SOCIO-ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION IN GHANA: COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF APPROACHES TO DEVELOPMENT IN THE NKRUMAH AND RAWLINGS YEARS

Abstract

Like many countries that attained independence during the cold war era, Ghana‟s internal politics, as well as its socio-economic transformation discourse, have been shaped by divisions between right-wing elites who espouse market-led approaches and their left-wing counterparts who favour state-led approaches to development. The two approaches were experimented in Ghana during the eras of former presidents Kwame Nkrumah and Jerry John Rawlings. Kwame Nkrumah‟s era witnessed the adoption of state-led approaches that used the instruments and power of the state to engineer socio-economic transformation. The Rawlings‟ era, on the other hand, was marked by the introduction of market-led approaches to social and economic transformation in a way that dismantled public enterprises and social provisioning established under Nkrumah. The use of two opposing approaches by these two influential leaders in Ghana is puzzling because both of them were deeply associated with the Ghanaian left, and shared a common vision of developing Ghanaian society on basis of socialist principles. This paper provides a comparative analysis of the trajectories of development under these two Ghanaian leaders with close attention to the factors that shaped their approaches, choices, policy instruments, and their associated legacies. Among others, the paper shows that approaches to development implemented by Nkrumah and Rawlings were shaped by differences in personal idiosyncrasies, geo-politics, domestic policy challenges, and the internal control mechanism of their respective governments