As the world prepares for Ghana?s 50th Independence Anniversary, the achievements of both Dr Kwame Nkrumah, who was voted greatest African of the 20th Century, and the Convention People?s Party (CPP) are undeniable; the sacrifices made by many ordinary Ghanaians to obtain Ghana?s independence on 6th March 1957 are also undeniable; undeniable further are those who lost their lives in the forceful removal of the CPP Government in the 1966 coup by leading members of today?s conservative NPP.
Far from accepting the assertions of the ?Nkrumah and his ideas are dead? brigade, Ghanaians are asking for deliverance on the basis of Nkrumah?s ideas and policies rethought in aspects for the 21st Century, setting aside the liberal and conservative pronouncements that ?you people are in the past and no longer relevant to the needs of Ghana today?. In their yearning for popular socioeconomic solutions, Ghanaians are further asking ?What is the CPP offering today??, as they look to the party of progressive ideas for social salvation. Many of our youth are asking for more information about the CPP and Nkrumah and searching for an alternative because they understand that the liberal NDC and the conservative NPP governments have failed to advance Ghana on the path of wealth over the last 25 years. The CPP agrees with the 80% of Ghanaians who live on less than $2 a day, that it is time for CPP Government.
21st Century Nkrumaism
The people of Ghana have identified the problems of the CPP as their own problems and they have enumerated them without end in the press, the radio stations, on TV, on the internet and in other fora and media. So we know our problems.
The CPP?s ideology in the 20th Century was socialism; other Nkrumaist parties like the PNC all agree it is now Nkrumaism. The party?s ideology was the basis of the CPP Work and Happiness Program leading to the 7 Year Development Plan. The CPP and the State were the same and Ghana became the CPP and the CPP was Ghana. The 24th February 1966 coup and other international events at the end of the 1980s such as the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and other Eastern European peoples democracies threw Nkrumaists into ideological crisis which the Nkrumaist Political Family led by the CPP has been unable to arouse itself; indeed the Unity Platform documents of the family such as ?The New Convention: Platform of the new Convention Peoples? Party is silent on the matter of ideology. The result in our ranks has been a pervasive lack of ideological confidence. Nkrumaists today believe that a multi-party system will provide a more stable democracy for Ghana than a one party system enacted through an act of parliament. Thus, while remaining true to our socialist beliefs, we have redefined our identity as progressives to differentiate ourselves from liberals of the NDC and the conservatives of the NPP. Nevertheless, in the midst of the foundational ideological wobble acute especially between 1979-1992 when some on the Left even amazingly eschewed Marxism, The New Right Washington Consensus championed by first the NDC (1992-2000) and then reformed under the NPP (2000-2008) was professed as the solution to Ghana?s developmental problems: it called simply for getting prices right, reducing the size of government and balancing budgets. This replacement of Ghana?s Nkrumaist development paradigm with IMF and World Bank development programmes at least over the last twenty years is what underpins Ghana?s national crisis.
The unconstitutional Government of the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) in the 1980s was first to accept the Washington Consensus and champion the private foreign sector of Ghana?s economy subjecting all other sectors to such foreign private interests and the philosophical document of the NDC leaves no one in doubt about this. In the meantime, the NPP has championed the private indigenous sector termed recently by Nana Akufo Addo as ?indigenous capitalism?. Thus between the liberal NDC and the conservative NPP, the private sector whether foreign or indigenous is championed to the detriment of the interests of the popular majority of Ghanaians.
As a result, instead of wealth for all, the liberal-conservative regimes have produced poverty, insecurity and dangerous division especially among the lower majority (ordinary people at the bottom) of society. They have produced corruption, intolerance and repression within the state institutions that administer our society. Over the years resistance to the liberal-conservative status quo has grown. These may signal a clear rejection of this centrist liberal-conservative status quo and a call for substantive progressive change; but such progressive transformation can only be delivered by an Nkrumaist Government that is rooted in the progressive philosophy and ideology of Consciencism.
