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Documentary, Pandoras Box Part 5 - Black Power
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00:00I dreamt last night, the moon was so bright, it melted the walls away.
00:08And it wasn't alarming when I saw Prince Charming come into my bedroom and say...
00:16Let me persuade you to come to the place where tomorrow meets today.
00:22Ooh!
00:23Bigger and better cities with the edges.
00:29For a world of progress.
00:33If you were a scientist, you were in.
00:53Your excellent science, I am your faithful servant.
00:58Let's go tomorrow!
01:00Building a new world.
01:11Thirty-five years ago, one man set out to turn this country into a modern industrial utopia.
01:17He was Kwame Nkrumah, the first leader of a newly independent black African state.
01:23His aim was to transform Ghana into a society shaped and driven by the power of science.
01:32And I see and hear springing up cities of Ghana.
01:36Becoming the metropolis of science, learning, scientific agriculture and philosophy.
01:43Seek ye first the political kingdom.
01:46And all other things shall be ordered unto it.
01:49We are rain, the nation's powerhouse.
01:53We supply power to every home.
01:58We are rain, the nation's powerhouse.
02:01At the heart of Nkrumah's plan was a giant dam that would produce vast quantities of cheap electricity.
02:06Enough power to build a modern industrial state in the heart of Africa within a generation.
02:22But what Nkrumah did not foresee was that with the dam would come other, more dangerous forms of power which he could not control.
02:28Political and economic forces that would tear apart his vision of using science and technology to create a model for the new Africa.
02:38Nkrumah was, in my mind, a visionary, not a dreamer.
02:43In his mind's eye, he could see the United States of Africa as the United States of America.
02:53And he could see Africa coming together to form a viable unit to become a world power in the shortest possible time.
03:03That was built out.
03:04Nkrumah!
03:05There is a new African in the world!
03:08He needed power.
03:09And there was no source from which he could get the amount of power which he needed.
03:15And this was the one source which could provide him with that power.
03:19And he was prepared to go the whole length to get it.
03:22Forget it.
03:36We begin in West Africa, one of the two great areas of the world where we have ruled but never settled.
03:43To the people of the Gold Coast, there came last week a day that will always be remembered in their history.
03:48For here, in what's been a British colony for more than a century, nearly a million people went to the polls in their first general election.
03:56The main issue in the election lay between those who want self-government sometime in the future and those who want it now, like the Convention People's Party, the CPP.
04:05Their leader, Kwame Nkrumah, spent election day in jail, serving a sentence for incitement and sedition.
04:12Nkrumah's rise had been irresistible.
04:13After spending ten years in America as a student, he had returned to the Gold Coast in 1947.
04:20Within two years, he had formed a political party.
04:23Two years after that, he swept to power.
04:26Although the British still controlled trade, defence and foreign policy, he had become the first black African Prime Minister.
04:32Nkrumah, before coming into power, has, in his election manifesto, had made certain promises about development, about turning the country into a modern industrial country.
04:48Nkrumah very much believed that for development, power was necessary, that you had to have power, that without power you couldn't develop.
04:57Power meant electricity, and the source was to be the giant Volta River that flowed through the eastern half of the country.
05:05Ever since the 1920s, the British had planned to build a dam there.
05:10A hydroelectric plant would produce electricity to make aluminium from the Gold Coast's vast reserves of the mineral bauxite.
05:16In the early 50s, Britain was desperate for a cheap source of aluminium, and Nkrumah joined with the British to resuscitate the scheme.
05:24This is the Volta, the greatest natural resource of the Gold Coast, whose latent power is the mainspring of the most visionary development project in the whole of Africa.
05:36And this is bauxite, which lies in millions of tons beneath the green forested hills of the Gold Coast.
05:45From this red earth, man can extract the shining wonder metal of today, aluminium.
05:51And that is the aim of the Gold Coast, to cap the march to independence with a dramatic leap into the age of technology.
05:57The British authorities saw the power from the dam simply as a means to boost the empire's supply of aluminium.
06:04But for Nkrumah, it was much more. He saw it as the key to fulfilling his country's destiny.
