Between Nkrumah and neoliberalism

Summary

The AIAC Podcast: Between Nkrumah and Neoliberalism
Hosted by Africa Is a Country
Release Date: March 17, 2025

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Introduction: Setting the Historical Context

In the episode titled "Between Nkrumah and Neoliberalism," hosted by Saeed Husseini under the Africa Is a Country banner, the discussion delves deep into Ghana's political and economic evolution. The conversation is anchored around two pivotal events: the recent election of former President John Mahama and the 59th anniversary of the 1966 coup that ousted Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president and a prominent Pan-African leader.

The Nkrumah Era: Ambition and Industrialization
Timestamp: [05:01]

Jeky Tano begins by highlighting the dynamic yet turbulent period under Kwame Nkrumah’s leadership. He notes, “The Nkrumah period was crammed with significant changes politically, socially, and economically” ([06:16]). Nkrumah aimed to transition Ghana from a primary commodity-based economy, dominated by exports like gold and cocoa, to a more diversified and industrialized nation. This involved establishing state monopolies in key sectors, guaranteeing prices for farmers, and investing heavily in domestic processing facilities—efforts that laid the foundation for Ghana’s industrial growth.

The 1966 Coup and Transitional Turmoil
Timestamp: [19:05]

The conversation shifts to the aftermath of Nkrumah’s overthrow in 1966. Tano explains that the coup was largely driven by economic struggles and opposition from entrenched sectors who felt marginalized by Nkrumah’s state-led economic policies. He states, “the social conflict introduced by this agenda of privatization meant that the chaos would and instability would ensue” ([22:24]). The subsequent military regimes attempted to stabilize the economy through privatization, often leading to increased corruption and economic disparity.

Rawlings and the Neoliberal Shift
Timestamp: [31:48]

Tano discusses Jerry Rawlings' rise to power, emphasizing that Rawlings was a product of the ongoing crises rather than the Nkrumah model itself. He remarks, “Rawlings is a product of the Nkrumah model going into crisis” ([31:48]). Rawlings’ administration marked a significant shift towards neoliberal policies, including extensive privatization of state assets. This move was intended to attract foreign investment but resulted in widespread economic dislocation and increased inequality.

Privatization and Socio-Economic Consequences
Timestamp: [44:15]

The episode delves into the ramifications of privatization under Rawlings. Tano explains how state monopolies were dismantled, leading to job losses and weakening of traditional labor structures. He notes, “the degree of rollback and its social dislocation was immense” ([55:43]). The privatization efforts facilitated the enrichment of a new elite while exacerbating income inequality, highlighting a stark contrast from the more equitable distribution during the Nkrumah era.

Current Political Stability vs. Growing Inequality
Timestamp: [60:02]

Despite the economic challenges, Ghana has maintained a semblance of political stability. Tano points out that this stability is misleading, as it masks deep-rooted inequalities. He asserts, “the ratio of the highest paid person did not end twice the lowest paid person... has now grown to 89 to 1” ([60:16]). This significant increase in income disparity illustrates how neoliberal policies have favored the wealthy, leaving the majority of the population struggling.

The Role of Trade Unions and Social Movements
Timestamp: [67:56]

Tano criticizes the fragmentation and weakening of trade unions and social movements, which once played a pivotal role in challenging economic disparities. He states, “There's a growing critique which says that all these people belong to the same class and they are wrong” ([67:32]). The decline in organized labor power has led to a lack of cohesive social movements capable of demanding substantial economic and social reforms.

Comparison with Regional Developments in the Sahel
Timestamp: [86:52]

The discussion briefly touches upon recent political upheavals in the Sahel, noting similarities with Ghana’s struggles. Tano emphasizes that while movements in the Sahel have garnered popular support by challenging foreign influence, they often fail to present viable alternatives for local empowerment. He observes, “the agency in society that can be animated by such a process is actually being short circuited by this new government” ([88:47]).

Conclusions: Potential Paths Forward for Ghana and Africa
Timestamp: [98:11]

In concluding the episode, Tano underscores the necessity of rebuilding popular power and unified social movements to counteract the entrenched neoliberal structures. He advocates for grassroots initiatives that can harmonize diverse social and economic interests, stating, “Progressives should begin to grapple with... the nitty-gritty of the fact that our economies have a certain structure” ([76:51]). The conversation ends on a cautionary note, warning against simplistic admiration of political figures like Rawlings and Rawlings’ successors, and instead calls for a more nuanced understanding of power dynamics and a concerted effort to foster genuine societal transformation.

Notable Quotes:

• Jeky Tano on Nkrumah's Industrialization Efforts:
  “The Nkrumah period was crammed with significant changes politically, socially, and economically” ([06:16]).

• On Privatization’s Impact:
  “The degree of rollback and its social dislocation was immense” ([55:43]).

• Addressing Income Inequality:
  “The ratio of the highest paid person did not end twice the lowest paid person... has now grown to 89 to 1” ([60:16]).

• Critique of Fragmented Trade Unions:
  “There's a growing critique which says that all these people belong to the same class and they are wrong” ([67:32]).

• On Rebuilding Popular Power:
  “Progressives should begin to grapple with... the nitty-gritty of the fact that our economies have a certain structure” ([76:51]).

Final Thoughts

This episode of The AIAC Podcast offers a thorough analysis of Ghana’s historical and contemporary political economy. By juxtaposing the visionary but tumultuous Nkrumah era with the more stable yet inequitable neoliberal period under Rawlings and his successors, Jeky Tano provides listeners with a critical lens to evaluate the limitations and consequences of current governance models. The discussion not only sheds light on Ghana's internal dynamics but also draws parallels with broader regional challenges, emphasizing the need for unified, grassroots-driven movements to forge a more equitable and empowered future for Africa.

Transcript

[William Shorkey]

Hello and welcome to the Africa Is a Country podcast. My name is William Shorkey and you are listening to this, which is Africa is a Country's Destination for analysis on current affairs in Africa and in the world from a left and Pan African perspective. This is another special episode guest hosted by a West Africa regional editor, Saeed Husseini of the Nigerian Scam, and today he'll be interviewing Jeky Tano to explore Ghana's historical trajectory, its place within the broader West African economy, and the structural challenges facing its democracy. This discussion is anchored in two significant moments. First, the recent election of John Mahama, who returns to the presidency after previous electoral defeat, as well as the 59th anniversary of the 1966 coup that overthrew Nkrumah. These events frame the contradictions of Ghanaian politics. While the country remains a beacon of democratic stability in the region, the persistence of economic crises and environmental struggles and labor fragmentation raises pressing questions about the direction of its governance. Jake Attano, a socialist activist, researcher and development economist, brings a sharp historical and political economy lens to these questions. Together, Husseini and Tano reflect on Ghana's shift in class dynamics, the evolution of its two party system, and the broader lessons for the African left. They also touch on the Sahel's recent political upheavals in their implications for Ghana and the region. At a time when mass protest and state repression are shaping new political realities across the continent, this conversation offers a critical reflection on how Ghana's history might illuminate the possibilities and limits of progressive transformation today. Without further ado, here's Saeed and Jeky. Enjoy.

[Saeed Husseini]

So today we thought we would take a break from the Nigeria centristism, if that's a word that has plagued us recently on this podcast channel, to have a conversation about a slightly saner and more stable country to our west, albeit one with its own scams. As we'll discuss as the show progresses, I'm speaking of course about our dear neighbor Ghana. I think two big events frame our conversation today. On one hand, the 24th of February that's two days before we're recording, marked the 59th anniversary of the coup that overthrew the renowned anti colonial pan African intellectual statesman Kwame Nkrumah. On the other hand, the conversation is taking place only a couple of months after the inauguration of John Mahamad, Ghana's new president, who is in fact a former president that has returned to power to replace the party that denied him his initial re election bid. Both events seem to reflect two poles of Ghanaian history. One could see on one hand, a turbulent and inspiring post colonial period marked by statesmanship, ambition, intrigue, betrayal, and on the other hand, a more stable, but maybe a bit disheartening political present marked by predictable pattern of democratic alternations and a seemingly frozen economic crisis. So is this a fair characterization of the Ghanaian story? How might an examination of Ghana's political economy help us understand its political present, including Ghana's role in ecowas, the politics of anti Galamse protests, and the future of the Ghanaian two party system? These are the kinds of questions we have in mind today. And we're very excited to be joined by a very able interlocutor to tackle these questions. None other than Comrade Jackie Tano, who is a social activist, educator and researcher and a development economist based in Accra. Comrade, we're really grateful that you've made the time to join us today. So thank you for being here.

[Jeky Tano]

Thank you very much, Saeed.

[Saeed Husseini]

Yeah, great. And also, you know, you mentioned you do have a bit of a cold, so we'll try not to keep you too long.

[Jeky Tano]

No props.

[Saeed Husseini]

I wanted to dig into some, some elements of Ghana's history and political economy. You know, certain personalities certainly loom large when we think about Ghana's history. And I think there's probably none that looms larger than Nkrumah. So maybe we could start with, you know, just a brief trip back to the kind of Nkrumah period to use that maybe as a kind of context to understand the present. So Ghana, you know, in addition to Nkrumah, one would probably think of, I mean, the big inanimate objects maybe would be gold and cocoa. The Ngruma period I think is remembered, or maybe assumed to have tried to lead a shift from a kind of single commodity dominant export economy or you know, kind of natural commodity dominant economy anyway, to something more industrial with sort of heavier infrastructure and some social welfare. Is it, is, is that a fair characterization of the incumbent period? To what extent were those ambitions actually achieved in terms of reshaping Ghana's economy away from the kind of classic post colonial primary commodity type of economy?