Nkrumaism has always had a consistent social-political theory for enlarging Ghana?s prosperity. This consciencist social-political theory is a synthesis of capitalism and socialism. In modern terms this can be called progressive economics and is a theoretical synthesis of the Neo-liberal/Keynesian economics[C+I+G+(X-M) =GNP] and Marxian economics M - C {MP, LP}...P...C' - M'. Nkrumaist progressive economics, rejects the moral undercurrent of utility-maximising individualism that underpins both capitalism and socialism and the corresponding privileged class of capital and the privileged class of the party; it prefers emancipatory deliberate development to a moral belief in automatic development by market forces; it emphasises what Ghanaians can make rather what they can buy at the cheapest price to consume; it emphasises the results of our social-political processes in terms of who wins or who loses rather than seeing it all as a game; it emphasises the well-being and security of Ghana and the importance of being self-reliant and productive as opposed to globalised dependency and consumption that upholds the rational self-interest of utility-maximising psychotic individuals and politicians at home or abroad; it perceives business as war rather than a peaceful process because trade is not just a game; it emphasises power and strength including political power rather than morality
Although Nkrumaist progressive economics is a synthesis of both capitalism and socialism, the cold war of the 20th Century led to an overemphasis of socialism over capitalism rather than the categorial conversion of both socialism and capitalism into a new and distinctive social-political theory that is distinctive to Africa?s concrete situation. Thus because of our heritage of Islam, Euro Christianity, Traditional Africa, Imperialism, Colonialism and Socialism, Nkrumaist progressive economics is the best means by which we can build a just society in which the increasing standard of life of the lower majority is the benchmark for everybody.
Such a just society can be achieved only by a rapid transformation of the socioeconomic structure of Ghana. To effect this, it is absolutely necessary that we have a strong, stable, firm and highly organised Nkrumaist Government. This means that Ghanaians must give political power to a progressive CPP to form an Nkrumaist Government to work for the national interest. The actions and practices of the Nkrumaist Government must be based on policies founded on the philosophy and ideology of Consciencism that can essentially be found in three books entitled Consciencism, Neo-colonialism and Africa Must Unite. From these trilogy, we come to understand 21st Century Nkrumaism as (1) love for territorial unity in our case of Ghana first and then of Africa, (2) the progressive development of Ghana through the ideological instrument of progressive economics, which is the synthesis of capitalism and socialism for social-political practice, (3) self-determination of the African Personality expressed in the pursuit of liberty, the use of (4) science and technology in all aspects of life, (5) fair equality expressed in the opportunity of education for all to achieve the highest level attainable, devotion to (6) philosophical Consciencism, which is the synthesis of idealism and materialism, and (7) the pursuit of a just society guided by the Consciencism?s ideological principle, which is the equality of all men and women whether Christian, Moslem or Traditionalist and whether driver, seamstress, president, parliamentarian, judge or kenkey seller.
Within progressive economic analysis Nkrumaists are united in their understanding of Ghana's economy as captured in the Nkrumaist Platform Document signed by the Convention People?s Party, National Reform Party (NRP) and the People?s National Convention (PNC) in the Inter-Party Coordinating Committee (IPCC) Platform document signed on 10th October 2001.
The External Dimension of our Poverty
So we know that Ghana?s economy does not function principally to supply the goods and services that her people need; in other words, Ghana?s economy is not a progressive economy as a result of which it does not produce wealth for her people. Rather, global liberal-conservative forces have organized our national economy to produce and export agricultural and mineral raw materials (C or MP) to Multinational Companies (MNCs) in the developed world at prices dictated by the buyers. At the same time, the global liberal-conservative forces import expensive and/or finished consumer products (C?) and capital products (I) from these same MNCs at prices also dictated by them. Thus, ?C +G? which expresses the progressive interest of the lower majority such as popular education, health and employment etc has been abandoned. So the global liberal-conservative economy enjoys a rapid and systematic net transfer of wealth from Ghana and other Third World countries to the detriment of the majority of our people. The dominance of a few commodities in the export bundles [X, C (MP)] and their primary nature like cash crops and minerals, the concentrated destinations and origins of exports and imports [M= C?+I] respectively - are those factors that generate our trade deficits, wide fluctuations in export earnings through the manipulation of their prices to exploitatively low levels. They are also the factors responsible for our perennial balance of payments crises and escalating external debts.