06:10The power was originally conceived just for the manufacture of aluminium in this country.
06:16But then when Kwame came, he gave a new accent, a new importance to that power project.
06:24That was, the power was to be used for a comprehensive economic development of the country.
06:38Together, Nkrumah and the British organised a travelling exhibition to promote the Volta scheme.
06:42Large models of the dam were built and taken round the country amidst a blaze of publicity.
06:49The exhibition was seen by nearly two million people.
06:55Some elderly folks, their reaction was first, is it possible, is it feasible for this to happen in their lifetime?
07:05And I remember in one particular place, there was one farmer who came in, in a plot, and did ask the question,
07:16what can he do to help for the project to come on?
07:20The two mobile cinemas ranged the country ahead, showing films to audiences large and small,
07:26wherever they could find them.
07:28Showing how great rivers can create prosperity for the people who live beside them.
07:32The exhibition was a great success, and it helped Nkrumah consolidate his political position.
07:40But to his opponents, whom he had defeated in the election, the Volta scheme was a dangerous trap.
07:46Just another cycle in the British exploitation of their country.
07:49The British people were anxious to give us that scheme.
07:56And one thing I must make clear, the scheme was not started by Nkrumah.
08:02The Volta River scheme was an old scheme of a British government.
08:07In 1953, Nkrumah's opponents forced a debate in Parliament.
08:12In a series of speeches, the opposition MPs warned that Nkrumah was in danger of enslaving the country to powerful interests far beyond his control.
08:20As a long-term scheme, it is excellent.
08:26But as a short-term scheme, Mr Speaker, it is suicidal.
08:32I would say that no nation which is beginning to free itself puts its neck in a position in which it will find itself in economic slavery.
08:45At the end of the debate, Nkrumah defended his partnership with the British.
08:50We are not boys, he said.
08:53Do you think I am a fool to enter into a project like this blindly?
08:57I am not so damn silly as to put my nose into something that is detrimental to this country.
09:07All my life, I've been a man of peace.
09:10Working for peace, striving for peace, negotiating for peace.
09:16But I am utterly convinced that the action we have taken is right.
09:22In 1956, Britain invaded Egypt to prevent President Nasser from nationalising the Suez Canal.
09:29Within ten days, the United Nations and the Americans forced them to retreat.
09:34Suez symbolised the decline of Britain's colonial power.
09:37Vast projects like the Volta Dam began to look increasingly insecure in the face of confident new African leaders.
09:44And Britain was running out of money.
09:47That same year, Nkrumah's government was told the Volta scheme was shelved.
09:52Nkrumah had received the news that the British government intended to pull out of the scheme because the finances were getting too large for them to handle.
10:01He was almost in despair.
10:05Everybody was depressed.
10:08All of those of us who were involved in it in any way were shattered when we discovered that the project was on the shelf.
10:15And Nkrumah.
10:19But Nkrumah was not a man to allow depression to take over.
10:24On the 6th of March, 1957, the Gold Coast became Ghana, the first black African country to be free.
10:35Ghana, your beloved country, is free forever.
10:43We are going to demonstrate to the world, to the other nations, younger as we are, that we are prepared to lay our own foundation.
10:52Out of the darkness, the pledge and the promise.
10:57The promise of independence was not just going to be just freedom, but that people will see it in their lives.
11:06The promise that we are going to industrialize the country as a means of generating growth, economic growth.
11:12And industrialization means that we must have power, and therefore the first thing was that all of us should harness all our resources to get in the power established.
11:24It was a glorious moment for Ghana and for Nkrumah.
11:37But in private, he knew that many of the promises on which he had been swept to power might prove dangerously hollow if the dam were not built.
11:45It was the key to his vision of leading Africa into a shining tomorrow.
11:49But then, 4,000 miles away, a simple twist of fate brought the Volta scheme back to life.
12:02At the end of 1957, Nkrumah's finance minister, Komla Bedemer, went to America on a private visit.
12:12I was invited to Maryland State College to give a talk on the newly independent Ghana.