[Jeky Tano]

Yeah, well, I mean, I think in your intro you said that that period was a dynamic but turbulent period. It reminds me of what someone said, that there are decades when nothing happens and then there are days when decades happen. In other words, the Nkrumah period was crammed into the Nkrumah period where a lot of significant changes politically, socially and economically. And one of the most important aspects of that is what you just mentioned, which is the kind of concerted attempt to Break from the structures, the very narrow structures of monocultural, monocropping, primary commodity, export dependence that the colonial order had locked all of our economies in Africa into, and that there was a concerted effort in the Nkoma period to move away from that and to do so. Primarily, one of the cornerstones, you know, the key mechanisms for trying to do so, was this effort at industrialization. You're perfectly right, dude. I think that's a fair enough characterization. Now you ask to what degree that succeeded. Well, first of all, just to take a brief moment to kind of highlight a number of the changes that ensued as a result of this orientation or path that Nkrumah pursued. The first thing, of course, is that it's required as a prerequisite, the state monopoly of a domestic dimension of that same primary commodity export economy. So whether it was cocoa, there was a lot of heavy state investment in it. Farmers were given guaranteed pricing so that there's a price, a floor for, you know, of income floor for all farmers. It wasn't just the cash crops, the export crops, but food, everything, that kind of the whole agrarian structure. But its heart was of course, the foreign exchange export earning sector, which had been dominated before then by European merchant houses and so on and so forth. So a monopoly was established in terms of the investment, in terms of the buying, the internal trading, warehousing, grading, agricultural extension support, upgrade, all that kind of stuff, along with an ecosystem of research institutions and so on and so forth. Okay? And alongside that, also that monopoly allowed the fact that, you know, a steady assured supply could go into domestic processing. So industrial plants were set up to process cocoa in various stages for various purposes. Chocolate factories, cocoa, cocoa butter, cocoa oil, things like that. Okay, so that prerequisite of trade monopoly, internal trade and investment monopoly was one dimension. Then on the back of that was a regime of intervention in agriculture, where state led interventions in terms of inputs and pricing. And, you know, and so on was also. And then that's a third leg was the uptake, you know, the industrial concerns as a domestic off taker of some of the products, so that it's not everything is exported in its primary, you know, unprocessed state and so on and so forth. And a lot of it fed right back into finished production domestically and so on. So this, in a sense was the real, was the picture, a microcosm of what was attempted. Of course, there are some things which go without saying would have been necessary in that process, which is the state monopoly of finance, because you cannot have the state financing all of this. If it does not have public banking, development, banking, under national control, which are policy instruments of the government, and so on. So from that point of view, I mean, a lot of innovation took place. I mean, even your most traditional economists, like Schumpeter and so on and so forth, will always say, as we all learnt even from school in a theoretical sense, that when you have structures that are missing in an economy, when you have late development and attempts to bridge that gap, both the necessity and the room for institutional innovation is stronger, okay? And therefore, you know, words that have become fashionable now, disruption and so on and so forth, when in fact at this point in time, nothing of any great significance is being disrupted. In those days that was a fairly serious and far going disruption. Okay? So that's one dimension of it. And I think that it also meant that the overall pattern and rhythm of the economy did not depend only entirely or unduly on the external sector, on the export sector, because you have all this domestically means that domestic growth, domestic investment, domestic demand, domestic consumption, gained in importance in terms of their weight in overall growth, for example. It would also mean that their weight in overall income and therefore savings and therefore investment, all that cycle and the nexus, interconnection between all that was strengthened. So from that point of view, you could say on paper at least, that it was a progressive intervention, which was one that went against the structures that existed. From that point of view, it was innovative, it was radical in that sense, it was countercyclical, it was not going against the trend, it was bucking the trend and therefore was important. At the same time, obviously we have to say that the levels of coordination which is required institutionally, policy wise and in terms of bringing the interests of different groups, traders, farmers and so on, into greater consonants. The level of coordination that that requires, requires a degree of state and institution building that if you leave everything to the free market, you don't necessarily require. Okay? There are great advancement in a lot of some of these structures and coordination and domestic institutional capabilities, whether it's the banking sector, whether it's in local government and so on and so forth, which cannot. I think we tend to overlook some of those soft elements, soft infrastructure elements, which I think, you know, now that our region is in such chaos, we should ought to be reminded of their value. Okay? So I think that's what I mentioned. And in sourcing, let me end on two points. This aspect of the discussion. In sourcing, two things were significant once you had this element of new skills being brought into the economy, in terms of the Domestic, you know, the spectrum of domestic capabilities, new institutions being brought into play, new levels of harmonize, attempting to harmonize interest and so on and so forth. And the fact that domestic economic activity was a far more weightier aspect of national economic growth than it is today, for example, or was in the period preceding the Nkrumah period, then you have to say that the welfare levels of society. You mentioned welfare. The welfare levels of society would necessarily have to increase.

[D]

Right? Right.

[Jeky Tano]

If local consumption is necessary, first of all, to attract the kind of skills and train and stabilize a skilled workforce which can power this manufacturing and industrial transformation, it requires a great deal investment in the people who are going to do the work. If at the same time the economy depends more on the domestic population and their consumption needs to keep growing, then you can't rely on simply immiserating people driving people's consumption right to the bottom. The race to the bottom cannot, no matter what your will is. If you are true to the economic policy paradigm that you're pursuing, then in addition to investing in the skills and standards and therefore having some degree of dignity of labor and so on and so forth, and an upward trajectory in terms of skills, incomes and consumption capacity, purchasing power of the domestic population necessarily must be something that you can't ride too roughshod over. Okay, that's a big contrast to where we are today, because I think that we are in an era where. I'm not saying exploitation did not exist. Every capital process necessarily involves exploiting workers, whether we like it or not. In whose benefit, under whose control are just as important questions. But we are not dealing with that just yet. The point I'm making is that the contrast between then and now. I know we will talk about now a bit more, but. But the fact is that now we depend more on cheap labor, on deregulation and informality and so on and so forth. And to do that, you need. You need necessarily to degrade the labor. Okay, so. So that is the. So that is the difference in the economic pattern and its implication. Okay, poverty existed then. Yes, definitely. The gaps in society, the inequality in society, and the degree to which there was a relatively speaking upliftment of the working and laboring classes as a whole. I'm not saying out of benevolence or whatever, as a necessary attendant part and a logical, you know, dimension of the. Of that increment policy kind of took place. So from that point of view, you can't say that they were important changes in the economy. I've already said that. But politically and socially they were also changes as well. I mean, if you are increasing the weight of the urban classes, as well as the weight and social importance of the technological and managerial strata of the national workforce, it's a very different thing from what you have today. Okay, I remember when we were growing, when I was growing up, when I was a kid, if you were kind of, you know, banker or big trader with lots of supermarkets, I have to say, social status, you may be richer by your social status was not necessarily that much more greater than somebody who is simply an engineer working in a public sector organization has been a real reorientation in that point of view, as well as the fact that if you have a stable, relatively decently paid urban workforce growing in numbers year to year to year, its political weight also shows trade unions become of greater significance and other associational types of professional associations and so on and so forth. Their weight in national affairs and in social affairs and the leadership that their ideas and their areas of interest encompass are more decisive than today when everybody's fragmented, looking at their own little corner and, you know, trying hard, falling over themselves to prove that they're not being political about the most political things that exist. I think you would have a greater potential, you know, participation from below society, even if in cases where you had one past institute and so on, I think you had a lot of that. Whether it succeeded or not is another question. But I'm saying this is the number one. This is the orientation that prevailed. Dramatic and turbulent period. Like you actually said, it was a period of great innovation and big ambitious steps which are rooted also responding to real aspects of our reality as some of the most important aspects. And given the weight of that reality, it was necessary to be that bold and ambitious and so on. And in the process, I'm saying that there were social dynamics which also could have been very progressive. You know, the rise of the attention paid to education and skills, the growing social weight of urban workforces, professional associations, so on and so forth. I think those are. Those would be some of the most salient aspects of that period. And above all, above all, the fact that economic growth did not rely as much as it does today on weakening labor, cheapening wages, impoverishing farmers, and so on and so forth, which, whichever way our governments speak today, that is the reality. And I hope I were able to demonstrate that in the course of the conversation that is the prevailing rally today. So it is a very stark difference from then to where we are now.

[Saeed Husseini]

Yeah, it sounds like it. And certainly also marks quite a clear departure from the colonial period before, which we haven't had the time to get into, but I think a lot of listeners will be able to imagine. So that's a very helpful background. But you know, before we come to the present day, there was obviously a period of transition between the Nkrumah period and, you know, what prevails now. And I mean, it was a very contradictory period of transition in a lot of ways. But it started with the 1966 coup, which we kind of mentioned in the introduction. So could you maybe set that backdrop a little bit for us? I mean, if this kind of period of innovation, turbulence, some quite dramatic transformations that you've described generated some winners, some of whom you've spoken about, but also it appeared made some people angry. And I'm sure there's more to the coup and the period that followed it than that. But I guess one way to phrase the question might be so what went wrong? And then, yeah, maybe that could be an entry point towards describing a bit how the political economy shifted after Nkrumah and in the military period that followed.

[Jeky Tano]

Okay, well, I think first of all, I mean the cardinal group that were upset by Nkrumah, of course, where those who, a combination of those who, who were dominant in the economy before. So for example, the transnational interest that in the colonial period were unchallenged in terms of their monopoly and control and catalyzation of the economy, they were displaced in some degree. Not totally, I think that would be a gross exaggeration. But there were displaces in, I mean, I mentioned state finance, for example. At the time of independence, about 99% of banking, insurance, everything was British banks. And basically, and they had a policy deliberately, as was the case in Nigeria and many other parts of Africa, deliberately not to lend it to local businesses because those local businesses will challenge the monopoly of British, you know, European interests. So basically you have a situation where a reversal where from that to the kind of, you know, far reaching encroachment and the new methods of financial intermediation that the state banking sector would introduce. It's a big shift. Okay?

[Saeed Husseini]

Yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

And it's also a lot of, lots of, a lot of lucrative kind of thing, including perhaps a section of the upper merchant classes, domestic money lenders and so on and so forth, who basically would have been an adjunct to the British system. They would have lost out in relative terms too. Okay. I'm not saying they were impoverished or disempowered or you know, dispossessed by anyone, but they are relatively privileged position would have you know, they would have suffered a decline somewhat. Okay. So there's that element and that merchant class and so on and so forth is also, let's be fair, it goes back. There's always new entrants. We don't live in a caste system, so there's always new entrants emerging. But that doesn't mean it's an old. You know, they go back a long way from a slave trade time. If you go back, you will find that there's a remarkable degree of continuity from all those slave trading families and traditional rulers.

[Saeed Husseini]

They've made sure that the bloodlines.