This means simply that the wealth we need to improve the conditions of life for Ghanaians are not available. Therefore living conditions for all but a shrinking liberal-conservative social elite inevitably worsen year after year. This system by which Third World wealth are drained by the businesses of the developed world, is now called globalisation whose fundamental goal is to appropriate the wealth of weaker countries such as Third World countries, maintain political, economic, technological and cultural domination of such countries in order to achieve, among others, foreign markets, sources of cheap raw materials, outlets for capital exports as it used to be before we gained our independence. In his book Towards Colonial Freedom published in 1945, Kwame Nkrumah made this very clear and explained that political democracy, economic democracy and social reconstruction were all necessary if we are to transform our economic system to generate wealth for all Ghanaians. This was why he was removed from office and Ghana since then has not had Government that champions the interests of the majority of Ghanaians.
A tiny portion of the wealth the MNCs siphon out of Ghana comes back as foreign "aid" from "donor" governments and goes to support the budget of the redundant G to enable it perform a stabilization function required for the continued extraction of the wealth of Ghanaians. This foreign "aid" serves as a sop to the collective consciences of the citizens of the developed world and mutes resistance in the exploited periphery to exploitation of the underdeveloped world allowing globalisation to present itself as a benefactor. This is the proverbial mouse that Nkrumah told us about blowing cool air while biting its prey. This stabilisation role includes the prevention of outright rebellion in the Third World countries themselves by blurring the extent of their exploitation, and by so doing prevent them from taking progressive action against it in the resolution of the internal-external competing claims. Obviously, the majority of Ghanaians would prefer to keep the wealth we generate in Ghana and use it for our own development. Thus the overall policy objective of an Nkrumaist Government must be the pursuit of popular wealth. To achieve this, a transformation of our economic system through a national industrialization policy is required.
To sustain this profiteering liberal-conservative system perpetually to our disadvantage, globalisation cultivates and grooms Ghanaians as collaborators, who can be found in politics, business, academia and the civil service amongst others, with whom it shares common material advantages and socio-political interests. As a reward for their collaboration, the families, friends and business associates of those who wield liberal-conservative power are able to feed off the droppings from our transnational exploitation and insulate themselves from the deepening development crises at home. Globalisation then turns around and rationalizes the consistent failure of such countries to achieve development through IMF/WB prescriptions by referring to local corruption and inefficiency for which it is responsible for in the first instance. Similarly, it is able to deflect accountability by hiding behind the elected liberal-conservative representatives of the people while doing all it can to destroy any progressive rise of the masses. In Ghana this is responsible for the numerous parties that should supposedly represent the progressive community.
In this hypocritical symbiosis, globalisation is vehemently hostile to any seriously patriotic and visionary leadership with a clear-cut commitment to the liquidation of underdevelopment such as the type of leadership provided by Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. Such leadership upsets the imperialist apple-cart and is always destabilized and even overthrown and replaced by liberal-conservative leaders in order to force such Third World countries to accept their assigned roles within globalisation: M - C{MP, LP}...P...C' - M' setup. Thus only a progressive government that champions the popular interest can withstand this.
The Internal Dimension of Our Poverty
Ghana?s unequal position in the global economy is sustained by significant internal inequalities which an analysis of our poverty situation will reveal. The most important of these is that between the wealth and power of the various liberal-conservative elite and the lower majority of impoverished and powerless ordinary Ghanaians. Inequality is not just an idea. It is what millions of Ghanaians suffer ? lack of equitable egalitarianism or fair equality. It also finds expression in unemployment, poor health, illiteracy, homelessness, unbearable taxes, unaccountable state officials.
The liberal-conservative system which sustains the status quo is necessarily divisive repressive and predatory and finds its counterpart in the liberal-conservative NDC-NPP parties in Ghana today, whose liberal-conservative leaders joined forces in the PNDC before they split up after the murder of the judges to form their own separate liberal and conservative parties.
