Page 89 - Afrika Must Unite

74 AFRICA MUST UNITE
before we ever got started. Nothing was too small to be twisted
as evidence in misrepresenting the strength and quality of my
government or to support the fiction of the growing strength of
the opposition.
In times of national emergency, the W estern democracies
have been compelled to limit their citizens’ freedom. We were
facing a time of national emergency. We were engaged in a kind
of war, a war against poverty and disease, against ignorance,
against tribalism and disunity. We were fighting to construct, not
to destroy. We needed to secure the conditions which would
allow us to pursue our policy of reconstruction and develop­
ment.
M y government brought in the Avoidance of Discrimination
Bill to deal with the control of political parties based on tribal or
religious affiliations. Its full title was ‘An Act to prohibit organi­
zations using or engaging in racial or religious propaganda to
the detriment of any other racial or religious community, or
securing the election of persons on account of their racial or
religious affiliations, and for other purposes in connection there­
with’. The effect was to bring the formation of the various
opposition parties into a United Party. Oddly enough, our show
of firmness wras reflected in a tem porary change in the tone of
the foreign press.
The Economist, for instance, summed up the negative position
of the opposition in a leading article:

The criticism that has always been levelled against the
N.L.M., and which is much more applicable to the present
assorted bunch of critics (the United Party), is that while accus­
ing the government of corruption, totalitarianism, destructive­
ness and inefficiency, it has offered no alternative policies of its
own. The opposition has two rather contradictory answers to
this: first, that the United Party is soon to announce a con­
structive policy (which has never come) and, second, that its
programme has to be vague or the government will appropriate,
and spoil, its ideas. In Ghana this fear is not altogether base­
less. The only fundamental difference of opinion between the
government and the opposition is over the relative power of the
centre and the regions. Since there is no basic difference in their
approach to, say, employment, education and housing, the