12:18And as I was driving there from New York, I felt like having a drink of orange juice or some water at a roadside restaurant, Howard Johnson's restaurant in Delaware.
12:33My secretary, who was an American, a black American, told me,
12:39Minister, I think this is one of the states where they are very sticky about colour.
12:45I said, what?
12:47The home of good, good food is Howard Johnson's.
12:51Howard Johnson's is such a friendly place to have good food.
12:55I asked for two glasses of orange juice.
12:57The girl looked at us, said, no, sir, you can't.
13:01I said, what? You can't.
13:03Then she turned away, went in and told the manager to come and speak to us.
13:09So the manager came and said, gentlemen, I'm sorry, because of your colour, you can't drink in here.
13:16I said to him, look, there are people here who are lower social status than I am, but they can drink and I can't.
13:22OK, you can keep the orange juice and the change, but you haven't heard the last of this.
13:26Next morning, it was world news all over the world.
13:33Well, during the course of breakfast with the president, he wanted to know how it all happened, so I told him...
13:40During breakfast, he asked me, what were you doing in the United States?
13:44I said, I've come here to talk about the Volta project.
13:48How's that project, he asked.
13:50I said, well, we've put it in cold storage because we can't find the money immediately.
13:54Have you talked to the State Department? He said, no, we haven't.
14:00Dick, Richard, will you take care of that?
14:04And that was how the Volta project came back to life so soon.
14:10Nkrumah seized the opportunity.
14:13He wrote to Eisenhower asking for help in building the dam.
14:16Eisenhower invited him to visit America.
14:18At their meeting in March 1958, he told Nkrumah that the best way to get the scheme started again would be to involve American industry.
14:27The Kaiser Aluminum Hour.
14:31Eisenhower contacted Edgar Kaiser.
14:35He was head of one of the largest aluminium corporations in the world.
14:39Kaiser Aluminum, the bright star of metal.
14:42Kaiser was based in Oakland, California.
14:46It had mines and smelting plants throughout the world.
14:49It promoted aluminium as the shining, lightweight metal of the future.
14:52Presenting aluminum in a demonstration of those remarkable properties that have made it the favourite of millions.
15:03Aluminum is famed for its lightness.
15:06At Eisenhower's request, Edgar Kaiser flew from California to meet Nkrumah in New York.
15:11We were staying at the Waldorf Towers and Edgar came in and he and Nkrumah stood and looked at each other.
15:22And some kind of magnetic quality passed between them.
15:27It was quite remarkable.
15:28They took to each other at once.
15:30And I doubt if that electricity ever evaporated throughout their experience, although they had many set twos in one way or another.
15:43Today, Ghana is a land of the future.
15:47Accra's international airport serves the major airlines.
15:51At the end of 1958, a team of Kaiser executives and engineers flew to Accra to look at the plans for the scheme.
16:00And at the end of the journey, a modern city.
16:05Nkrumah offered the Kaiser team a deal.
16:08If they agreed to build an aluminium smelter in Ghana, then his government would be able to raise the money for the dam.
16:14In return, the dam would supply the large quantities of electricity needed by the plant.
16:20The rest would go to power the future industries of the new Ghana.
16:24To the Kaiser team, Ghana seemed an attractive prospect.
16:27It was wealthy.
16:29I think they had $400 million in the bank.
16:32Very highly educated.
16:35Everyone, every driver was reading the newspaper.
16:38I mean, they were very literate people.
16:41And it was as good a place to try in Africa as you could go to.
16:47They were aggressive.
16:48There was one young lawyer who impressed me, who became great friends, Ron Sullivan.
16:56He was very aggressive.
16:58And they were...
17:00Later on got to understand what they were doing.
17:04That was their nature.
17:05Unlike the British, you were very gentlemanly.
17:10The Americans were straight to the point and no frills or wrapping up.
17:17They called a spade a spade and shovel a shovel.
17:22They wanted the dam.
17:24And we were the means to get it because we were the way that the dam was being financed.
17:34It had always been assumed by the Ghanaians that, as with the British scheme, the smelter would use the vast reserves of their own bauxite and so create an important new industry.
