Osman in 1961 criticized Nkrumah’s party-state for taxing nonmembers to fund itself.

Evidence

Unlike the quality of leadership detailed in Personal Rule in Black Africa, these leaders tamed their personal temptations. Both President Aden Abdulle Osman and Prime Minister Abdirazak H. Hussen exuded some of the inspirational qualities attributed to political Prophets, but the evidence clearly shows that they were mindful of the soft underbelly of being a political Prophet or worse. For example, Osman observed the downside of Nkrumah’s prophetic leadership during Osman’s state visit to Ghana in October 1961: … Our last day in Accra! At 9:00 we went to visit the headquarters of the Convention People’s Party. This party, whose Secretary General is Nkrumah despite being also the head of state, has tentacles everywhere in the life of the country. Since the party is seated in huge buildings in every district of the 9 regions of Ghana, I asked where the party gets its funds to finance such big buildings and its activities. I was told “from the people.” I imagine the government takes the party’s share from the money it collects from the people in the form of taxes. So the party is financed also by the nonmember citizens of the CPP. Poor democracy! We blabber about it only when we struggle to conquer political power in order to get rid of colonialism. — Abdi Ismail Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats, 113

Categorization

• XREF: This is the author’s stated rationale (contrast against Personal Rule in Black Africa) that frames Somalia’s democratic experiment against African postcolonial trends.
• SHARE: Osman’s eyewitness account of how the CPP tentacles reached everywhere is a crisp primary-source for someone interested in Nkrumah’s Ghana.