Page 75 - Afrika Must Unite

6o AFRICA MUST UNITE

reigning Government of Britain. We protested our ability to
safeguard the rights of our own people and were resentful of
the doubts cast on our intentions. I posed the suggestion that if
my Government could be suspected of ulterior intentions towards
our political opponents, we were equally open to the suspicion
that we might abrogate the imposed constitution on the morrow
of British departure. Where, then, was the purpose of negotiating
a constitution ? W hy not let us frame our own Constitution ?
The British Government was adam ant. They made it un­
equivocally clear that unless we entered into constitutional
negotiations they would take no further steps towards the grant
of independence. This was the atmosphere in which we met and
the mood in which the constitution emerged that was to tie the
future of Ghana. It saw the light of day, indeed, not as a legal
instrument from our own Ghanaian Assembly, but as a British
O rder in Council. Its official title was ‘The G hana (Constitution)
O rder in Council, 1957’ of the British Government. It was
published by the British Government on 22 February 1957.
Some might charge that there was a good deal of emotionalism
involved in our attitude to the m anner of the framing of our
constitution for independence. Reviewing it with the dis­
passionate objectiveness of three years of government under its
provisions, we are reinforced in our conviction that only im­
perialist arrogance could have decided that entrenched clauses
are irremovable, even under such constitutional stringencies as
those by which the British sought to tie us down. Perhaps we
were regarded as too stupid to be able to extricate ourselves by
constitutional means from the strait-jacket of the ‘Special
procedure for passing Bills relating to the Constitution and other
im portant m atters’, in which the British strapped us with the
freedom that they ‘gave’. The British Government had decided
that constitutional change should be made as difficult as possible
for us, indeed almost impossible.
Clause 32 of our independence constitution allowed that

No Bill for the amendment, modification, repeal or re-enact­
ment of the constitutional provisions of Ghana . . . shall be
presented for Royal Assent unless it has endorsed on it a certi­
ficate under the hand of the Speaker that the number of votes