggering $1 billion, most of it in short-term loans.

In his obsession for absolute power, Osagyefo banned all opposition parties, passed a series of laws empowering him to jail all suspected enemies indefinitely and without trial, declared Ghana a one-party state with himself as perpetual President. He also outlawed strikes and clamped rigid government control over the press.

Strong Suspicion. All the while, he was proclaiming himself the father of Pan-African nationalism, and grinding out intricately vague political doctrines about "African socialism." It all sound ed splendid enough, and his fellow Africans were impressed at first. Later, when they found his agents bent on overthrowing their regimes, other African leaders lost their enthusiasm for the freedom pioneer. He was strongly suspected of instigating the 1963 assassination of Togo's President Sylvanus Olympic; last year 14 French-speaking states joined together in a formal denunciation of his eternal plotting.

At home, too, he was running into trouble. Shortages of such basic items as soap and matches were felt in every home, and most Ghanaians deeply resented his government's blatant corruption. At least five attempts have been made to assassinate him. Nkrumah's answer was to crack down even further, increase his security guard--and to retreat behind the four walls of his palace. He reportedly took to wearing a bullet-proof vest, nervously kept five bullet-proof Rolls-Royces ready to carry him around Accra, waiting until the last minute to choose the one he would ride in.

By last summer, he suspected everyone of plotting against him. He packed off his Cabinet for three weeks of enforced "self-study" while he attended a Commonwealth conference in Lon don, turned the government over to three hand-picked cronies in his absence. Ever suspicious of his army, he fired its commanders when he heard rumors that they had been "talking against" him, took command of the army himself. Then, three months ago, he announced plans to form a "people's militia," the obvious purpose of which was to neutralize the army if it tried to move against him.

Late News. That, as far as his officers were concerned, was the final blow. Led by Major General Joseph Arthur Ankrah, a tough, pro-British soldier who had been army chief of staff until Nkrumah fired him, they secretly drew up their plans for Nkrumah's overthrow. Perhaps because Nkrumah himself was absent, it was surprisingly bloodless. Two Cabinet ministers were killed, and 25 soldiers reportedly died in the fighting at the presidential compound, but most of Nkrumah's vast array of plenipotentiaries were hauled off to jail rather than shot. His Egyptian wife and three children were even allowed to fly off to exile in Cairo.

The news came to Nkrumah rather late--after he got off his plane in Peking, but just before he showed up for a gala state banquet. By then, his Red hosts had also got the word, and realized that they were stuck with a President without a country. With cold formality the party went on, but Chinese protocol officers carefully kept Nkrumah separated from the rest of the guests. After that first party, Peking's embarrassed bosses canceled the rest of Osagyefo's program.

With that, Nkrumah disappeared into his suite in Peking's Welcome Guest House and refused to come out.

Through his Foreign Minister (and former President of the United Nations General Assembly), Alex Quaison-Sackey, who was traveling with him, he announced that he would "soon" return to Ghana to throw the military out, but he was obviously whistling in the dark. "If he does, we'll cut his throat," grinned a soldier on duty at a roadblock near Accra. Offered exile in Guinea by his good friend Sekou Toure, Nkrumah replied with a cryptic cable: WILL VISIT YOU SOON.

Fate of Many. In Accra, the military government wasted no time in getting down to business. A seven-man National Liberation Council headed by General Ankrah was named to head the government. One of its first acts was to open the political prisons in which more than 1,000 of Nkrumah's enemies had been held for months--even years. Suddenly the newspapers and radio stations, which had so slavishly adored Nkrumah, were heaping scorn on their onetime leader. The new regime had its own words of explanation. Said Radio Ghana: "This act has been made necessary by the economic and political situation in the country." Nkrumah had brought Ghana to "the brink of national bankruptcy . . . What we need is a radical revolution. This will be done almost immediately, and we hope to announce measures for curing our troubles within the next few days." In this type of spirit, the new leaders promised to provide strict separation of powers, reorganize the government and appointed a committee to rewrite the constitution, which later would be submitted to the nation in a referendum.

Meanwhile, Nkrumah was suffering the fate of many a departed demagogue in the past. With hammers, chisels and even wrecking cranes, crowds tore down his statues.

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