17:43But in the middle of the negotiations, the Kaiser team made it clear they had no intention of using Ghana's bauxite for the time being.
17:51Instead, they would import the raw materials needed by the smelter from America.
17:56The decision shocked the Ghanaian negotiating team.
18:00They might have been disappointed, but you have to realize that wasn't that high grade of bauxite.
18:05It was high 30s or low 40s.
18:09And the bauxite, for example, over in Guinea was 55%.
18:16It makes a lot of difference in cost.
18:19It just wasn't possible at that time.
18:22This seemed to be totally wrong to Nkrumah.
18:26He was intensely upset.
18:29He could never believe that Ghana's bauxite couldn't be converted by a series of processes into pots and pans.
18:39And the roofing sheets.
18:41What the Kaiser executives didn't tell the Ghanaians was that there was another reason why they didn't want to use the local bauxite.
18:47We were greatly concerned that if we located within Ghana all of the bauxite and power necessary to have an integrated aluminum operation,
19:00that someday our project, if it were profitable, might be nationalized by the government and taken away from us.
19:09The Kaiser team refused to change their minds.
19:11They knew, as well as Nkrumah did, that without them there would be no dam.
19:14At the end of 1959, Nkrumah told his team to agree to Kaiser's terms.
19:21Millions of dollars' worth of Ghanaian bauxite would remain in the ground.
19:25But with Kaiser's letter of intent in his pocket, Nkrumah knew he could now set about raising the money to build the dam.
19:31He approached the World Bank.
19:36It had been set up at the end of the war to provide loans to rebuild Europe, but now it had turned its attention to the Third World.
19:43He asked the bank for £30 million. It was the largest loan ever requested.
19:47Yet the bank's economists believed, as Nkrumah did, that electricity was the key to industrial development in the Third World.
19:56We envisaged the development of this power resource as fundamental to Ghanaian economic development.
20:03The provision of power, electric power, to Ghana was an immense economic benefit to the country,
20:10was a sine qua non of economic development in the country.
20:13So let's accept that the economic benefits for power to Ghana were tremendous.
20:18The belief that science and technology applied on a grand scale would somehow inevitably propel a Third World country into the industrial age,
20:26was the prevailing wisdom of the time.
20:28It was called the theory of take-off.
20:31It gripped the imagination of politicians and economists both in the West and in the Third World.
20:38In June 1960, the World Bank approved the scheme in principle.
20:41But its report had important reservations.
20:45The most serious concerned the price Kaiser paid Ghana for electricity.
20:49The World Bank made it clear that if Nkrumah was to get the benefits he expected from the dam,
20:54he must negotiate a certain minimum rate for the power.
20:58If he didn't, Ghana might find it difficult to take off.
21:01Our report essentially was saying to Ghana, this project will succeed and we're prepared to make a loan on it and the loan can be paid out if the power price is right.
21:12This was absolutely the key to the negotiations.
21:16As a conductor of electricity it's hard to beat.
21:18But Kaiser needed a low rate if the smelter was to be profitable.
21:21A second round of negotiations began.
21:25In toughness and adaptability, it can be made as strong as structural steel.
21:30Nkrumah faced a terrible dilemma.
21:32His advisers and the World Bank told him that if he accepted the price Kaiser was offering,
21:37the high expectations he had of the dam might not be realised.
21:40But if he refused, Nkrumah knew that Kaiser would pull out and the dam would never be built.
21:47Nkrumah was a man besieged.
21:49He had to do something.
21:51As you know, he had raised up hopes of the development of the country,
21:56that the Volta River project would turn Ghana into a modern industrial country.
22:02He had no other programme.
22:04Insofar as he saw it as providing this minimum of the power which he saw,
22:10he was prepared to go along.
22:14The negotiations dragged on through the autumn of 1960.
22:18Neither side would give way on the electricity price.
22:22Finally, one hot afternoon in December,
22:25Edgar Kaiser decided to confront Nkrumah and force the issue.
22:29Kaiser asked for the meeting to be adjourned and went straight to Nkrumah
22:33and explained that perhaps his shareholders would not go along with the project
22:41if we asked for a higher power rate than Kaiser was asking for.