[Jeky Tano]

Exactly. It's an intergenerational. Wealth is always intergenerational in that sense. So from that point of view, I think that there were those who. Which is not to say the old merchant classes and old chiefs did not want independence. Of course they did. They too did. Right. I mean, everybody would want. Every ruling group or any elite would want their own states to serve them more than anybody else. Okay? So they also wanted it, except that they wanted it on different terms than promise, for example. They wanted it on terms that they could control. And the very fact that they were displaced in terms of, you know, the people who rose to the nationalists, the leadership of the nationalist struggle like Nkrumah and co, were the lower middle classes and the working class elements, what they themselves called the veranda boys, those who slept outside. Yeah. So on and so forth. That was something they couldn't really live with. Okay. They found that extremely difficult to live with. So basically, they would complain about everything. Say, when the hydroelectric dam was being built, they were opposed to it, all kinds of things, you know, to provide electricity, which would be the backbone of not simply welfare and social progress, but also the economic, you know, industrialization agenda and so on. They were opposed to it. But I'm saying all this to say that despite all of that opposition for that narrow political. It doesn't mean that when those things come into being, they don't recognize its value and do not seek to profit from that as well.

[D]

Okay?

[Jeky Tano]

So given the degree of public investment that had gone into the Nkrumah agenda in terms of the economic structures that I mentioned earlier, and given the fact that they were important sources of growth and so on the subsequent post, Nkrumah, you know, leadership did not try to dismantle that completely, okay. What they tried to do was to diversify it. So, for example, privatize some of them, transfer some of that into their own private ownership. Okay. And also transfer some of that into foreign international Private ownership which will be the basis of a new partnership with them, greater investment from abroad, so on and so forth, because the economy was also beginning to struggle, okay? So that kind of privatization enabled both the personal and private enrichment of sections of the elite in Ghana. Enrichment from the states, but done in a legal way. Privatization is legal, okay? And also at the same time, to use that mechanism of privatization to have a rapport, more a renewal of links and ties with global capital. So it would include, you know, a deal with the imf, but also a deal with foreign multinational companies taking over some of the key strategic industries that Nkrumah had tried to develop. So, but by a lie that if you like that state catalyst based, that state led or, you know, that agenda of light and other manufacturing, state provision of key, you know, infrastructure like energy and so on and so forth, by and large, I don't think it was fundamentally dismantled, okay? But it led to a political problem for those people. It meant that the same numbers of urban workers and their associations and all their power was not directly affected by the. They were not necessarily weakened by the group. But all of a sudden you have privatization. And privatization means you have to clean up the books of enterprises, you have to lay off workers, you have to tighten, you know, you know, I mean, you have to kind of. Yeah, you are redirecting resources from the more broader public domain into more private. From that point of view, workers suffer. So the political turmoil was intense. You know, the structures that could have opposed that agenda had not been weakened in any way. And yet the new regime and its priorities directly clashed and whether I liked it or not, was directly attacked those interests as well. And that is one of the reasons for the degree of instability throughout the 1970s, especially in Ghana. Okay? Because the 1970s could have been otherwise. I mean, it's not. I don't think it's simply fortuitous that at the end of the civil war in Nigeria, there was, you know, at least for the early go on years, up until some late 90s, there was some degree of boom. It's not fortuitous. The fact is that that was on the back of the rise of global commodity prices like oil.

[D]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

We all know with the price of oil going up in the 1970s, people really ascribe it to one superficial trigger, which is the, you know, Arab Israel or. But whatever it is, it went. And let's not forget, even that came on the back of greater control by African and global south governments. In the same way as I'm saying that the Nkrumah period tried to establish state control of those, the domestic aspects of that export regime, internationally as well, the same thing, it was extended into the international arena. So the institutions of commodity producing countries, like opec, classic example.

[D]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

Area joined at some point and so on. But you had the same thing, you know, less advanced efforts in the same direction in every single commodity that counted. International cocoa organization, international coffee organization, those were real things that existed. And every foreign power had to contend with that. That cluster of interest around which Africa and other global south primary commodity producing countries were beginning to, you know, if you like, encroach on the terms that had previously been unchallenged by Western and transnational interest and so on and so forth. So you have to ask now, if in that period cocoa was getting record prices, then it was. Gold was getting record prices and it was how come then the turmoil and the economic collapse in Ghana, and I'm saying the roots of that is precisely what I've just said before, that the social conflict that was introduced by this agenda of privatization, okay, meant that the chaos would and instability would ensue. One side or the other had to win. It couldn't. So when the people overthrew Nkrumah, in a sense, there was a continuity regime from the military rulers to the civilian government, the Second Republic, all the way to 1972, when there was a countervailing coup d'ta by others who in the first thing they did was to appease the same working classes and so on and so forth in a period when the kind of, you know, economic crisis that had tried to be resolved in the pre neoliberal free market, we had not. It hadn't resolved. So basically, I don't want to complicate the conversation too much, but I'm trying to say the underlying economic crisis was not resolved. And the political settlement kept jumping from one faction to the other without resolving the crisis, okay? And most of all, the most important factor in that crisis is that the weight of those who opposed dismantling the state sector had not. It was socially and politically undiminished. That would pose a problem for any government that will come to be given in the circumstances. And that's why we tottered along from crisis to crisis to crisis throughout the 1970s. It didn't mean that the edifice or the foundations produced by Nkrumah were thriving. On the contrary, they were getting more and more deteriorated and whittled down and distorted and corrupted. But they were in place and they were decisive. You see what I'm saying? Their capacity to block the space was there. Their capacity to move the country forward was not being enhanced. Okay, so you had a real degree of stagnation and so on and so forth. And one example of that is that, you know, given the fact, as I said, the role of state investment and state finances and so on and so forth, it kept going higher and higher without producing the results. In fact, when global prices, as Nigerians would know very well, when There was a first recession, a crash in 1979 which brought all the Nigerian boom to a juddering halt. And then there was another crash in 1982 which led us to our debt crisis and all that. But without going into those details, the fact is that in that period of the downturn which every African and third world government suffered from, Amehwa, in effect, it was a global recession anyway, so everybody kind of suffered from it anyway. In that period, for example, public investment grew. I mean, now when you have a crisis, the common sense has become that then the public should cut back an expenditure, isn't it? And balance the books. That was the opposite in those days. It was an opposite mistake. In fact, in 1978, 1979, I think public government investment in the economy was 28% capital investment. I don't mean huge. That's almost Southeast Asia standard. The fact that it wasn't in new technology and therefore, or new sectors and therefore the economic diversification and a new dynamism wasn't introduced that does not. That one, you could say is a wrong choice in terms of policy focus. The point I'm trying to make is that even when economies are in tatters, the idea that there cannot be public investment, resuscitate and regenerate and renew the path of economic revival is totally false. And in fact, in the big countries in the world, we have seen that since the global financial and economic crisis of 2008, 2009, when their governments have spent money bailing out everybody. In our case alone, we are told that, no, you are an exception, that when you are in trouble, squeeze your people more and more and more. I think we should come to the point where we refuse totally to accept that as a theoretical or even more importantly, as a practical political, you know, a reality that we have to contend with. Part of our turning at the corner of where we are today has to be to reject those kind of those falsities which are now being enshrined as some, you know, theological common sense that God given that no one can, no one can challenge. It's totally false.

[Saeed Husseini]

Yeah, I Think theological is a great metaphor because it also suggests sometimes a difference between what applies to the priest and what applies to the congregation.

[Jeky Tano]

Exactly. Perfectly right.

[Saeed Husseini]

No, that's quite helpful. I do think though, to kind of dig in a little further into this time period, at least the one that came after it. A lot of Nigerians, I think non Nigerians, you know, folks who are, who maybe are not as familiar with Ghana's history, will also immediately start to think of another figure that emerged, you know, in the course of this turbulence of the kind of coup prone period of Ghana's history. And that's of course, Rawlings. Did Rawlings change much this picture that you're spelling out? I mean, or was he a product of the kind of push and pull of the, you could say, the kind of economic and social structure that was left behind from the incumbent period versus the kind of merchant capitalist, I mean, you know, and et cetera, the sort of beneficiaries of the early privatization, that whole kind of structure.

[Jeky Tano]

I think Rollins is not a product of the. Of the Nkrumah model. He's a product of the Nkrumah model going into crisis. The period of crisis is. Rollins is a product of that period of crisis. Okay. And I think some of the elements that inform that understanding I've already mentioned, for example, when I say that the trade unions and so on and so forth, and the professional associations, bar association media retained all their social, socioeconomic, sorry, their social power and their social influence and their, if you like, their hegemony over domestic discourse and common sense and so on. They retained that completely despite the tend to privatization, despite the turmoil, bringing back military government, which is more draconian. They still. None of that was whittled away. Okay.

[Saeed Husseini]

Right.

[Jeky Tano]

In fact, that is why the military governments kept trying to find ways to appease that kind of constituency. One of the ways to appease it was to sustain the high levels of public investment, as I've said. But there were more overt ways of trying to appease it, which was trying to, for example, bring about a political settlement. In the case of Ghana, the generals had this clever idea to bring about a political settlement which would permanently incorporate traditional rulers, members of the old political class, trade unions and priests. You mentioned priests, all those, if you like, heads of, you know, and incorporate them in a national government, a national unity government. They call it the union government idea. And the idea of doing that was, I would be, you have periodic elections, but there'll be no parties, which the government interpreted as they are fractures. They play on ethnicism they, you know, basically, yeah, that kind of, in a sense, this attempt at a corporatist political solution was meant to appeal the appeal to an appease, buy off and neutralize the kind of disaffection that remained rife in society, okay? But it also tells you that there was an impasse. The government clearly had no solution. That's why you can only come up with such a hybrid nonsense if you are stuck. And the people that the government tried to appease with this arrangement are precisely those who oppose it the most.

[Saeed Husseini]

Okay?

