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This is chilling:

[snip]... This process began in Ghana, the first black African country to gain its independence from Britain on March 7,1957, under Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, who is generally regarded as "the father of African socialism."

After independence, he faced herculean tasks. He had declared in the 1950s, "We shall not rest content until we demolish this miserable structure of colonialism and erect in its place veritable paradise." Independence had been achieved. The question was how to build that paradise. Nkrumah urged Ghanaians to know their "enemy," which was "collective imperialism in which the USA occupies a leading position." He also exhorted his fellow Africans to beware of a number of imperialist dogmas: "that western democracy and the parliamentary system are the only valid ways of governing; that capitalism, free enterprise, free competition, etc., are the only economic systems capable of promoting development." These were fallacies, Nkrumah asserted.

Socialism, therefore, was to be his ideology. His choice of socialism was "based on the belief that only a socialist form of society can assure Ghana of a rapid rate of economic progress without destroying that social justice, that freedom and equality, which are a central feature of our traditional way of life." Many other African leaders followed suit. While President Kaunda of Zambia was espousing "humanism," Nyerere of Tanzania was instituting " Ujaama, " drawing vague references from the African tradition of socialism."

In Africa, socialism was implemented through the one-party state apparatus. The state would "own everything" and direct economic activity (dirigstne). There would be only one political party. The head of that party would also be the president - for life. Clearly, any individual with ambitious political designs and lust for personal power would be seduced by such a system.

Accordingly, under Nkrumah [Dr. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, who is generally regarded as "the father of African socialism." ] socialism as a domestic policy was to be pursued toward "a complete ownership of the economy by the state." A bewildering array of legislative controls and regulations were imposed on imports, capital transfers, industry, wages, the rights and powers of trade unions, prices, rents, and interest rates. Some of the controls were introduced by the colonialists, but they were retained and expanded by Nkrurnah. Private businesses were taken over by the Nkrumah government and nationalized. Numerous state enterprises were acquired.

...Nkrumah was in a hurry to transform Ghana into a socialist state. "We must achieve in A-decade what it took others a century," he asserted. He was intolerant of criticism. Opposition members were traduced in the media as the "party of divisiveness" bent on a course of deliberate sabotage of Ghana's construction efforts. They were to be eliminated. Accordingly in July 1958, Nkrumah passed the Preventive Detention Bill, which gave his government sweeping powers "to imprison without trial, any person suspected of activities prejudicial to the state's security." With this vague definition, anybody could be picked up since any private activity could be interpreted as prejudicial to the interests of the state. The insidious march toward dictatorship thus began.

The news media next came under the complete control of Nkrumah's party. Journalists were gagged, censorship established, and editors who criticized the government were hauled off to jail. Any opposition to Nkrumah's dictatorship was brutally suppressed.

Finally in 1964, Nkrumah declared Ghana to be a one-party state and himself "president-for- life."

Ghanaians soon tired of Nkrumah and his rhetoric. In 1966 when he was overthrown in a military coup, there was much joy and jubilation in the streets of Ghana. His "socialist" experiment was a miserable fiasco. Worse, his ideology had degenerated into "Swiss bank socialism." While he was preaching socialism, his ministers were busy importing Mercedes Benzes and gold beds into Ghana and stashing millions into Swiss bank accounts.

...When Ghana gained its independence, it boasted foreign exchange reserves of $400 million. In 1966, there was a foreign debt of $858 million in its place. The state farms Nkrumah set up could not produce enough food to feed their own workers, let alone the nation. Between 1960 and 1966, food shortages appeared and local food prices doubled. Ghanaians were suffering. Nkrumah's policies were emulated by many African countries. Predictably, in one country after another, economic ruin, dictatorship and oppression followed with deadly consistency: Angola, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mozambique, Zambia, and now Zimbabwe....[/snip]