Internally, it sustains inequality and injustice for example in the areas of gender inequality, industrial exploitation, in landlord exploitation of tenants or state brutality. The system is also fundamentally divisive. Because of its lack of legitimacy, it can only maintain its grip on power by keeping ordinary Ghanaians divided by exploiting religious, ethnic, gender and other social differences. Ordinary Ghanaians are vulnerable to this tactic, and since they cannot rely on the state, they rally around the banners of such small groupings. The competition for wealth in such circumstances can sometimes be desperate and consequently violent. Tenant farmers from different ethnic groups wage war on each other, unemployed and marginalized youth systematically prey on old people and children in a growing crime wave. Gender violence grows as ?powerless? men vent their frustrations on even more ?powerless? women. Factory owners threatened by policies that discourage production increasingly resort to force to deny established legal rights of workers and break their ability to protect their legitimate interests. Ghanaians living abroad have to remit huge sums for domestic consumption by family members.
The Way Forward: Wealth and Happiness for all
So Ghana?s economic problems and poverty is not the result of our reliance on agriculture, low propensity to save, high population growth, archaic customs, archaic taboos and traditions, our extended family system, illiteracy and ignorance, geography, sociology and politics. Our poverty is the direct consequence of the liberal-conservative development of the advanced capitalist economies and the extent to which liberals and conservatives both local and international have pursued liberal-conservative policies that have had anti-progressive detrimental effects on the lower majority of Ghanaians. Evidently, African liberals and conservatives at home have failed the popular majority as they implement liberal-conservative IMF sponsored socioeconomic programmes whilst radical intellectuals co-opted into dominant two-party liberal-conservative state systems have been exposed as nothing but liberals and conservatives masquerading as radical progressives. Thus only a progressive Nkrumaist Government will pursue popular wealth to increase the standard of life of the Lower Majority and rebuild confidence in our national ability to live and survive as one people in one nation.
The overall policy objective of an Nkrumaist Government must therefore be the pursuit of popular ?Wealth?. With wealth Ghana will take care of all its programmes: our children will be in school; we can provide health care for all our people free at the point of need; we can invest and provide full employment; with wealth Ghana will be able to assert its right to life and happiness; hence it must be possible to sum up in a single sentence what an Nkrumaist Government policy must be: it is to provide wealth and conditions of happiness for every Ghanaian. If we achieve this, and continue to work for the ethnic unity and progress of Ghana, we shall be making a positive contribution to the well-being of the territory Ghana. The liberation of Ghana, from the Liberal (NDC)-Conservative (NPP) Two Party Dominance, to unify and progressively develop it will be an Nkrumaist Government?s central objective. These require the transformation of all our institutions towards the creation of wealth for all. In all areas of our national life we must implement policies that will lead to the creation, management and enjoyment of wealth for all. Thus we must call for papers on all areas of national life from the Ghanaian public that will lead to the creation of wealth for all. The summary of these papers will become the United CPP Nkrumaist Government Manifesto as opposed to the practice whereby liberals and progressives masquerading as progressives sit in some room and write party manifestos that the lower majority of Ghanaians who are mostly illiterate anyway never bother to read. Freedom from poverty and freedom from diverse fear are essential for the attainment of happiness. Happiness, however, would be incomplete without the opportunity for Ghanaians to lead a full cultural and spiritual life as a Christian under the guidance of the Almighty God and Father of all Spirits, as a Moslem under the guidance of the Ever Merciful and Ever Compassionate Allah, as a Traditional African under the guidance of the Ancestors who are Ghosts. An Nkrumaist Government policy principle is that no Ghanaian should be unemployed, be below a predetermined wealth line, will be neglected in old age, or be without help in times of sickness because they do not have cash to buy health care (NDC position) or pay a health insurance premium (NPP position). An Nkrumaist Government policy is that no man shall fear oppression from terrorists and bomb-throwers and its security consequences as in the days of the NPP forbears; that no Ghanaian female shall be anxious that her child shall not be cared for or educated because she lacks the means herself. Nkrumaists today are determined that all Ghanaians shall look forward to ever-increasing social benefits and ever-widening opportunities for the enjoyment of leisure and culture.
