The situation in Ghana is not too different from what has just been recounted about
Nigeria. Right from the period of the toppling of Nkrumah’s regime, in February 24,
1966, about a month after the Nigerian coup, what followed was a succession of military
regimes with occasional lulls of civilian democratic rule. From this time on, what began
as an aberration would become the order of the day. The military from 1966 made
continual incursions into politics. The tendency to distinguish military identity from the
rest of the nation left the nation in disarray. Writing on the situation at the time Baynham
(9) says: “the rhetoric of altruism and patriotism is a screen to hide the soldiers’ sectional
interests, and the maintenance of public order carries with it the maintenance of the
domination of those who control that order”.
In assessing the performance of the soldiers in the countries, together or differently, what
comes up ultimately is an antinomy of expectation on the part of the citizenry, and non-
performance on the part of the military. It has to be said further that the military were no
less vulnerable to the tactics of neo-colonialism which especially in the 1980s saw most
of the Third World nations into deep debt traps. These were ideas sold by the capitalist
West ostensibly to free the mostly developing countries from the shackles of poverty
(Peter Abrahams 2000:229). The irony however was that both countries, like others,
became overwhelmed by indebtedness through institutions like IMF, the World Bank and
the Structural Adjustment Programmes. The economic crunch in which the nations were
caught therefore was a result of the collaboration of the military rulers with the West. To
worsen issues, there was also a disturbingly pervading aura of suppression and
peremptory commands which left the citizenry helpless. Opposition became risky on the
part of dissidents of all categories. For a long time, standing up to change the military
status quo was hardly effective, because of the relic of colonial memory which produced
a myth sponsored by the West to endorse military dictatorship. This was the case, so long
as the various strategies redounded to the wealth of the West. That is, just as
anthropology created the myth of the wild negro with all negatives (St Clair Drake 1990:
270), and would therefore need to be tamed from outside through colonial violence, the
military also saw itself as distinct from the people and qualified, for that reason, to handle
the situation and crisis in the countries. On this Arnold again says: “It was a Western