Simon Baynham, 'Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? the Case of Nkrumah's National Security Service'

The Journal of Modern African Studies, 23, 1 (1985), pp. 87-103 Quis Custodiet Ipsos CustodesP: the Case of Nkrumah's National Security Service by SIMON BAYNHAM* FROM the ancient Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta to twentieth- century Bolivia and Zaire, from theories of development and under- development to models of civil-military relations, one is struck by the enormous literature on armed intervention in the domestic political arena. In recent years, a veritable rash of material on the subject of military politics has appeared - as much from newspaper correspondents reporting pre-dawn coups from third-world capitals as from the more rarefied towers of academe. Yet looking at the subject from the perspective of how regimes mobilise resources and mechanisms to protect themselves from their own security forces, one is struck by the paucity of empirically-based evidence on the subject.1 Since 1945, more than three-quarters of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East have experienced varying levels of intervention from their military forces. Some states such as Thailand, Syria, and Argentina have been repeatedly prone to such action. And in Africa approximately half of the continent's 50 states are presently ruled, in one form or another, by the military. Most of the coups d'etat from the men in uniform are against civilian regimes, but an increasing proportion are staged from within the military, by one set of khaki-clad soldiers against another.2 The maintenance of internal law and order, and the necessary provision for protection against external threats, are the primary tasks of any political grouping, be it a primitive people surrounded by hostile * Lecturer in Political Studies, University of Cape Town, and formerly Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political and Social Studies, Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. The author wishes to acknowledge the financial assistance of the Human Sciences Research Council, U.C.T.'s Bremner Travel Grants Committee, and the Harry Oppenheimer Institute for African Studies in the preparation of this article. 1 But see David Goldsworthy,' Armies and Politics in Civilian Regimes', in S. J. Baynham (ed.), Military Power and Politics in Black Africa (London, forthcoming); Elise Forbes Pachter, 'Contra- Coup: civilian control of the military in Guinea, Tanzania, and Mozambique', in The Journal of Modern African Studies (Cambridge), 20, 4, December 1982, pp. 595-612; and R. Charlton, 'Predicting African Military Coups', in Futures (Guildford), 15, 4, 1983, pp. 281-92. 2 As in Benin, December, 1965; Nigeria, July 1966; or Ghana, July 1978 and June 1979. 6768C:D 54C697 C95C7 07CD81C5.D475:7,4C697,C7 7CD8D747:D 54C697 C95C77CD :D6 C9 /2 88 SIMON BAYNHAM tribal antagonists or a modern and militarily-powerful state in the last quarter of this century. But there is, paradoxically, a danger inherent in this role. For while Napoleon's maxim that without an army there is neither independence nor civil liberty may be true, it is equally important to stress Burke's warning that an armed disciplined body is, in its essence, dangerous to liberty. The potential threat to an incumbent regime, and to the wider society, is further emphasised because armies use force to achieve their objectives. In this respect, as Samuel Finer has argued, they have three crucial advantages over civilians: 'A marked superiority in organisation, a highly emotional symbolic status, and a monopoly of arms', which thereby give them 'overwhelming superiority in the means of applying force'.1 In accounting for patterns and levels of armed intervention, two major approaches have been developed in the study of civil-military relations. The first 'internal characteristics' model focuses on the social organisation of the armed forces: structural format and techniques of control, hierarchy and authority, recruitment and assimilation of military roles, skill patterns and career development, sources of cohesion and cleavage, and professionalism. In this model, explanations of military participation in politics are mainly restricted to the inner characteristics and dynamics of the armed forces themselves. But as Morris Janowitz (who has devoted most of his academic effort to investigating the composition and sociology of military bureaucracies) has pointed out, any analysis of an institution's internal structure requires attention to the social context.2 The second school of thought, that favoured by Samuel Huntington who argues that 'the most important causes of military intervention in politics are not military but political',3 accentuates the social and political circumstances in which the army operates.4 Although he does not ignore the strictly military variable altogether, Finer also maintains that military interference is largely regulated by what he calls the degree of public attachment to civilian institutions or the 'level of political culture'.5 For him, the greater the degree of political modernisation, the fewer opportunities the military have for intervention and the less support it will receive. The lower the development of a well-mobilised 1 Samuel E. Finer, The Man on Horseback: the role of the military in politics (London, 1962), p. 6. 