"I Love Power"

Unlike their U.S.-educated Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, few citizens of the new State of Ghana have been anywhere--even to school. They may not be aware of the hue and cry abroad at the way Ghana's government has been trampling on civil rights (TIME, Sept. 30), but Nkrumah is. Last week he tactfully gave ground. A lawyer down from London was allowed to challenge the expulsion of two Moslem opposition leaders. Contempt-of-court charges against a British newspaperman were dropped. Nkrumah pleaded for international sympathy: "Do not apply to us standards of conduct and efficiency which are often not attained in your own countries."

Yet despite his two-to-one controlling majority in Parliament, Kifcame Nkrumah still seemed convinced that only stern measures could weld all the tribal nations of Ghana into a unified country. Evidently shaken by last summer's anti-government demonstrations in Kumasi arid Accra, Nkrumah appointed as his Interior Minister in charge of immigration and police a squat, hoarse-voiced and flamboyant party tough named Krobo Edusei.

A maverick Ashanti who began his career combining debt collecting with newspaper reporting, Edusei got into politics, and did even better. He was named in two corruption investigations, and after one was forced out of Nkrumah's Cabinet. He is back in favor now as Nkrumah's key subordinate, enjoying power and living it up with two wives, one of whom proudly boasts of the $200 dresses and $45 shoes that Edusei gives her.

Three days after Nkrumah's conciliatory broadcast last week, Edusei promised a toga-clad, hallelujah-singing crowd at Cape Coast that by next month Parliament would vote that "anybody who gives a speech to the discredit of the government will be removed to a detention camp." Shaking his leopard-spotted baton, he shouted: "I love power, and so Prime Minister Nkrumah has given me the most powerful of all the ministries. I am going to use it sternly and strongly, no matter what." When the crowd whooped gleefully, "We like it. we like it!", Edusei responded: "Call us Communists if you want, but anything we want to do in this country, we will do it. When you know you have got the masses behind you, it is O.K."

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