cc Kwame Nkrumah brought the Convention People's Party into power within two years of its formation, creating independent Ghana, writes Yao Graham. An overwhelming electoral victory gave Nkrumah a platform for mass anti-colonial mobilisation around Africa. Accra became a staging point for the African anti-colonial movement with the All-African People's Conference, drawing delegates from 62 nationalist organisations, including future ruling parties and post-colonial leaders, who were urged to 'fight for independence now'. Post-colonial construction, however, was different from bringing down colonialism and Nkrumah struggled to generate resources for steady improvement in the living standards of people with expectations fuelled by independence and his own visionary pronouncements. Today Ghana is seen as a development icon, but the challenges Nkrumah grappled with have not been overcome, argues Graham. Reliant on a few commodities for export earnings and aid for public investment, it is far from the independent structurally transformed model Nkrumah wanted to establish as a ‘black star’ for Africa.

© While many African leaders have aspired to inherit Nkrumah’s mantle as the visionary and driver of Pan-Africanism and continental unity, writes Yao Graham, a gaping political leadership vacuum remains at the heart of the continent’s collective expression. From an age when there were a number of outstanding African leaders, among whom Nkrumah was preeminent, Graham argues that the African Union’s election of Gaddafi as its leader is a statement of a collective failure of leadership and underlines the crisis in which the Pan-African project is currently mired at the inter-state level. Where, asks Graham, are the African leaders who see opportunities for change in the current crisis, and who are ‘ready to dare and look beyond guaranteeing the sanctity of aid flows?’