An American rip-off

While many of the fulminations of the leaders of emerging Third World nations against "neocolonialism" and "exploitation" turned out, in retrospect, to be a bunch of bugaboos meant for ideological domestic mass consumption, some of their concerns - as this story will show - were right on target.

This is a startling and tragic tale of how western interests - particularly American - conspired to perpetrate an economic rip-off in a Third World country - Ghana - in the name of economic development. It is a story of how a powerful corporation - Kaiser Aluminum Corp - obtained the assistance of a US President, intelligence agencies, and the World Bank to entrench itself on the commanding heights of Ghana's economic order with disastrous consequences for that country's industrial development and ecology.

After Ghana gained independence following more than 100 years of British colonial domination, its first leader, Kwame Nkrumah, dreamed the same dreams as India's Nehru and Egypt's Nasser. The way out of centuries of debilitating poverty and stagnation, he believed, as other Third Worlders believed, was the quick fix of rapid industrialisation through mammoth "developmental projects."