But nothing in this world is achieved without wealth. It is our wealth that partly funds the good life in developed countries. Thus the attainment of these vital aims of an Nkrumaist Government must be worked for, by increasing greatly and rapidly the greater wealth of Ghana and seeing to it that this greater wealth remains in Ghana for Ghanaians but fairly distributed among all our people whether busanga, wangara, mande-busanga, grusi, vagala, sisala, mo, kasena (paga), mole-dagbon, walba (wala), nanumba, nankansi and gurense, namnam (nabdon), mamprusi, kusasi, dagomba, dagarte (dagaba), builsa, (kangyaga or kanja), gurma, salfalba (sabulaba), pilapila, kyamba (tehamba, baasari), kokomba, bimoba, guan, yefi, Nchumuru, krachi, nkonya, gonja, cherepong, larte, anum, awutu, efutu, senya, avatime, nyongbo, tafi, akpafu, lolobi, likpe, ewe, ga-dangme, ga, dangme, wassa, sefwi, nzema, kwahu, fante, evalue, denkyira, chokosi, boron (brong) including banda, asen (assin), asante, aowin, akyem, akwamu, akuapem, ahanta, ahafo and agona among others.. This in turn depends upon the production and productivity of all Ghanaians. To attain these ends, an Nkrumaist Government which stands dedicated to the service of Ghanaians, must have a workable plan and be able to put that plan into operation. We the progressives have that plan. To be able to put that plan into operation, we must win political office, which requires that the lower majority of our people must be organised and united to put an Nkrumaist Government into office in Ghana as early as January 2009.
What You Can Do
We call on you as a Ghanaian to serve as a progressive centre of organisation to mobilise the people around you in your kiosks, workplaces, mud houses, huts, urban slums, villages, towns and dilapidated regional capitals and wherever you are so that united as a lower majority we shall produce a better wealthier Ghana tomorrow.
As a centre of organisation you will improve communication within the party and between the party, the general public and the lower majority. It is yourselves as progressive centres of organisation that will be the progressive spokespersons that would articulate the progressive vision of wealth for all, articulate the philosophy of Nkrumaism, articulate our progressive position on government policies, connect with the Pan Africanist and progressive global movements, work for the self-determination, liberation and progressive development of Ghana, work for the ultimate unification of all progressives, mobilise and organise yourself to fight the internal and external liberal-conservative forces opposed to our self-induced development in an optimum zone of a free and united territory. As a progressive centre of organisation, it is your call to duty to be at the forefront of the progressive transformation of Ghana. Unity or no unity in the Nkrumaist political family it must be your aim to win the 2008 elections and help form a progressive government of Ghana by all means necessary in which you will play a vital role. We call on you the majority of Ghanaians to work together with a progressive leadership of visionary leaders drawn from amongst yourselves and reject liberal-conservative intellectuals and political operatives either because they are handsome or because they come from your home town or because they are from your ethnic group (tribe) in order to take Ghana out of pervasive poverty to wealth for all. We therefore call on you all who constitute progressive social forces of patriots and nationalists from all ethnic groups everywhere to join hands with a progressive CPP in a collective progressive effort to confront the liberal-conservative forces responsible for our present predicament of poverty, misery and a hard life. Certainly, as Ghanaians we must organise for a progressive CPP government if we are to transform our poor and deteriorating material conditions. Neither the liberal NDC nor the conservative NPP will ?help? us the Lower Majority who live on less than $2 a day to come to power and govern the country in our own popular interests because they want to subject our interests to either private foreign interests (NDC) or private indigenous interests (NPP). You as a progressive will work with other progressive forces to mobilise and harness all resources to meet the popular needs and aspirations of the majority of our people to which we shall subject both the public sector and the private sector (foreign and indigenous).
Thus the new CPP of today offers an alternative progressive vision unlike the liberal NDC and the conservative NPP who are both ardent disciples and apostles of the IMF-World Bank neo-liberal economic policies which have been undemocratically imposed on us the lower majority through policy conditionalities.
In office, our progressive CPP government will lead the accumulation drive to assist all sectors of the economy to increase the rate of capital accumulation, partake in production to enable the market operate effectively by progressively developing our productive forces, create complementary conditions and infrastructure for all sectors of the economy and above all create fair equality for all regardless of income, status, gender and ethnicity, in respect of employment, education, health and social services by delineating a wealth line below which no Ghanaian shall be allowed to live by law as we build a just society in which the increasing standard of life of the Lower Majority becomes the benchmark for everybody. Forward Ever, Backward Never CPP UK & Ireland
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