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Commentary

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Kwame Nkrumah, the 1 president of Ghana, saw the need to modernise Ghana’s economy.
He wanted to build an aluminium processing plant alongside the already being built Volta

hydroelectric dam (now known as the Aksombo dam).

He asked USA President Eisenhower for a ‘soft’ loan to make this possible. The loan

was refused. The reason for this. The CEO of America’s biggest aluminium businesses saw
the proposed development as a potential competitor.

See the following :
"C.I.A. Said to Have Aided Plotters Who Overthrew Nkrumah in Ghana,"
Hersh, Seymour M., The New York Times, (May 1978)
and

"The CIA, Kwame Nkrumah, and the Destruction of Ghana." - Modern Ghana
*****

60 years later BWI, independent economists and academic researchers continue to stress

how too many African economies are too dependent on a single commodity. Or perhaps
only two.

Too few people today are aware that the problem African economies have today,
reliance on export sales of commodities whose market prices can drop significantly, was

understood 60 years ago by African leaders! They understood it and had plans to address
it. All too often their efforts were often thwarted by the nature of the over-arching financial

regimes imposed on them. But in a number of specific instances their efforts were quite

deliberately blocked by the same people who were claiming to ‘help’.

The failure to get the necessary loan was a substantial loss of national wealth

creation for Ghana. Big businesses create opportunities for the creation and growth of
many smaller businesses. As big businesses train and develop their own people they also

stimulate an upgrade of skills in other businesses. Ordinary people get regular payment of
wages. The government gets tax revenue from the businesses that have been created and

from the individual workers.

What difference could 60 years of such wealth creation in Ghana have made?

*****
But it was not just a loss of wealth creation. What actually happened was that Nkrumah, as

would be the case with other African leaders, went looking for finance from other sources.

The USSR was one of these. And the USA and the USSR superpowers were in intense