22:49A message came back after lunch there from Nkrumah
22:53that we had to go ahead and accept the rate.
22:58He wanted the project at all costs.
23:00Kwame Nkrumah and Edgar Kaiser on the 22nd of January 1962 signed the Master Agreement,
23:10which enfolded every provision that was necessary between Edgar Kaiser's company and the Ghana government.
23:17When they had signed it, they stood up and clasped each other in a very, very genuine embrace.
23:25I was there together with a large number of other distinguished guests and we, I don't think any of us will ever forget it.
23:37The following day we all went to Akosombo and Nkrumah let off a vast charge and the scheme started.
23:43Yes, I suppose you can say Kaiser used Nkrumah, but if that makes Nkrumah passive, that would be inaccurate, because Nkrumah also used Kaiser.
24:01The question is whose end of the bargain came out better.
24:06Nkrumah would seem to have been going into an area with so many unknowns.
24:13One can say that while he was pursuing power, power slipped through his fingers.
24:19But even as Nkrumah and Edgar Kaiser celebrated, other forces were becoming involved in the scheme.
24:26The dam was now a hostage in the vicious confrontations of the Cold War.
24:37A year before, the Congo had been torn apart by a brutal civil war.
24:41America and the Soviet Union backed opposite sides.
24:45The policy of the new Kennedy administration was to fight the spread of communism in Africa.
24:51In 1960, Brezhnev, the president of the Soviet Union, had visited Ghana.
24:56It frightened America's leaders.
24:58They were determined that Nkrumah, despite his brand of African socialism, would be their man.
25:03Nkrumah was everything. He was everything. Politically, economically, psychologically, culturally and so on.
25:13He just absolutely dominated the scene.
25:16Nkrumah, though, wanted to keep Ghana and Africa out of the Cold War.
25:20President and Distant Delegates, it's quite clear that a desperate attempt is being made to create confusion in the Congo.
25:34Extend the Cold War to Africa and involve Africa in the societal powers of foreign powers.
25:41The United Nations must not allow this to happen.
25:45But there was the dam.
25:46The American government realised that it was a powerful weapon with which to ensnare Nkrumah.
25:52Like the World Bank, the Kennedy administration had agreed to lend millions of dollars to the scheme.
25:58In an internal memorandum, the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, made it quite clear what this money was for.
26:04By maintaining this leverage on Nkrumah, he wrote, the US will be in a better position to influence his policies.
26:11In public, though, it was called foreign aid.
26:14The problem was that we foresaw that the progress that the Soviets were making and extending their communist ideology,
26:23particularly in Africa and, to some extent, in South America, certainly in the Middle East.
26:30And that, therefore, we had to counter that some way.
26:33And we countered it with foreign aid as a defence against the spread of communism.
26:40Bit by bit, Nkrumah's utopian vision was slipping away.
26:44The Volta scheme had become something very different from what he had originally intended.
26:48At every stage, the project had been shaped, not by his idealism, but by powerful political and economic pressures.
26:56But Nkrumah still believed it was worthwhile, because once the dam was built, it could not be taken away.
27:02In time, it would become the engine of his country's future.
27:08Everyone was hopeful.
27:11Those absolutely were optimistic times for hope.
27:14Ghana was singular in the sense that it had everything.
27:18It had educated people.
27:19It had considerable infrastructure, three universities, schools, lawyers, doctors.
27:27It had everything going for it.
27:32The construction of the dam was to take four years.
27:35Throughout Ghana, factories and roads began to be built,
27:39the foundations of the Industrial Revolution that would be powered by the dam.
27:43But with these trappings of the modern world came other forces
27:46that took Ghana's fragile economy even further from Nkrumah's control.
27:53Corruption is not a problem peculiar to any country.
27:59I personally feel that the only way in which you can stop corruption in the country
28:04is to build up a strong public opinion against it.
28:10Elements entered into the equation that had not been adequately foreseen
28:15and perhaps the greatest of them was corruption.
28:19Corruption of government and of government people.