[Jeky Tano]

So from 1977, which is when this union government we call the union government, the anti union government campaign, became a national mass democratic campaign, okay? Or it gave room to all the recycled politicians, including some of those who had been banned and jailed for corruption or exile. Or all of them had leeway because the professional associations, the lawyers, the human rights people there, plus crucially the trade unions were on board. The trade unions were so crucial at that point in time because they were the ones who gave it a mass flavor. And they were the ones who tested the structural capacity of ordinary people. So who displayed, testing the structural capacity of people to basically stop the state, the state in its tracks. I remember when working, there was a series of power cuts which were engineered by the electrical workers, electricians, electricity workers, unions, okay? And sometimes they will leave the power on for hospitals, you know, critical civic infrastructure, and they'll turn the power off in the most powerful military backs. I mean, this is a clear statement, wow, no one dare do that today. This was a military government, no one false republican, liberal. But that, that was the stakes that was so high and so on, so forth. And this disaffection against the military attempted to perpetuate itself also seeped it from the civilian sector into the military itself, right? So the ranks and the junior officers who had been cut off from all the largest of political office and so on, began to imbibe and reflect the civic discontent that was out there, okay? And the idea that they were lumped in with their generals and bosses and their own internal oppressors as the opprobrium and target of public ridicule, opposition, anger, hatred, for some of them, it was a bit too much. And there's also something that I think all of us have to accept. Middle class people, especially middle class intelligence, those who are without money, especially like you and me perhaps, okay? A lot of us feel deeply affected and embarrassed by the chaos, the corruption, the venality of our state and institutions. We take it more personally, more viscerally than Maybe any other section of the population, you understand me? I mean, there's no time to go into the psychology of social classes. But I'm trying to say there are people who lament, you know, you would have gone to school, your colleagues from the States, from Asia, from Europe for. So there are no better, no words than you people, you know what I mean? And yet here we are sitting over in this. There are people who, who would think that, yeah, we are in this situation because of these greedy plutocrats who are, you know, whatever, and therefore they feel very strong. And I think in that element, in even the state sector, there are those who lament the question of efficiency and, you know, political interference, whether it's in the military or the civic, civic bureaucracy. You will find those elements, I'm quite sure. And you find, you know, because that's, that's why we keep seeing people who come up from the military, for example, with the coup d'etat and promising to clean up everything. It's not simply some empty talk. There's a deep impulse, I think, in that. And I think someone like Jay Rawlings was that type of character because you had young officers, you know, your Sankara types and so on and so forth in many African military and civic bureaucrats, the unelected part of the state, you know, basically, who felt the degeneration in the same way as their civic and didn't have them the freedom to act the same way. Okay? And for them, in an era of coups where the fashion of revolution and whatever changed, you could be the worst person. Idiom. Said he was a revolutionary, for example. I mean, you could be the worst person, call himself a revolutionary. You know that.

[Saeed Husseini]

Actually Abasha has been renovated right now, so it's funny.

[Jeky Tano]

Oh, well, terrible. That's really. I listened to that IBB book launch download. I thought that was a shocking reconstruction of history in a way that. Anyway, that was deeply boring. Anyway, so basically you had all these elements coming to me. So it's the radicalization of that middle class sentiment and those below it, the working classes and so on and so forth, which I think pushed the military to the brink. When you have such a degree of upset in society, it causes a crack in the top edifices themselves. The kind of confidence in what they're doing. Crack. Some feel we should repress people, we should shoot them down more. Others feel, no, this is the time to back up and give some concession. You see what I'm saying? The monolith that they have, it cracks. And in fact, in the case of Ghana, it did, because in 1978, the general who was head of state was overthrown in a palace school, okay? And in that process, the new leader, the new general, I mean, his deputies who took over and so on and so forth, who were all army chiefs and whatever and so on and so forth, announced that they will be now opening to civilian rules. That's how the Third Republic came into being, okay? On the mass pressure against the UNICOV idea, okay? But clearly they were. These were people hoping to recycle the old politicians. And they haven't given the old politicians the leeway backing, can retire peacefully and go back and deal with their, you know, enjoy their wealth without changing anything. The problem for them, however, was that in the military and in the civilian, everybody in the old guard who had the leadership of this anti union government thing were satisfied with that solution because now they would be in power directly, right? But for the rest of the population, the lower orders, they were not satisfied with that solution because what does that give me? Just the right to put a paper in a box every four years. That's not nearly as good as continued. And they smelled, they smelled this concession of government and they interpreted rightly as a weakness, that these are people are being weakened. So let's go after them. Okay, so you had. I'm not saying they had a clear plan of let's go after them. To go where? Which direction? I'm not saying there was such a. I'm trying to say this concession, instead of it quietening down the social table, exacerbated it.

[Saeed Husseini]

Right?

[D]

Yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

Okay. And therefore, you know, you had what philosopher Gramsci would call a real, you know, stalemate in society. The top order couldn't continue the same old way. The new, the lower orders would not accept the same old way. But they also don't quite have an agenda of where to go from there. They are, they are strong enough to neutralize the top. They are not strong enough to break through and bring about a new order. From that point of view, I think that the balance, the power balance in society was really precious. I'll give you an example. You know, people will talk about the fact that in the Fourth Republic we have declining voting figures. Okay, I'll come to that in a minute. But in the Third Republic, you know, you've been under military rule for seven years, some of the most brutal military dictatorship because it was more farm officials than the previous one, that because of the crisis in society, was far more vicious than the one that overthrew Nkrumah in Many respects, okay, it was, you know, its tentacles went into society deeper, it was there for longer. All kinds of, you would think, and everybody, the population, any active section of the population, students, everybody rose against that military power. You would think that when the time comes to have a transition to civilian liberal democratic rule, it will be greeted with complete enthusiasm.

[Saeed Husseini]

Yeah, massively.

[Jeky Tano]

The election that brought the third Republican president was called Lehman Lehman to power, was the lowest ever voter turnout in the country's history. 26%. 26%. Because before that election clearly the kind of recycled politicians and their old language and their own vision of society was outwarded at best. And people were finding new ways, you know, to establish, for example, you know, all kinds of insurgent institutions from below. It didn't crystallize into a full blown agenda, but you see pockets of it in some critical strategic areas and so on, so forth. It is in that context that a section of the junior ranks and the junior officers in the military led by Rawlings revolted against the generals saying that you can't simply hand over, we are going to engage in a house cleaning exercise before you go. This is the source of Rawlings being catapulted international prominence in May, June 1979. The elections were supposed to be June 1979 and after that was the. The third republic was supposed to be inaugurated. We always tail Nigeria in these matters. You know, Your coup was January 66. We had ours in February 66. You were shifting to civilian rule in October 79 or whatever it was when Obasanjo was handing over to Shagari, which were in the same, you know, kind of at the same time kind of thing. So basically just before the election when everybody, everything is geared towards this vote of this eruption in society and an eruption which gives expression to popular participation or the makings, the possibility of possible participation and a popular intervention in national politics which no election can provide. No election result can give people the same power and level of participation and the same self determination as to what had preceded the election. So the election itself and what it promised and what it could deliver was already still born by the time it came into being. All the lower orders who were discontented identified with Rawlings as a manifestation of that total. Do you understand me? They saw him as part of that turmoil. Sorry, that's part of that upsurge and the representative of that aspect. Okay, I think the story of the Third Republic briefly tells so. Because the point I'm making leads to the conclusion that by the time the Third Republic was born, it had no power. The only way the Third Republic could have had power was to smash the trade unions, smash the military junior ranks. Do you understand? Restore all the hierarchies, privatized. It simply could not do that. In fact, their party was the successor to the Kwame Karma Party. So they tried to cloak themselves in that veneer of radical state intervention at a time when the state was in no position to do that. And that in fact, the order of the day was to have smashed back all those insurgent people to restore even profitability, you know, administration, administrative authority, managerial authority to get the economy going. You needed to settle the class question. They were absolutely in no position to do that. In fact, every time they beat a hint of the oh, no, the way the inflation has run rad, we need higher interest rates or we need devaluation. Their own party voted against their budget. Repeated. Because everybody was scared.

[D]

Yeah, yeah, okay.

[Jeky Tano]

In 1980, sections of the military and the police began to form what they call defense committees. These are people prevented from. From forming trade unions. Even defense committees in, in the context meant like our own committee that we elected by the ranks who. Who we order to do what the police should do. That's like, you know, National Revolution 1917 kind of thing.

[D]

Absolutely.

[Jeky Tano]

Okay. And this in the heart of the state itself, Parliament. There was a general strike by industrial workers in Accra in 1980, and they went to parliament and the parliamentarians, okay, and working striking workers occupied parliament for this. And the kitchen staff of the parliamentary people fed striking strikers and their supporters for this. Now, what I'm trying to say, that the street had more power than Parliament. This is real. It's not some cooked up the what was happening. So in rolling zone words, power was lying in the streets. It's a very pithy way of putting it. It is true. Okay.

[D]

Yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

So in this, this, you could only latch from crisis to crisis to crisis until you would have had some kind of, you know, butcher type general who come and wipe down in blood all of these, you know, famine from below, or you'd have that same famine from below re establishing a new order.

[D]

Okay.

[Jeky Tano]

And in the event, that is what seemed to happen. I use the word seemed with emphasis because Rawlings, while he was being persecuted by the new government as a symbol of all this that was going on, you know, he had a lot of popular support. At the same time, his life clearly was in danger. Okay? Lots of pressure, lots of repression, all kinds of, you know, all these security type things. And so. And the discontent in society simply would not go Away students were up in arms, trading up in the government. Every day was a crisis throughout the territory and eventually Rawlings and co take over at the end of 1981. Now even the those who took over, the composition of those tells you how non existent the state powers at the time. Rawlings had been decommissioned from the military, so he was not in the army and the armed forces. Okay? It was eight people who led this thing. None of the eight people were in the military. Half of them were civilians. Now how does such a thing happen? People who are not, you know, they go over and no one opposes them, they take over and before long, once they announced, everybody you know, you'd expect, because the coup could have been crushed within three minutes or less. So it's important to ask them why didn't people do it right, the ranks, you know, that kind of thing. And in the end, they all came out in support. So did the students, so did the trade unions and so on. So let's go back to the issue. The issue is that the social crisis had not been resolved. And it could only be resolved one way or the other. Either all this insurgents is smashed back so that the order of things is restored in some degree and the system as is can start working again. And through that you eventually get some regeneration. Okay. Classical way in which that could happen is that some section of the top of society which was being, you know, pushed back by all this, will react and bring about this counter, counter movement. Okay. We had the curious situation that there were Rawlings who brought about the counter movement. Rawlings came to power with all the support of these people, actually, which put him in a unique position to be the one to smash back this movement. Am I making sense?

[Saeed Husseini]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Jeky Tano]

Every government, you know, runs the show with some degree of consent and some degree of question. The balance and the equilibrium between the two shifts according to circumstances, so on. But I'm trying to say the kind of repression that would have been required by any member of the Old guard, civilian or military, to put back was not required by Rollins because he had the support of those same people.

[D]

Right, okay.

[Jeky Tano]

And he used those same people to neutralize the Old guard. Right? On one hand. And then when those same people look like they were going beyond getting too big for their shoes, he turned against them once his position stabilized, and he turned against them by incorporating by then elements of, by then the thoroughly beaten, politically beaten and defeated ruling classes back into the order of things. So he always had this hybrid. And that's why I'm saying that when the social forces neutralize themselves. It is possible for even a weakened state apparatus to rise above them both. Yes. And this is what Rawlings represents. So Rawlings. Yes. Was stable to embark on a level of dismissals, privatization that I don't think any section of the Ghanaian ruling class could have done. Possible. Okay. And people took it from him. Yes. A degree of repression was there, but there was also the. Always the question, you know, this must be the international interest. It can't be a good man like. Do you see what I'm saying?

