Feature Article of Saturday, 31 January 2015

Columnist: Kwarteng, Francis

On the topic of the utility of reading to personal growth, intellectual development, moral refinement, and development economics, K.B. Asante recalls of Nkrumah, of his reading habits, writing accordingly: He was an avid reader and enjoyed the company of intellectuals and men of ideas, especially those whose views were similar to his own. Nkrumah was therefore aware of the trends of development economics (See Asantes essay Nkrumah and State Enterprises). This type of constructive collaboration is what we previously referred to as spatial, an interactive configuration that has contributed to the success of the so-called Rwandan Model (Rwandan Economic Miracle, or Rwandan Experiment) as well as to the praxis of Kagames enlightenment and knowledgeability about development questions, innovative strategies for political maneuverability of his opponents, and intellectual cosmopolitanism.

The irony of Kagames exemplary reading posture, nonetheless, is that while Britain is Rwandas biggest donor, whose contributions to Rwandas GDP amounts to about 70%, Kagames intellectual and ideational sympathies lie with Singapore, not Britain, to which he looks for innovative praxes of development strategies, tactics of political pragmatism as it relates to the particularity of Rwandas recent history, and useful models of technocracy. In that case, then, the proposition of spatial constructive collaboration, experimental as it may be in its underpinnings of philosophical temperament, collaterally carries with it a portmanteau of implications for converting functional knowledge acquired through ones quality reading, travels, and strategic association with knowledgeable persons into intelligence. This process of conversion requires the operational variables of imagination, intuition, vision, and personal, or collective, initiative for effectuation of material success. It may also entail huge costs of emotional and physical exertion.

Accordingly as a matter of further emphasis, going back to one of our primordial remarks we should want to state categorically that, Prof. Domperes timely advice was in direct response to those Ghanaian university students and professors who had complained to him about the inability of some major ideas imported from the West to solve African problems, if effectively. This is a controversial supposition as a matter of principle. On the one hand not all of these questionable drab ideas are, in and of themselves, foreign in philosophical content or in cultural texture. Many of these ideas are actually originated in the partisan political manufactories of Ghanas winner-takes-all capitalism, a system largely borrowed idea from America and which a cross-section of the American electorate wants to see radically revised, somewhat molded on a standard potters wheel of Gandhian economics.

Proponents of Gandhian economics, not dissimilar to proponents of Nkrumahs mixed economy, the Nordic Model, Beijing Consensus (market socialism), or Keynesian economics, arguably prefer Keynesian economics to the classical model where, as in the latter case shadow forces purportedly regulate and steer supernatural engines of economic activities under oversights of theoretical designations of transcendental mystery and under jolts of revisional impenetrability, as though the greedy calculus of human intentions does not matter in the dynamics of market economy. The Chinese, who are under no illusions as to the realistic caliber of Adam Smiths invisible hand successfully shaping and directing economic activities, have realized the moral weaknesses of unfettered capitalism and, accordingly, restructured the theory and praxis of market economy to fit a model the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) calls socialist market economy, or socialist-oriented market economy in line with the political economy of Vietnam.

Either system falls under the rubric of state capitalism. It does mean, on the one hand, that state capitalism intrinsically provides adsorptive and absorptive capacity for the failures of unrestricted capitalism, and on the other hand against the shortcomings of human predictive power and greed. Among other things, the Asian Tigers did not blindly copy Western capitalism. Rather, they adapted Western capitalism to the particularities of their cultural, geographical, spiritual, material, and historical experiences, a path Nkrumah tried pursuing for the most part. Aside that, humanism or general concerns for the quality and dignity of human life are accommodated in the critical compartments of Gandhian economics! Nkrumahs mixed economy substantially shares a practical and theoretical overlap with the spirit of Gandhian economics.

What is more, teleology, human spirituality, preservation of human dignity, and community are subtle connotations or, even overt corollaries, of Gandhian economics as of Nkrumahs mixed economy. On the other hand state capitalism does not share an internecine habitation with individual, or collective, initiative as regards greed and destructive competitiveness of unfettered capitalism. State capitalism merely offers a tempering or moderating visible hand of corrective intrusiveness at the moment capitalism undergoes internal episodes of derailment and of haywire, as well as of creative and timely management oversight in regulatory mechanism. State capitalism can also run currently with the private sector and public or social ownership of the means of production. Unfortunately for Ghana today, the spate of corruption scandals, namely the winner-takes-all capitalism, bad judgment debts, lack of competitive tendering and procurement protocols, extreme partisan politics, weak institutions, bribery, lack of patriotism and of respect for laws, underdevelopment, cronyism and nepotism and ethnocentrism, technocratic blindness, kleptomania, and the like, rocking the state and the private sector renders any prospect for implementing genuine mixed economy in the contemporary dispensation of Ghanaian political economy gloomy.

It is worth mentioning that the predominant mode of political economies in the modern era is mixed economy or Keynesian economics.

The question we should all be thinking of is this: Which model of economic proposition fits the contemporary challenges of Africas political economy, of Ghanas especially, as capitalism has demonstrated debilitating instances of internal unsustainability in many a situation across the world? That is a standing inquiry our political economists, politicians, sociologists, political scientists, scholars, and policy makers are struggling with. Moreover, granted that state capitalism worked so well for Nkrumah at least, recalling that Nkrumahs state capitalism predated Chinas late 1970s economic reforms and sequent optimization of Chinas contemporary political economy, is there a rational argument to be made weighing the comparative strengths of state capitalism against unfettered capitalism, the latter of which Africas clueless leadership is vigorously pushing?

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Dr. Kofi Dompere On Nkrumahs Scientific Thinking 9