28:22And corruption, I call it corruption, on the part of foreign suppliers
28:28who tried to sell Ghana, in fact did sell Ghana,
28:33on investment in substantial industrial enterprises
28:37which were not properly designed for the country and did not, in fact, achieve success.
28:47In the early 60s, Ghana became a mecca for European industrialists
28:51eager to win large contracts from Nkrumah's government.
28:54They began to discover that the easiest way
28:57was to offer officials from Nkrumah's party a bribe.
28:59This soon became the accepted way of doing business in Accra.
29:05What resulted was a rush to sell Ghana anything,
29:08no matter how inappropriate for an emerging African nation.
29:12Vast sums of Ghana's precious foreign currency were spent on these projects.
29:19Then, in 1964, Nkrumah's industrial experiment received another body blow.
29:23The world price of cocoa, which had been falling for four years, finally crashed.
29:29It was Ghana's main source of foreign exchange.
29:33The millions of pounds needed to pay for the new factories began to dry up.
29:37Ghana, once one of the richest countries in Africa, began to slide into debt.
29:41Nkrumah was an increasingly isolated figure on the world stage.
30:01What had once been seen as visionary ideas were now perceived as dangerous megalomania,
30:06and his country was sinking ever deeper into debt.
30:13By 1965, it had become very desperate.
30:17And I remember we decided to write a memorandum to Nkrumah
30:21to tell him the true state of affairs of the economy.
30:26I had written that the reserves were only 500,000 pounds.
30:30He looked at me and said,
30:33ah, you didn't check the typing.
30:37You left a few zeros.
30:39I said, no sir, there are no zeros left.
30:43This is 500,000.
30:45That's all we have in the banks overseas.
30:48And he sat back.
30:50Then what he did was that he went round the table.
30:53He went to everyone who was seated there at the meeting and asked them,
31:01Frimpong says, we have 500,000.
31:04Is he right?
31:05Do you agree with him?
31:07And everybody said yes.
31:09That was the first time the whole cabinet acknowledged to the president
31:15that Ghana was bankrupt.
31:16The river, take me across, and wash all my troubles away.
31:27Like the rocky old sun, give me nothing to do.
31:34Roll around, have it all.
31:39Our objective is African Union now.
31:43There is no time to waste.
31:47We must unite or we perish.
31:50I am confident that by our concerted effort and determination...
31:56Kwame Nkrumah was losing both domestically and internationally in his posture.
32:02He was practically alone in Flagstaff House.
32:05He was really a little bit paranoid.
32:08It was really awfully sad.
32:09He was even afraid to...
32:12I remember they opened their parliament one day.
32:15And Krumah didn't want to take the chance to drive from Flagstaff House to the parliament building.
32:21He was a prisoner in a sense.
32:24You know, there had been a couple of attempts on his life while we were there.
32:29So he had reason to be a little bit apprehensive.
32:32But toward the end, he was a different person.
32:40I've never been a person who wasjournist at the front of the camp.
32:42The first day of the camp was the camp.
32:45I wasn't really going to stop the camp.
32:47The last day of the camp was the camp was destroyed.
32:50And it was a heavy camp.
32:51Andmotiv which was just about a long-term camp.
32:53But the camp was a very rare camp.
32:55It was the end of the camp.
32:56the dam was finally finished.
32:58Nkrumah organised a massive celebration.
33:01He invited the whole country to attend.
33:03The mood of the people at the celebration,
33:06the mood of the country was euphoric.
33:09There was this vast project which had come in,
33:12and they understood it would have a tremendous impact
33:16and effect on the country.
33:19I felt euphoric.
33:22I was quite enthusiastic.
33:24I thought a new dawn had come for Ghana.
33:32But all that was happening against the background of a country
33:36that already had no money,
33:38it had extreme controls and port controls.
33:41So it was just like a big emperor's new clothes.
33:45Nobody could say that Ghana was broke,
33:47but Ghana really was broke.
33:49President Eisenhower and President Kennedy
33:53were genuinely interested in this project because they saw,
34:01behind the cold figures and the rigid calculations,
34:05that the Volta River project was not only an economically viable project,
34:11but also an opportunity for the United States of America to make a purposeful capital investment in a developing country.