[Saeed Husseini]

So you're saying people wanted to give his reforms a chance.

[D]

Okay.

[Jeky Tano]

Yes, because he was one of us. That's how people saw it. Okay. And let's not forget there was no clearly articulated agenda for what us means and where we should go. All we knew is that those thieves and those. We should be out. Those thieves and those generals and those. That's all we knew. You know, we knew what we were, who we were against, why, and what we were for wasn't anywhere near as clear. Yeah, I see. When Rawlings came to power and he was seen as part of the movement and if it's even his savior, he was called Junior Jesus, the redeemer of Astros, basically, you know, that kind of thing, you know, I mean, he made it very. And given the stalemate in society, he could get away with things that I don't think anyone, anyone by any chance could have got. And in fact, the more experienced members of the global ruling class recognize that. I remember that in. In the Financial Times, the British paper, we know, the darling. The house paper of the British ruling class. Okay. Yeah, they had a report, small report on those days, Ghana had collapsed. It was not nowhere near as significant as the Kwame Nkrumah time. So if it was Kwame Krumah, a whole center spread would have been dedicated to this thing. But in the. Rawlings, by the end of the third, just two paragraphs would suffice. So there was a report on the Ghana coup. Tiny bit buried somewhere in the newspaper in the back of the. I don't think anybody even saw it. I saw years later. And he said, rollins has come to power. His extreme popularity gives him a chance to undertake reforms that no one else can. Now, what they meant by reforms, I think we all know.

[D]

Yeah, sure, yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

Now, I believe strongly that if you are taking that newspaper and you are taking it to Rawlings that day and showing it to him that this is what these people are saying, this is where you end. He would have laughed at you. This is what I'm saying. But the realities of the situation and the position that he found himself in and the relationships that, you know, enabled him to get away with some things that no one else could have gotten away with. He's the one who in the. In the name of bringing sanity back into the order, into the order of things is the one that embarked on the privatizations of all these corrupt and inefficient state enterprises, so on and so forth, all of that.

[Saeed Husseini]

Right.

[Jeky Tano]

He is the one who broke the. And in the process that gave him the credibility to. For foreign investors and IMF and to come and support whatever I thought. So the. The long and short of all that is that where we are is a very curious kind of situation. On the one hand, the. In your de. Industrialization has set in since. Okay, but. Although even without our Rawlings, many African countries have gone to the same thing, including Nigeria. Okay, but I'm saying that in the Ghana case because of the extreme degree of state ownership. I mean in terms of per capita and in terms of as a weight as a part of the economy, it was far more thoroughgoing than any sub Saharan African country you can think of.

[D]

Okay.

[Jeky Tano]

The degree of rollback and its social dislocation was immense. Really mess. I mean there's no way of, you know, downplaying that. Okay. And. And at the same time it also meant that the dislocation and the weakening of the traditional sources and pools of social power. Students work. It also almost overnight went. But the neoliberalism, the phase also required the rehabilitation of the old ruling class. At least the sections that were more prepared to work with rollings and go. Okay, so in a sense you are bringing back. Yeah. The ruling class also got reconfigured because there were new entrants, those represented by the likes of Rolex personally. Right. And then there was a recycling of the old guard. So the two together. Okay. And that's what we see in the two parties today.

[Saeed Husseini]

So the new entrants that were kind of represented by the Rawlings crowd. I mean, were they. Were they kind of gestated in the bureaucracy, so to speak, even the army, like, like Rawlings, or. Or did they. Were they some. Were there some economic sectors that. That, that also. Kind of.

[Jeky Tano]

Well, I think. I think there were. Well, it's two things. I mean, the first is that, you know, if the narrative was that we had come to this tragic national decline as a result of corruption and mismanagement and so on and so forth. Okay. Then the idea that we. We need a Rebirth and a reset with hard work and sacrifice and intellectual purity and so on. It was attracted to a lot. I just mentioned that lower middle class, which is attracted to, you know, those are attracted to a lot of idealistic lefties and so on and so forth, people of undoubted technical competence. So in a. Who could form a kind of, in the, at least in the early few years, could form a kind of quasi bureaucracy which was not part of the old deadwood of the state bureaucracy around Rawlings to enable him bypass the traditional bureaucracies. Yeah, the process of bypassing the traditional bureaucracies, of course there'll be elements in that bureaucracy who will make their peace with the new regime, because otherwise you will bypass forever.

[Saeed Husseini]

Yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

And at the same time, if the government, this is a government that can suck hundreds of thousands of industrial workers who are the most powerful people, then as for sacking a few civil servants, that's not a problem. So basically it was reconstituted that way. That's why this idea of renewal and continuity that, you know, describes the elite rich light is also true for specific institutional locations like the bureaucracy and the state bureaucracy and so on and so forth. It's also true for sections of the economy because if you had, let's say for example, just off the top of my head, two arenas, okay, you would have had the industrialization of large scale manufacturing and so on taking place. True. But on the other hand, you also have a government that can face down miners and so on and so forth. It has all these gold reserves. The state mining institutions have been run. State mining companies have been run down. They are ready to sell off their assets for cheap. Why wouldn't foreign investors come in? Yeah, sure, you have a revival. So yes, there will be economic sectors and they're coming in a period when some of the new mining engineers and some of the new macro economists think that actually, you know what, we can work out a better deal with these transnational companies than was the case before. So elite professionalism dimension as well, which serves as a bridge between, never mind that half the mine workforce are losing their job and so on and so forth. And these, some of them come from left wing organizations which some of the miners leaders also belong to. So it was a real confusion. And again, those are the hybridization, the hybrids and the lack of clarity which allowed Rawlings to navigate the situation a lot more easier than it would otherwise have been.

[D]

Yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

So in the long and short of it is that the economy did get revived precisely because of the degree to which real assets Wages had been devalued. It was cheap to restart the economy. But you started the economy on a new basis because now the predominance of the traditional export sectors not only was restored, but went out of all proportion to whatever was before. Okay, for example, to revive the economy and end foreign exchange fast, cocoa had to be shot, pushed. But let's say tree felling for timber. I mean, the amount of. I mean, if you think about it at any level, that's a scandal. What went on? I mean, the amount of the boom in the timber. Oh, I mean, my God. Yeah, the forest reserves and forest was totally wiped out in no time just to generate, you know, and this was good for capital, for foreign exchange, for investors, for even private capitalism. So you had configuration this new and that growth was real. I mean, Ghana was until the last government. Ghana is one of only two African countries which from the 1980s to first two decades of 21st century consistently had year on year real GDP per capita. Right, right.

[Saeed Husseini]

Which is why some people would have said that Ghana seemed like an example of successful structural adjustment.

[Jeky Tano]

Well, well, yeah, success in this, you know, when you started off by saying, you know, we have a stable government, but it's more boring now. Well, it's more stable for some. It's more stable for some. No, yes, generational ruling class that we're talking about Israel. Yes. The guy who just left the presidency, his father was President John Muhammad, who is now president. His father was in the first Nkrumah government, Baomiya, who he defeated in the last election. His father was Muhammad's father's colleague in the first. I'm saying these are not people who arrived on the scene like rawlins did in 1979. These are old ruling class people who came from the old chief class. That's where we are back again. There's almost an element of, you know, your South Asian dynastic. You know, Indira Gandhi succeeds Nehru and you know, Bangladesh, all those people who succeed, therefore we are back to that level. But at what price of instability for the rest of us is the question that has. And all that speaks to is that, that yes, all that growth has taken place, but the grab, the share of the growth that has gone in two directions. Sorry, three directions. One is outside the country because throughout all this mining and other boom. And that one is a story across Africa. And in fact the Angad, the UN Conference on Trade has published at least two or three different research elements in the 21st century which, which show how in the period of the commodity boom, especially that's 2002 up until 2014, 2015, the amount of share surplus in Africa that went that the transnationals took unparalleled. Not even the colonial period was matched by that. But the, the local elements who participated in in absolute terms also gained a loss. Even if their relative share was smaller. They also gained a lot. That's why we have all this real estate boom, financial speculation, you know, all that kind of stuff. And therefore inequality is as rife as ever. I mean Nigeria may have in 2018 overtaken India to become the country with the biggest absolute numbers of poor people in the world. Even though India is what? 7 times the population of Nigeria? 6, 7 times the population of Nigeria. Nigeria overtook India. But Nigeria's wealth today in absolute tense is higher than ever. Last three weeks or last month the latest world inequality report data came out and in Nigeria the top 1% similar to Ghana, top 1% control about 33% of all wealth in this site. That's the same as Ghana. Now Ghana was the kind of country where. Let me give you a statistic which tells you how far the change has come. At the beginning of the Rollings period precisely because of this turmoil and stalemate and so on. So inequality was at its lowest ever. Now I'm not making a judgment as to whether that's good for society or not. I'm simply stating in mind. So if you take for example in the public sector, the areas where you know, entrenched power was because it was a state led economy at the time, the ratio of the highest income to the lowest was 1.7 to 1. Now that is no ratio, 1.71. The highest paid person did not end twice the lowest paid person.

[Saeed Husseini]

That's incredible.

[Jeky Tano]

Yeah. Ghana Statistical Society report about public sector pay just late last year came out the. And this is just income. We are not talking about allowances and all the packs and all that.

[Saeed Husseini]

Yeah, sort of declared.

[Jeky Tano]

Well yeah, I'm not even talking about declared because they declared talk about their wealth which is now I'm talking about income, your pay, your paper official pay. I'm not talking about your padding for traveling, your allowances that you have three houses and you know you're paying for gardener and driver. You leave all that aside just on the basic income. Yeah, your basic without the pecs. Okay. The ratio has now grown to 89 to 1.

[D]

Wow.

[Jeky Tano]

This is not in the private sector. Not in the mining and where the billionaires and million. Not in the financial. I'm saying in the public sector proper which has the Most solid conditions of work for ordinary people anywhere in the world, anywhere in the country. So for 1.7 to come on. So, yes, it has grown, yes, it is more stable, but for who? The question. Because the cleavage, the. The way in which the wealth of a part of society is that everybody else's cost, including that of the environment, as I referred to in terms of the timber and as we know now, mining and Galamsey and all that kind of thing, you know, is darker than ever before. So the system's capacity to deliver to a larger, increasing, not even if not to everybody, so increasing in relative terms, increasing proportion of the society, as was the case in the Nkrumah period, that is gone forever. So anyone who sits here and dreams that the way forward for Africa is this success. Because you are right, in terms of neoliberalism, Ghana is a success story. And this is what success looks like. This is what success has delivered. So anyone thinking, dreaming that we will get anywhere with that model, you better think again.

