When Ghana celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary on 6 March 1982, however, the country was experiencing its sixth change of regime under its tenth head of state. (Three heads of state had been executed before a firing squad, and the most famous of them had died in exile.) It had just experienced its fourth military coup d’etat. Refugees, exiles, emigrants, and political prisoners were numbered in hundreds of thousands. The economy, crippled by years of escalating national debts, had seemingly stagnated to the point of no return. (Accra urged its once exultant embassies to celebrate a purposely low-profile silver jubilee.)

In contrast, twenty-one years after achieving independence, neighboring Nigeria — early on nicknamed the Giant in the Sun and later widely recognized by the sobriquet Africa’s Giant — had overcome a secessionist movement, healed the wounds of a civil war, and seen its number of universities quadruple and its student population increase tenfold. It had a revenue budget of 12 billion (as compared to a budget in the mere millions at independence in 1960). Lagos had been lavishly hosting dozens of international conferences for some time.

The intent of this historical assessment at the end of two decades of independence is not to contrast Nigeria’s meteoric rise to the status of economic giant and acknowledged leader of black Africa with Ghana’s dramatic plunge from a position of initial external admiration and great internal expectation to an abyss of bankruptcy. To do so would be to ignore Nigeria’s present grave economic problems painfully symbolized in its decision to celebrate the 1984 anniversary of independence in a low-key manner unknown since the dark days of the Biafran war. Rather the object of this essay is to indicate the fluctuations of fate and fortune to which West Africa’s two major independent states have been subjected and to draw attention to the differing ways in which common or comparable problems have been handled by the two governments. Further, we seek to understand why there have beenmore “Ghana tragedies” than “Nigerian triumphs” among independent African nations in the quarter-century since that heady midnight hour of March 5, 1957. In other words, why has the continent experienced the horror and shame of Amin’s Uganda and Nguema’s Equatorial Guinea, the brief but bloody glory of Bokassa’s Central African Empire, war-torn Sudan and Ethiopia, sinister Zaire and gruesome Guinea (together ranked near the bottom of the list by Amnesty International in terms of human rights), indigent Tanzania and the one-man Malawi, crippled and dependent Mozambique, bizarre and coup-drunk Togo, Dahomey-Benin and Upper Volta, and erupted Chad? We must first identify what has happened before we can attempt to diagnose why.

This essay, then, is less a synchronic political or economic comparison of Ghana and Nigeria than a diachronic comparison of the history of the two countries since independence. We seek to elaborate upon and understand two sharply polarized scholarly assessments of West Africa — to contrast Ken Post’s optimistic assessment that “the inner reality is a basic political — indeed, philosophical — question: how may a decent life be ensured for the citizens of the State, and in ensuring this decent life, how may effciency be balanced against the Rule of Law and protection from arbitrary action?”² with John Dunn’s blunt verdict (delivered less than a generation later) that, when one evaluates the performance of West Africa’s rulers in the postcolonial period, “sadly, the blame is simpler to allocate than the praise.”³

But Ghana’s Second Republic was even more short-lived than its first, and from 1972 to 1979 the country was once again under military rule. The back-to-civilian-rule election of 1979 was a concession wrung from the stonewalling General Acheampong and his equally reluctant successor, General Akuffo, by the determination of a bold bourgeoisie to end military rule. On the very eve of this election the army intervened once again. Flight-Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings postponed rather than canceled the impending general election. Three months later, in the wake of a rigorous and often insensitive “house-cleaning” exercise aimed at purging the country of corruption in high places, he handed back power. Nevertheless, the incoming President of the Third Republic, Dr. Hilla Limann (perhaps considered safe because he was so unknown and so inexperienced in politics), was left in no public doubt that he was head of state by grace of Jerry Rawlings, who would always be watching from the wings. The military (and Jerry Rawlings) were back in control within two years — as of December 31, 1981. Five recorded (and several rumored) coup attempts have taken place since then. This, added to Ghana’s record of six heads of state dead within a decade, suggests that the country has yet to solve its fundamental problem: how to make the activities of the head of state coincide with the best interests of modern Ghana. Equally important is the question of who can fill the top position to the satisfaction of the nation.