34:21You see before you, in all his majesty, strength and power, the Aconsobodar, which has tamed the turbulent waters of the Volta.
34:33A lot of us, myself particularly, you know, did not take our seats at the official seating place and watched the ceremony from further uphill.
34:47Many, many reasons for that.
34:51One of them was that there was talk of a possible coup at the time.
34:55This is Ghana's Volta River project.
35:01A project that is to lead Ghana to a new, brighter and a more prosperous future.
35:09A project that is to lead to a new, brighter and a more prosperous future.
35:13A project that is to lead to a new, brighter and a more prosperous future.
35:19A project that is to lead to a new, brighter and more prosperous future.
35:22The citizens of Ghana, and fellow countrymen, good evening.
35:26The Ghana Armed Forces took over the reins of government of this country
35:34after a successful overthrow of the regime of Kwame Nkrumah
35:40in what may be truly described as one of the boldest ventures in the history of this country.
35:48Hello, fans. Excuse me. Excuse the bristling about with weapons and the flushing in the face,
36:00but I've just come from dashing away from doing a bit of liberating
36:03and overthrowing the government and all that business. Overthrowing the government is rather
36:10heavy-going at the best of times, but my goodness, folks, this is a landmine in the history of
36:16Africa, no mistake. The military coup won enormous popular support. Nkrumah had failed
36:22to deliver the modern Ghana he had promised. The dam had come too late to save him. But
36:29there were other forces involved in planning the coup. America, too, had finally lost patience
36:33with Nkrumah. Well, Howard Bain, who was the CIA station chief in Accra, engineered the overthrow
36:39of Kwame Nkrumah. Now, obviously, you can look at it different ways. A Ghanaian might
36:46say, I thought we did it. Inside the CIA, though, it was quite clear Howard Bain got a double
36:52promotion and the intelligence star for having overthrown Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana. The magic
36:58of it, what made it so exciting to the CIA, was that Howard Bain had had enough imagination
37:05and drive to run the operation without ever documenting what he was doing and to sweep along
37:12his bosses in such a way. They knew what he was doing. Tacitly, they approved, but there
37:18wasn't one shred of paper that he generated that would nail the CIA hierarchy as being responsible.
37:25Nkrumah fled to Guinea and never returned to Ghana. He died in 1972.
37:32In the 1950s, in the eyes of the West, his country had been a radiant model for what Africa was
37:37to become. But by the time he fell, that image had been replaced by a picture of a continent
37:43racked by military coups and corruption. In the late 60s, Western journalists travelled to
37:49Ghana to pick over the bones of his industrial experiment. Their contemptuous reports seemed
37:55to confirm to the West a new myth of Africa, a continent unable to handle the complex pressures
38:01of industrialisation. Kwame Nkrumah, the communist messiah of Africa, came home in 1947 with the
38:08clothes he stood up in and a cardboard suitcase. He left 19 years later a multimillionaire.
38:18He turned a £250 million credit at independence to a £600 million debt, and he left Accra studied
38:26with expensive white elephants, such as this massive saluting base, here, in Black Star Square.
38:36Today, Black Star Square, built by Nkrumah for mass parades to demonstrate enthusiasm for his rule,
38:42remains as a bleak reminder of his conceit.
38:48Overlooking the square was Job 600. Built by Nkrumah, specially for the OAU conference in 1965,
38:55it's never been used since. This luxury block was to house the Pan-African Congress.
39:01They never came. There was the Accra-Tamer motorway, cost £6 million to duplicate a fast good road
39:08already in existence. They say the Russians actually managed to sell snowplows to this state
39:15in equatorial Africa.
39:18For Ghana, the years following Nkrumah's fall were ones of economic failure.
39:23The dam worked well, but the industrial world that was to have sprung up around it failed
39:28to materialise.
39:30Those Ghanaians who had been moved to make way for the dam found themselves stranded
39:34in the wreckage of Nkrumah's dream.