[Saeed Husseini]

I mean, but this then emphasizes, you know, the penultimate question perhaps, why the current republic in Ghana, you know, the one inaugurated by Rawlings and you know, which has given birth to this dramatic inequality, has also been so stable. I mean, in the election you just witnessed. Yeah, you mentioned the NPP was kind of blamed for the economic downturn in recent times and was replaced, but it was replaced again by the end.

[Jeky Tano]

A former president. Exactly.

[Saeed Husseini]

Somebody who had been in power previously.

[Jeky Tano]

So it kind of rejected very wildly previously. Yes, you're right.

[D]

Right.

[Jeky Tano]

So, yeah.

[Saeed Husseini]

How would you account for the. For the. For this stability amidst, you know, some growing discontent in certain sectors of society? So the, The Galamse protest that you mentioned, we witnessed from afar, summarizing resistance around environmental degradation, pollution, etc. And also, you know, the reoccurrence, it seems now with increasing regularity, of seemingly economically driven protests in Ghana as well, despite all of this. I mean, the party system has seemed to be impervious to this reduction.

[Jeky Tano]

So.

[Saeed Husseini]

Yeah, I wonder how you.

[Jeky Tano]

Yeah, you're right, you're right, you're right. It seems like a bit of a. An anomaly, and it does reflect contradictions. You are perfect. You put your finger right on the matter. Okay, the first. And let me just mention a couple of things about that contradiction, and I think maybe that will help shed some light on the situation. The first thing to say is that, you know, what has united all the ruling classes since the 19, the different factions or sections of the ruling class since the Rawlings period is that they are all United on the liberal model, right?

[D]

Yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

So Rawlings would have been a military person who brought this? Well, it was a military gun. There are a lot of civilians in and around the government. In an extreme way, okay. In, I mean, in a very prominent way, the ndc, which was Rawlings own party, succeeded. Obviously they were going to continue. But everybody else has come. And it goes back to the original problem that I posed, that it was a question of resolving who will win in society. Do you push back this insurgency and this claim for more welfare, more even if it's unprofitable for, you know, or you reimpose and Rolling succeeded in reimposing the old order and creating room for new sources of growth to emerge. Okay. And in the process, the groups that I'm saying began, began to reflect collective aspirations all got demobilized. Okay? And I don't mean it in a purely quantitative way because I don't actually accept that. So, for example, trade unions are supposed to organize working people. Now working people include those who are part time jobs or looking for jobs. You understand, there's no reason why the vast pool of informal sector people who are in and out of work or precure should not be part of the trade unions. So the fact that trade unions have failed to mobilize them, that one is the political failing of the trade unions. They can't be saying that structural adjustment led to unemployment. So Ana Meza, we can actually. The people who depend on their own autonomous, self sustaining subsistence agriculture, which you can say they're not out of the way for, are dwindling all the time. Most people in our countries, their only chance of any serious life would be any decent life would be a proper wage paying job, you know, so the working class socially and has grown, it doesn't diminish. So there's no excuse on the part of the trade unions. But I just thought I should make that point. But we need to back the point for now. The point I'm trying to make is that it's a reflection of where trade unions and students and so on in the previous period. And this would be true for Nigeria and many other countries when people fought, they always fought not simply in their own immediate sectional interest, like my pay rise and so on. Of course they did, naturally. And why not? But they also always had a vision of what society should be and how their immediate fight was related to that.

[Saeed Husseini]

Right.

[Jeky Tano]

Okay. So the battles that I referred to in the 1970s, for example, about union government, about this, about that, they were not simply battles that would be of immediate relevance or benefit to let's say people who are members of the water workers. What does that got do with them? You know what I mean? And in fact today that would be the thing that we are non political in the sense that look, we just fight. We have the right to in our industrial relations laws to negotiate for better wages or go on strike and that's it. Anything else is political, we don't do it. Okay. And I think the demobilization came in the period of the so called Africa's liberation was, was actually the reverse of liberation which is that the beginning of the return to civilian and democratic rule in the beginning of the 90s for most African countries. Nigeria, 1993, Ghana, 1990, you know, things like that. When Obasanjo came back and all of that. And we all know it came from some tremendous struggles. Okay. Even before the Berlin Wall came down, all that pro democracy struggles were sweeping Eastern Europe. It had already started in Africa. People forget that, that the genesis of that was a lot in Africa. I remember Omar Bongo, Gabon saying that the winds from the east are shaking the coconut trees. He tried to say it that way. So it looked like is foreign agitation and bad influences from abroad which is causing the turmoil. It wasn't so at all. But all those who fought to restore political liberalization and so on and so forth never questioned the underlying economic liberalism. So there was a split, a bifurcation in people's consciousness. On the one hand, yes, we should embrace liberal rights in the so called democracy, governance, political realm.

[D]

Yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

But as for neoliberalism, it's not really our business to touch unless you are directly impinged upon and you fight your own smallcoming so that. So there's a profound fragmentation in terms of agency in our society for change.

[D]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

And no one is offering that pool around which people can be organized around and different unique subaltern interests can be harmonized around. No one is offering that.

[D]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

It leaves the field clear for the political elite who are the ones with the best organization. They have honed their election, you know, hoovering machinery to a high degree and are prepared. In the era of privatization, they're a bit less afraid of showing their wealth. In fact, their wealth is a sign of their efficiency and whatever else. And they're prepared to buy votes. They're paired to regulate. They can't do everything only because there's no contestation which matches them at the level of the systemic. Everybody fights them in the macro. All the struggles you've mentioned is True, they are there, they are Israel. But they're all fragmented, macro, disconnected, localized, sectional. And the thing that will transform the landscape is the moments that they can be brought together. I'll give an example and I'm saying that possibility exists all the time. Last year, for example, before the election, there were three moments when the government was stopped entirely in its tracks. Now this was a government which, you know, had become quite insensitive to opinion and would ride roughshod. I mean, its ability to basically go for its agenda was the most ruthless, single minded you can think of. Yeah, okay, it did all that. And yet when it came to a number of things which were relatively important to it, for example Galamse, I mean the government, this government likes them, sorry, the last government, this the scale of domestic capital going into Galamsey, small scale mining, those who can't compete with the industrial transnational dominated sector. The fact that all those concessions were given to them, the fact that all this liberalization was given to them. The fact that there was a boom in the mining economy as a result of the commodity boom. So again, let's come to the realization that where we are is a result of the success, not the failure, the success of capitalism in Africa. Neoliberalism in Africa, that is the fruit we are picking now. Okay, so it is the success of all that, that other side. But if all this money is being made at and these people have levels of technology and skill where they cannot mine for the far too difficult to reach tailings of the mine in riverbeds, then why can't, you know, in the desperate unemployment that we have, people will do anything for a livelihood. Why can't we rally a few of them, get a level of some degree of low level technology, have the chiefs give us some land protected by the military and then we go and dig more and more gold and make money. Of course, why not? It makes perfect sense from that point of view. Okay, so the government license far more artisanal miners, small scale miners than ever before. I mean, I think when it came to part about 200 or so, my figures may not be exact, but there are two or so license. In its six or seven years it licensed about 3,000 more. And in his last month it's last. But last week alone it license hundreds of. Between January 2 and January 7, when it handed over power, it licenses about 300 more. But it tells you that the configuration of power, both economic and political, which is fused at the level below government in the local areas is profile it goes very far and this coexists with, let's say, the conflicts between headers and livestock and pastoral communities and let's say settled agriculture, the kind of thing we see in the middle belt in Nigeria, for example. Now we know, for example, that those conflicts have killed more people than let's say, Boko Haram. That's a fact.

[D]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Jeky Tano]

And they are dealing is there and it's not even news. So I'm saying the fractures in our society are deep. When the trade unions, just before the election said to the government that you, you have passed a legislative instrument, an ally which legalizes mining in riverbeds and we are going to go on general strike against them, the government removed it in 24 hours. Now, what that tells you is that if the trade union was serious in the same way as they could mobilize a vast pool of unorganized workers into their ranks officially, if they are serious, they could offer that social unity. There could be at least the spine around which all kinds of popular interests can begin to coalesce and unify and become elevated into a social agenda for change which would contest these political parties directly. It doesn't exist, so somebody has to organize for it. But if you're going to organize for it and you think that the best way to do it, for example, if you are university teachers, if students are being charged fees, it's none of your business. In fact, some may dream that maybe the more fees, the better pay we will get. Or you are nurses in the hospital and people come to hospital and they're being charged or being mistreated anyhow. And for you is you versus them or you are electricity workers and you know you are fighting privatization. On the one hand, when you go into poor communities to fix meters, you freeze the population, working class communities and they have to pay you before you fix a public electricity meter. That's where we are. So it is that deep. And people life is about real alternatives. If I'm talking to you here, it's because we have a real alternative of the Internet to talk over. Or we could have done it by telephone, but I could not have shouted for you to hear wherever you're sitting.

[Saeed Husseini]

But it wouldn't have been very effective.

[Jeky Tano]

Exactly. You know, I cannot, or I cannot say I'm jumping on a helicopter now. Let's meet in the sky and talk. It's only the real. The real alternative that exists are these ones. And that is why it is not so much the resilience of these political parties R it is one the lack of alternative. But there's something else that we have, you know, if you say, for example, that, let's say people have lost hope in the total Democrat. It is true in a certain sense, the critique of the fact that, I mean, this is the first time there's always opposition to a government. Of course, naturally. Right. That's why some selections are. But there is a growing critique which says that all these people belong to the same class and they are wrong. Now, in a sense, there's always been that too. But it's a more prominent and more organized voice. Now, a lot of the youth movement that have emerged in the last two, three years, this is what qualitatively differentiates them than previous generations of, let's say, four, five, ten years ago. Okay. The sense that the ruling class as a whole and the political order as a whole is, Is not fit for purpose, in that sense, the possibility of radicalization going back and the principle of generalizing and connecting the different issues and different constituencies becomes stronger. I'm not saying that they have reached that stage.

