Tony Killick

Tony Killick was a British economist working as an adviser to Kwame Nkrumah’s government in Ghana after independence. His detailed account of a footwear project—whose proposed production chain sent materials on long journeys across the country and back—made the costs of poor planning concrete. In the book’s argument, Killick’s testimony also helps distinguish mistaken policy from politically useful policy: Ghana’s projects were not merely products of leaders who lacked sound advice.

Adviser and witness

Killick recorded the problems of Nkrumah’s state-led industrial development in detail. The footwear factory he described was intended to connect a northern meat factory to a tannery in the south, more than 500 miles away. Leather would then travel back to a footwear factory in Kumasi, about 200 miles north of the tannery, before shoes were transported another 200 miles south to the main market in Accra.

Killick’s restrained assessment was that the enterprise’s viability had been undermined by poor siting. The itinerary itself reveals the problem: the project’s geography imposed repeated, unnecessary transport over long distances between production and market. His account gives a specific example of the broader inefficiency associated with Nkrumah’s emphasis on developing state industry.

Policy beyond ignorance

The footwear factory was not an isolated misjudgment. Another project, a mango-canning plant, was located in a part of Ghana where mangoes were not grown, and its planned output exceeded total world demand for the product. Together, these examples present economic irrationality not as a single planning error but as a recurring feature of the government’s development projects.

Yet the book explicitly resists the idea that such projects arose because Nkrumah and his advisers did not know better. Killick was present as an adviser, and the government had also received advice from economist Arthur Lewis. The account instead locates the driving force in political incentives: Nkrumah used economic policies to buy political support and maintain an undemocratic regime. Killick’s observations thus serve as evidence in a larger argument that bad policy can persist even when its defects are understood.

Place in the book’s argument

Killick’s case helps challenge the ignorance hypothesis—the view that poverty results chiefly from leaders’ lack of knowledge and could therefore be remedied by better economic advice. The book’s counterargument is that politicians face incentives and constraints created by their societies’ political and economic institutions. Advice alone cannot explain why leaders choose policies that damage economic performance when those policies help them retain power.

Killick’s role is that of a recorded observer rather than the central political actor. His concrete description of the footwear project lends detail to the book’s analysis, while the contrast between its obvious logistical weakness and the government’s political purpose sharpens the distinction between knowing what works economically and having reason to choose it.