2 Morris Janowitz, Sociology and the Military Establishment (New York, 1959), p. 8. 3 Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, 1968), p. 194. 4 According to Eric A. Nordlinger, Soldiers in Politics: military coups and governments (Englewood Cliffs, N. J . , 1977), p. xi: 'The external or "environmental" variables include the actions of civilian executives, the performance and legitimacy of civilian governments, the politicization of workers and peasants, the severity of c o m m u n a l conflicts, the extent ofsocioeconomic modernization, and the rate of economic growth.' 5 Finer, op.cit. chs. 7, 8, and 9. 6768C:D 54C697 C95C7 07CD81C5.D475:7,4C697,C7 7CD8D747:D 54C697 C95C77CD :D6 C9 /2 Q.UIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES? 89 public opinion, the more numerous the opportunities and the greater the likelihood of public support. For instance, the 1920 Kapp Putsch in Berlin and the 1961 Generals' Revolt in Algiers were met with overt civilian opposition and strikes,1 whereas coups in Bourkina Faso (previously Upper Volta) and the Central African Republic have been greeted with civilian support or indifference. In fact, as a closer examination of their texts reveals, Finer and Huntington were as sensitive to the importance of the military's social and organisational profile as J a n o w i t z was to those of t h e society. Today, there is a general consensus that both traditions in civil-military relations analysis are important, and that the explanatory force of stressing the internal qualities of the armed forces to the exclusion of the social and political sphere, or vice versa, is limited. This said, it should be appreciated that the present article is concerned not so much with military intervention per se, but rather with the other side of the coin; with the question of civilian control of armed forces, a sadly neglected but key aspect of civil-military relations inquiry. For this reason, our emphasis here is on the institutional characteristics of the military establishment itself. In western liberal democracies, it is commonly assumed that it is 'natural' for the military establishment to obey the civil powers. But in the world at large, this is far from being the normal pattern of events. Our focus in this article, however, is not all-embracingly global since we shall examine events in one particular third-world state, Ghana, during an otherwise well-documented and clearly identifiable period of its political history.2 Utilising Huntington's 'objective'/'subjective' pattern variable, we shall concern ourselves with a detailed examination of Kwame Nkrumah's efforts to subordinate his army to the civil authority during the Ghanaian First Republic, 1960-6. Having outlined Huntington's theoretical dichotomy, it will be argued that the pattern of control inherited by Ghana from the British colonial power was eventually cast aside in favour of an entirely new format. This involved the orchestration of a programme of military diversification in which new security organisations were formed and existing ones split up. President Nkrumah deliberately encouraged rivalry between the units of the dual security system that emerged with the aim of controlling all. 1 For a further account of civilian opposition to military intervention, see Adam Roberts,' Civil Resistance to Military Coups', in Journal of Peace Research (Oslo), xn, i, 1975, pp. 19-36. 2 A good deal has already been written on the nature of politics and society in the period under review, three of the most important being: Dennis Austin, Politics in Ghana, i^^S-ig6o (London, 1964); Henry L. Bretton, The Rise and Fall of Kwame Nkrumah: a study of personal rule in Africa (London, 1966); and Trevor J o n e s , Ghana's First Republic, ig6o-ig66: the pursuit of the political kingdom (London, 1976). 6768C:D 54C697 C95C7 07CD81C5.D475:7,4C697,C7 7CD8D747:D 54C697 C95C77CD :D6 C9 /2 9O SIMON BAYNHAM It will be argued, furthermore, that these changes had their roots in the policy to accelerate and complete the process of military Africanisation, a decision predicated on wider foreign-policy objectives. In his classic text on the theory and politics of civil-military relations, Huntington gives considerable attention to the question of how civilian supremacy over the armed forces might be assured.1 He begins by delineating a conceptual distinction between what he calls 'objective' and 'subjective' control. In the former, the officer corps is disciplined by its own professionalism, the most important constituent involving service to the community. He concludes that the more professional an army (that is, the more it saw itself serving society), the less of a threat it would pose.2 According to the latter, subjective model, civilian political control is ensured by the denial of an independent military sphere.

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