[D]

Yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

You point to the structural power that trade unions have, for example, in this mining debacle. There was also an attempt to privatize all kinds of hotels for some hotel. Big, big hotels in, In Accra for some hotel chain and part of the hotel chain. I think there's some degree of pensions, pension investment in it. So officially, in a sense, you can say workers have some small stick, tiny sticking, which shouldn't be affected whoever owns it, the majority. But they said no. Okay. And these were powerful interests and they stopped them in, in less than a day. The government backed off and retreated completely. The third thing was our debt crisis. You know, the debt crisis there was the, the. As an act of good faith, the government thought it was going to devalue domestic debt first before it tackles foreign debt. Okay. And again, pension funds are a big part of the domestic bond market, you know, investment, okay. And the government tried to kind of impose some haircut on, you know, and they simply said no. And, and they came to some deals. It's not been made public, but I'm saying the kind of religious intensity that the government had favor and conviction that it brought to this agenda, supported by the imf, supported by all the foreign embassies and the donors. Well, powerful interest. In fact, the most powerful interest in society, both home and abroad, supported the government. And it seemed like it was one of those fatal complaints.

[D]

Yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

The moment these guys lifted their little finger, and I mean their little finger, because they didn't go out there to Explain their position to the public. Even their mass membership were not mobilized. It's just the leadership issues on Staples and the whole thing costs. So there's rail power there. I mean, if multinationals are making all this money from mining and oil and gas, it means that even if ten thousand, a hundred thousand miners have been sacked and there's only 10,000 left, that 10,000 has not lost its capacity to, you know. Yeah. In fact, it has grown in capacity in terms of numerical. It's per capita structural power. It still has the power of what 200,000 had before. Okay, but will it learn to connect with all those who are displaced? All those who are in the Galamse who are. No, right now people in the official mining sector, like the transaction, say ban Galamse. Now, I'm not against banning Galamsey, but if you just go that way, then how about the 2 or 3 million who work in Galanzi?

[D]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

Then you have the header agrarian problem brought to another dimension, that kind of COVID So if you say. What about. If you said, well, actually, you know what all those public lands are for, let's nationalize them. And they become the ownership of local government and local communities and so on, so forth. So that communities among which includes headers, miners, pastoralists, hunters can sit down and work out who has access to what, what are the rights, how do we balance? That's proper democracy.

[D]

Yeah, yeah, okay.

[Jeky Tano]

And that is an elected committee. And we can do it by direct democracy. We can remove people, no chief involved, no mp, no police chief, no district appointed. It is our own popular assembly, that we are popular parliament, people's parliament, that we are doing with asserting our control over natural resources. It will change the landscapes completely. Yeah, you know, so. And this is the kind of thing that progressives should begin to be grappling with. Okay? Not simply the big, big slogans and so on so forth, but the nitty gritty of the fact that our economies have a certain structure. Those structures give privilege to certain areas and discrete type of activities. Those activities are demobilizing and fragmenting and dividing everybody else. We have to have something concrete and specific about those activities, number one. But we also have to do so in a manner that is able to provide a basis for uniting other interests around them. And in the process of getting those interests around that how we harmonize that interest. The type of innovation that I was referring to, the Nkrumah period, will be nothing compared to what I'm saying. But then Chroma innovation, don't forget, was a top down innovation. This one will be rooted in popular initiative, coming from below and building the widest possible unities up initial. And you can work into it every type of social agenda that you have. The equality of women, for example, the empowerment of youth. You can work in ecology and environmental protection. You can do all of that in that process. Okay. Is it possible? I think it's feasible. Because you see, despite the apparent hegemony of the political parties, you know, when you mentioned that John Muhammad lost the election in 2016 by a record number of votes. And then eight years ago, the man hasn't done anything different. He's the same old man and he wins by a record number of. Is that stability of volunteers? The wild swings like that is not stability.

[D]

No.

[Jeky Tano]

The fact is that people are so disaffected and they. They move on mass to try and punish an incumbent for lack of alternative. It's the main and immediate beneficiary will be the opposite will be those who are organized to take advantage of the benefit from it. That will be the position for now. Okay. But I think we should scratch the surface a bit more and the scale of rejection of the government, the previous government actually creates problems for John Mahal. Now these are two people who are. I'm saying there's a unity around over neoliberalism for decades now. What is John Muhammad's agenda that is different. We can talk about some difference, but in reality, this is a country facing debt, okay? Therefore, its borrowing costs, its financial credibility in international capital markets is low. So its borrowing costs are going higher and higher. The main interest of the previous government is the same as the main interest of this government, which is that we will generate enough credibility so that the credit rating agencies will improve our credit rating so that our borrowing costs will go lower and we can return to borrowing cheaply abroad. That's the agenda. Now for that to happen. No, it has to be the agenda. They have not built the alternative domestic public financing institutions that Nkrumah had. They hadn't, okay? In fact, the only way you can attract foreign finance is by having high domestic interest rates. Because the foreign finance will borrow abroad cheap. It comes to make profit. Here it goes. Yeah, but that high domestic interest rate cripples genuine investment in genuine production. Production. So the idea is it's a sleight of hand. We will borrow cheaply abroad, then we'll use that to stimulate local activity despite the crippling domestic inflation. Tell me how that makes sense. It can make sense if you are an investment banker and you are getting as the previous finance minister was. And you are getting a pile of money on the bond itself. You know, I mean, because you are an issuer, you are part of the infrastructure and so on and so forth. You get your commission and so on. It can make sense if in the process of building all these, these bonds, some investor in some ppp, so called public private partnership in some major infrastructure investment in energy or roads, and so come and you are the broker between it. Yeah, it makes sense. But at whose cost? I'm saying that when you have a degree of rejection of what that previous government was, that ordinarily should create problems and be a constraint on the Mahama types to pursue the agenda that they want to pursue. But if the rejection is not analyzing those things, the narrative about White who lost is simply corruption is not the underlying long term neoliberalism which has nothing to do with corruption. Corruption can go this way or that way. Minimize or not minimize. You may be corrupt, I may be corrupt, or you know, maybe you are more supposedly God fearing than me, so by accident you are not corrupt. Even if you are not corrupt and you are sitting on an agenda aiming to bring the country back to cheap borrowing abroad, inevitably you are going to squeeze me.

[D]

Okay.

[Jeky Tano]

All those who, if we simply have a very superficial analysis of, let's say the last election, then we leave aside the most important things because those important things rise to the heart of the narrative. Then they become markets for what the government, the new government can do or cannot do. Yeah, that constraint is not there. On the contrary, everybody rushes to kiss the government behind in the hope that, ah, you know, they'll be a bit more favorable to us than the previous.

[D]

Okay.

[Jeky Tano]

And the very fact that there has been some change is a, that is celebrated. Meanwhile, what is the change? What is the substance of the change? I mean, zero. You know what I mean? And let's not forget that we have to take a long term view. From a long term view, it is beneficial to the elite that you have these changes. It increases the longevity and legitimacy of the system. That's one actually answer to why the party seem to be so, you know, have the longevity and resilience because people lose and people win and it lends legitimacy to what's happening. Yeah. So it prolongs and perpetuates the illusion that, you know, maybe these people will learn their lessons from the old time. It will become better.

[D]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

On the one hand there's that, but on the other hand it's also the fact that people still have a belief in the political process. Because most people in Africa, in Ghana, are too desperate to have individual solutions to problems. You and I talking here. Maybe if we were critically ill, between us, our own savings and our own friends and family and colleagues, we can gather some money to go abroad for some treatment, right? Or go to the most expensive private medical care in Nigeria or Ghana or vice versa. For a majority of the population, that individual option is not. Is non existent. It can only be a social and a public solution at that. You get clean water to get clean. So from that point of view, people cannot afford to lose hope in politics and social solutions and so on. So the possibility is always there. It is the subjective agency who will do what to begin to give coherence and direction in however small way. Who will do what to embed a real radical ecological agenda in the student movement. Who will do what a real welfare agenda which is equalizing in the women's movement. Who will do what to bear a real anti exploitation thing. And who will teach the trade union that to be sexist and to be, you know, so and so it's not in your benefit to be sectarian around religion and ethnicity is not that one? It takes real agency to bring back. That's the agenda that I think we face in Ghana and it's the agenda you face in Nigeria. The agenda we face all in Africa. In that sense, yes, Africa is a country because we have one agenda to fight and that is the regeneration of popular unified alternatives. But real alternatives from below. We won't get it overnight. But if we have that perspective, we can begin to make inroads in a system which despite instability, is extremely fragile. And that fragility, unfortunately threatens all of us. Okay, we look at what is happening in the Sahel, we look at the rise of xenophobia. Even South Africa, supposed to be the one with the deepest, if you like, political culture from below in Africa in recent, because of its recent fight, relatively recent fight with apartheid. Look at the xenophobia in the last election, Zuma and Co, the Zulu vote. I mean, look at the degeneration of the anc. I mean, at least in Kruma and Co, you can say they were. They did some stuff for a decade or two and then things went bad. And so they see in no time and under no pressure, look at where they went, you know, I mean, and meanwhile they're doing all this with the trading notes in their pocket. I mean something, something really new is required, you know, and it's not Tinubu or John. Mama.

[Saeed Husseini]

I really appreciate that context. And in fact, it would have been the ideal place to end, except you did mention the Sahel, which, Yeah, I think for a lot of listeners has been quite a vexing topic. So, I mean, maybe as a way to just, you know, quickly wrap up. I don't know if you have a couple of words to say about these developments with the AES. I mean, you know, in some senses there was a bit of popular mobilization, you know, maybe of the more fragmented sort, maybe with some elements of coordination, you know, in a lot of these Sahel countries before we saw the military step in. Do you. And in some respects, what they've achieved in terms of, you know, at least challenging France's status quo in the region has been seen as inspiring by some members of even our own societies. Right. You know, that could probably march into Nigeria quite easily and get a lot of support within and outside of the. Of the security forces. So I don't know, do you see any openings there? Or, you know, I just. Yeah. I wonder how briefly you might kind of summarize the impact of that development, maybe for Ghana, but perhaps for the region.

[Jeky Tano]

Well, I think the first thing is that you're perfectly right about the popularity, the popular sentiment that has, you know, been stared and excited and in some degree inspired by these developments, these new governments, especially Tauri and Burkina, when all these, as usual, you know, heads of state, they love ritual and ceremony and all that. So when they all descended on Accra on the 7th of January for Mahamad's inauguration, you know, Tinubu being guest of honor and all that, it was Chaure who by far got the most loudest and most prolonged cheers from the crowd.