39:36I've become quite disgusted, because we are directly about three miles from the Volta Dam.
39:43But we don't have power.
39:45No electricity, no water.
39:47So my feeling is that when we have these things, we can do so much to help the nation.
39:56Valka, the Volta Aluminium Company, owned and run by the Kaiser Corporation, flourished.
40:15It employed over 1,500 Ghanaians and brought precious foreign exchange into the country.
40:20It used most of the dam's electricity, and so allowed the World Bank loan to be paid off
40:27without interruption.
40:31The smelter became an integral part of Kaiser's worldwide production of aluminium.
40:35In a way, we looked at this as a gigantic dry-cleaning plant.
40:41What we did was we sent alumina from the United States to the smelter.
40:47The smelter put electricity through it and took out the oxygen, and that made metal.
40:56In the 1970s, electricity prices soared throughout the world.
41:00Although the Ghanaians periodically renegotiated the price Kaiser paid,
41:04it remained one of the lowest rates anywhere.
41:07This caused increasing resentment.
41:11Then, in 1979, there was another military coup, the seventh since Nkrumah fell.
41:17It was led by a flight lieutenant in the Air Force.
41:20He was determined to put Ghana back on its feet.
41:25I must share this fact with you, that Ghana has no money.
41:30We cannot build a bridge, or make a road, or give our people water or medicines
41:35without borrowing from other countries.
41:39We have borrowed so much that for every £100 we earn by selling our cocoa and other exports,
41:47we use a sizable proportion, percentage, to pay for some of our debts.
41:51We cannot continue to borrow and be in debt all the time.
41:56Rawlings became a popular figure on a par with Nkrumah.
42:00His main aim was to lift the burden of debt,
42:02and one of the most obvious solutions was to get more money from the smelter.
42:07In 1983, his government put together a team.
42:10Its task was to persuade Kaiser to renegotiate the agreement signed with Nkrumah.
42:14The new government decided to take the bull by the horns and confront Kaiser directly.
42:21A number of things made them sit up and listen.
42:24I think they were aware at all times that the new government in power was quite prepared
42:30to take drastic measures, if necessary, to achieve the objective of a new agreement.
42:38The master taught us a bit of a joke.
42:41I recall the first day when we met, when we had a lecture from Kaiser about how to compose a team.
42:49We were too many in the room, for instance.
42:51And I said, well, you choose your team, we will choose our team.
42:56We were young, green, and inexperienced.
43:00And I think they underrated us.
43:03Valko's management agreed to meet the Ghanaians,
43:06but the talk soon became bogged down in disagreement.
43:09The Ghanaian team decided to raise the stakes.
43:12Then we started to play our master plan.
43:18We decided that we were going to nationalize.
43:22We knew that we wouldn't do it, but we wanted to put it strongly
43:26and send up a paper to government for permission to do that.
43:31We knew that it would leak out and Kaiser would get the message.
43:36Of course, we had another advantage.
43:38That was, the dam was shut down because of the low level.
43:42And we had to decide when to open.
43:45And we wouldn't open until we had got a good deal.
43:49So Kaiser would be left?
43:51With a smelter that was sitting down doing nothing.
43:55And they would be losing money.
43:58Although Kaiser denied that the ploy worked,
44:01a completely new agreement was negotiated and signed in January 1985.
44:05As part of it, the price Kaiser paid for electricity from the dam
44:10was increased by nearly three times.
44:12The Ghanaian people saw it as a victory for their country.
44:17Whereas, it transformed the country.
44:21Experience has shown that it requires a good deal more than that.
44:25It requires a political environment.
44:27It requires a whole range of international understandings
44:32to make it possible to transform the potential
44:37which science presents into actual achievement.
44:40And regrettably, Ghana was not able to draw upon these other elements
44:45to make its vision of science and technology in the driving seat realizable.
44:49So, it is true that one needs political power.
44:59One needs knowledge that is also power.
45:02And then one has to combine that with the energy,
45:05the electrical power, for us to get to that paradise.
45:08.
45:20.
45:30.
45:30.
45:31.
45:34Wimbledon
45:37Wimbledon
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