It is completely disheartening to note that few leaders have been able to avoid the curse that power has a tendency to corrupt and as a leader gets more comfortable in the wielding of unbridled power the more their moral rectitude diminishes .
Soon the liberator became the oppressor and unfortunately used the very same state machinery that was used to harass the efforts of the liberator to curtail the voice of those that did not tow his line of thought .
There were many incidences where the newly liberated citizenry lamented the good old days when they were colonized as they came to terms that independence was for a few chosen people and not for the hoi polloi .
A cursory check at history seems to confirm that oftentimes great men tend to always be bad men . Probably one needs an oversized ego that brooks no competition to be able to believe that they alone can move the community along .
Soon Nkrumah ’ s detractors had a raft of accusations leveled at him which included sadly the curtailing of freedom of speech and intimidating the press . For a person voted in democratically he quickly assumed an authoritarian posture .
Ghanaians particularly resented his imposition of a one-party state and passing unconstitutional laws that had his opponents detained and jailed without due process . Nothing had changed except that now the African was oppressing the African .
Unspoken , but the real bone of contention , was the sticky subject on the sharing of the national cake which the liberator assumed was his right to eat his fill with his cronies as a reward for midwifing the independence process .
Nkrumah turned Ghana into a personal piggy bank and before long it was apparent to any observer that Nkrumah was slowly but surely running down the country and any economic gains that the country had achieved by independence were being rolled back .
Not surprisingly , Kwame Nkrumah was deposed in a military coup with the alleged involvement of the CIA . An otherwise potentially illustrious political career had crumbled under the pressure of the rising Ashanti nationalism . Tribalism was replacing patriotism .
One of the unfortunate legacies of colonialism was that the former masters never really let go and had intricate economic ties with their former colonies . The down side of this was the fact that African leaders faced intense external interference . Many were mere puppets .
It was in the interest of the departing colonist to create as much chaos as they could . And use the age-old divide and rule tactics but this time to exploit the internal ethnic differences to maintain a grip on the country ’ s resources .
The Nkrumah experience seems to have prepared the template by which practically all newly independent African countries played by . Independence did not bring the expected prosperity for the majority of Africans , just more problems .
The Arab north African countries had gained independence by the mid 1950s giving a much-needed impetus for the rest of African countries to step up the clamor for their freedom , autonomy and sovereignty .
By the mid 1960s most West and Eastern African countries had also gained their independence and all of them had created heroes who led this heady period of African history when Africans dropped the shackles of colonial dominance .
As stated , independence did not usher a new chapter for Africa and like in a game of macabre dominos the newly independent African states tumbled into chaos and military coup d ’ états were the new vogue in Africa .
In fact , military coups have become such a common African style of government that it is no longer frowned upon . It appears that the only way you can keep these artificially created African countries is by force not cooperation .
The problem seems to date back to the failure of the African independence heroes to galvanize the nascent countries into nation states and create a national outlook that would allow the citizens to identify as a homogeneous unit .
The independence heroes had become independence rogues and allowed power to get to their heads and unfortunately assumed that people can be policed into a community . The heroes had no vision beyond the attainment of independence .
Nigeria is a particularly interesting case of how the intricate regional dynamics of a newly independent country created so much chaos virtually rendering the country ungovernable and raising the question of whether African countries should be federations or nations .
Few would even remember that Chief Anthony Enahoro was the man usually recognized as the father of Nigerian independence . He was an anti-colonial and pro-democracy activist who in the early 1950s moved the motion for Nigeria ’ s independence .
People are more likely to remember the colorful and eloquent Nnamdi Azikiwe who was the first black governor-general of Nigeria and the first president when the Nigerian federation was created . Already the history is getting confusing .
Add into the mix Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa , the first Prime Minister of Nigeria on attaining independence and one realizes that Nigeria was trying to navigate a complicated political matrix made more complex by the curious religious demarcation of the country .
Nigeria has more than three hundred and seventy tribes and by dint of history the north is Muslim and the South is Christian . It also happens to be the most populous country in Africa creating unique leadership challenges for a leader .
These challenges were evident in the fact that by 1966 Nigeria had had its first coup against the anglophile Abubakar Tafawa Balewa who had favored close ties with former colonial master , Britain . Nigeria went on to have four more coups and army rule up to 1999 .
Did our independence heroes let Africans down or was it that they were deliberately handed a poisoned chalice by the colonizing powers hence their failure was not only imminent but pre-planned ?
This however does raise a disturbing question on the caliber of the political leaders that Africa has raised if they all fell victim to self-aggrandizement and did not have the moral courage to put the interests of Africa first .
There is one curious case in West Africa , Senegal , in that the country has not experienced coups since its independence in 1960 which does not in any way suggest that it has been a stable political entity .
The reason for flagging this country is that it also had one of the original heroes of African independence in the personage of Leopold Sedar Senghor . He was an intellectual and a poet . He was ideologically an African socialist and
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