[D]

Yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

Okay. Now, in a sense, isn't that ironic? I mean, on the day that we are celebrating the high point of liberal democracy, somebody in military fatigues with a pistol side arm is the one that everybody is checking.

[D]

Okay.

[Jeky Tano]

The antithesis of whatever message the ceremony is supposed to be sending out. So that's. That's an irony. Okay. And you are right that the reason is precisely because of the associations that people are. All the hopes that people are reading into his regime and some of the developments that have taken place, especially in relation to France and French interest, you know, But I'll have to be unpopular here and disagree with all of that. Yeah. Because I think it's not a step forward. Right. Number one, we've been there before. Okay. People mentioned Tauri in the same breath as Sankara. I think that's a travesty.

[D]

Okay.

[Jeky Tano]

Even if you mention him in the same breath as the early Rawlings. It will still be maybe not as extreme as the Sankara analogy. And what I mean. Yeah, what I mean by that, especially that don't forget that the Rawlings and the Sankaras were enabled by a popular upsurge of popular participation. That's what brought them to me. And for a time, it was. Those currents were strong enough for them to need to reflect it.

[D]

Yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

There's no such thing going on in Burkina or any of the Sahelian AAS countries as we speak.

[D]

Right, Right.

[Jeky Tano]

There is a popular sentiment against France. That's always been the case and will forever be the case, and rightly so. Okay. But when a government hijacks that sentiment and that same government closes the door to that sentiment being expressed beyond where it wants it to go and can imprison and shoot people for that same sentiment, I'm not sure that it takes us forward. I'm trying to say the agency in society that can be animated by such a process is actually being short circuited by this new government. Okay. And it's not good enough. I mean, we are now a bit more mature. It's not good enough to judge politics in Africa simply by the stance that governments take to foreign powers. What about the relationship between the government and the people? That ought to be far more fundamental. The mistake we made in deifying the Rawling system is that we're not paying enough attention to that aspect of the relationship.

[D]

Yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

Okay. So a pale imitation of that in the form of. Of tari. I don't think should. Especially decades after the fact when we've gone through the bitter lessons of the Rawlings and, to be honest, the Sankaras as well. Because, let's face it, why was he overthrown so easily? He had been isolated by, you know, he was dealing trade unionists. He was dealing people were. And the factionalism in his. In his government got the better of him. I'm not saying it was a good thing. Of course not. But that is the reality. You. You have to have an honest balance sheet, an honest audit of what has taken place.

[D]

Yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

Okay. Is it that we want a savior to lead us and save us, or do we want the power to do so ourselves? And therefore we respect leaders who reflect and are subjected to that power. I will go for the latter. No matter how great or good your Sankara or Kwame Nkrumah or Fidel Castro is, I do not think one man or a few people should be telling us where to go or not. Where not to go. And that one, we disagree with them.

[Saeed Husseini]

Secondly, especially after we try that.

[Jeky Tano]

Secondly, the things that I was saying about Ghana and Nigeria actually apply to Burkina and those things and Mali and so on. Let's not forget that a lot of this, the war, the warring and the conflict in those places is precisely about who will control the new sources of growth on the economy. And Mali, for example, the explosion of the same Galanzi that we're talking about, artisanal mining, if it was in Nigeria, it could be oil bunkering here and so on. So do you understand? And Nigeria mining is also rising and so on, so forth. The militia fighting is about the control of those resources. So what is the difference between that and the big, if you like, apparently more organized and sanitized way in which transnational companies also want to control resources?

[D]

Yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

One is not an alternative. Okay. And in fact, if you want a sense of how bad that can be, consider the Sudan. The situation in Sudan right now, the rsf, okay, the rsf, unlike let's say Ghana or Nigeria, where control over these resources is by or even Burkina and so on, is by different factions and so on, so forth, has centralized control of all those because it was enabled to do so by the previous military dictatorship, which is why as a paramilitary adjunct to the state and it could do things in the name of the state that the state found too unpalatable to do. It was enabled by the state finance, by the state, all that. And in exchange for that, he was given all these resources in these gold mining, all kinds of things. And they have now a national network of that seeking a new outlet internationally and a new constellation of relationships outside your traditional minerals and mining trading region. That is why the uae, all the are so heavily involved in it. A whole new circuit is opening up in. And that's why we think internationally and geopolitically the rise of Asia, what does that mean? The right of the Gulf countries in fact, in particular, we can talk about climate change and ecological resources. UAE alone with resource grab in Africa, it cannot go unmentioned.

[Saeed Husseini]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

So this is all the subterranean currents that are taking place and with it is the new, you know, interventions in Africa by different foreign interests. If you replace France with Russia, how is that a step forward? I'm not saying France is better than Russia. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that imperialism is not about one country and the policy of one country. Imperialism is a system where the global powers compete. It is the competition of global powers. So it is a system. It's not one government or one president or one country. If you say I'm opposed to the United States imperialism, the only way to be properly opposed to United States imperialism is to be opposed to all imperialism because it's not the United States, it will be somebody else. So it is a system, not a choice by some one government. So you're opposed to France because of your own colonial. Fine, great. But shouldn't that lead you to oppose all imperialism rather than allow Russia to come and hold your bauxite reserves And Ukraine and Russian conflict is now being fought on your own soil with devastating consequences for community and no one. The press cannot even report it properly. What is. No, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. The degradation and devaluation of our expectations. The same fragmentation that I'm talking about in terms of Ghana, Nigeria and so on, where a vision that. An all encompassing, potentially unifying vision from below that can seek the transformation of society in the big sense and at the same time begins to enact it in the small, localized, more networked way domestically that is totally absent from any of the adulation that is being given to this. Okay, so I'm not in favor of Tinubu and Akufuado and Makisal and Alasan Watara saying that AES countries should be ostracized and they. And they are prepared to be the frontline shock troops for NATO to do so. I'm not in favor of that. But that in no way suggests that the AES path is a path to popular power and democracy in their own countries, let alone a model that it will unite the democratic aspirations of increasing numbers of West African citizens is not true. For having come as far as we have come with all the experimentation and the costliness of that experiment implementation. If in 2025 we are celebrating something that would have found unacceptable in 1983, which is when Sankara came to power, did we go forward or do we come back is a pale imitation of Sankara then? I don't think that in 2025, because in. If Sankara was accepted acceptable in 83, it doesn't mean he ought to be acceptable in 2025 if that was the same model that he's bringing. Right?

[D]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

Let alone I don't think so. So I'm saying that it still comes back. You know, when people are weak and are looking for a savior and do not know the way for it, that's when they give the cheering to the tourists. Okay, so towering is a symbol of our own disempowerment I'm sorry, That's how. So I know it's not going to go down very well. It's not necessarily the most popular. But the imperative of no longer postponing the reality of where we are and the steps we have to take in a serious way, it's necessary. We can't keep postponing and kicking those questions down the road in the hope of some short term fix and some temporary emotional gratification because some wretched president stood up to some even more wretched French leaders. So what? No, I don't think so. Yeah, okay. So please, I mean, so if some president comes and blasts Donald Trump tomorrow, so he's a hero, how we are being asked, you know, we are being asked to confine our political aspirations and business to that wretched level.

[D]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

Okay. So I'm not, I don't. And I understand. Look at the analysis that I tried to give of the rolling spirit. Travel came because the military elites were appropriating military aid. We're appropriating military contracts as we saw in Niger, for example. I mean, the Nigerian guy, he's a general who came to power. He's a general who fell out with his president because they were fighting over some military contact. Now, is that a man to go and follow to. For what?

[D]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeky Tano]

The man who came to power in, in, in, in Mali, I think it was a captain, relatively junior or middle rank officer. All of a sudden he's some general somewhere. Well, come on, come on. I'm sorry, there's no way on earth those are models of any wave.

[D]

Yeah, fair enough.

[Jeky Tano]

And they are repressing their own people. They are very selective about what they do. They are supporters of, they are happy to be in bed with other imperialists who may not be their number one frontline enemy historically and so on. No, there's nothing in there. Nothing in there. They have hijacked the popular sentiment against the genuine popular sentiment against France. And are you saying for ants that cannot advance and liberate our people and empower us and unleash dynamics in our own society which will take us forward in our own terms for our own purposes? No. Though I will have to beg to differ. To all the adulation that is taking place, all the uncritical, shallow, you know, a bit childish. I mean, it's childish given where we have come from and all we have been through. Let's step back when we kind of look into this. I'm sorry, it's a step back even in the Sankara terms. Let Alone. Yeah.

[Saeed Husseini]

But as a matter of fact, I don't think there will be too many of the listeners to this show who disagree or find what you're saying surprising, because I think, yeah, the assessments that we've made previously, and I think that you've been making throughout this episode has been about popular power, really.

[Jeky Tano]

And popular power, we have to. It doesn't fall on anybody's lap.

[Saeed Husseini]

Exactly.

[Jeky Tano]

Everything else is constructed, is built, whatever. Small. The skill is not the point. It is the vision and the matching the practical with that, with that. You know, we stand on the reality today, but we have that vision for tomorrow. And those two things have to be constantly animating and mutually reinforcing and shaping each other as we go along is the only way. There's no. There's no magic one. That's the only way.

[Saeed Husseini]

No, no, I think, unfortunately, there. As much as we would have liked to have one, especially in this podcast, there isn't one. And I think you've summarized that very well. So I won't. I won't attempt to echo what you've said, but what I will say again is a huge thank you to comrade for making the time to join us today and to provide quite an incentive, insightful picture narrative of Ghana's trajectory and, you know, what. What hopes lie ahead. Because I think what you've also achieved here is, you know, suggesting that there actually might be an alternative, you know, contrary to the, you know, to the kind of neoliberal realism that we've all seem to sort of imbibe. So I'm really grateful for that and I think our listeners will be, too. And, yeah, I should probably let you go, but not before saying, once again, a huge thank you and hope that we can talk to you again some point soon.

[Jeky Tano]

Thank you very much. You too. And to, you know, your. Your blog and to all the people that you work with. I think you're doing a tremendous, tremendous work and a tremendous service for all of us providing these platforms and these. Animating these conversations and so on. So please keep at it. I will pay closer attention to what you're doing, become more involved, and, you know, let's try and build on that collaboration from here. You are, you are a key part, a key node in the networks that we need to bring. We need to bring to bear on all the different struggles and concerns. So thank you for that.

[Saeed Husseini]

Yeah, thank you, too. Excellent.

[Jeky Tano]

Sa.