GHANA @ 50 AND THE WESTERN NATIONS
In part II of the “meaning of Independence of Ghana”, I presented for our general reflection on Ghana@50 , the current realities that must be understood for redefining a new beginnings in order to lay down new solid foundations for Ghana’s future and Africa’s progress. Ghana and her members of the political elite following the footsteps of Kwame Nkrumah must set example and define the new direction of Africa’s freedom. The main ideas of part II are presented below as ten-point summary for quick reference.
1) The meaning of political independence must find expressions in the three social controls of:
a) the center of the domestic political power that allows social decisions to be made in order to shape the direction of nation-building, national history and the welfare of Ghanaians;
b) the legal structure for creating social stability and national security;
c) the economic structure for the production of material benefits in support of the welfare of the people and the evolving culture.
2) The control of the political power must be used in making social decisions that will define
a) the content and the direction of social progress;
b) the effective and appropriate conditions of building Ghana as a nation from within; and building Ghana whose citizens have collective interest, goals and objectives that are not appendages of the imperial predators and vestiges of colonialism.
3) The control of the legal structure is to define the necessary and appropriate conditions for:
a) the establishment and defense of sovereignty of Ghana;
b) the creation and maintenance of socio-political stability for nation building and social progress;
c) creating conditions for full democratic citizens’ participations in the national affairs and appropriate covenant between the collectively own public sector and individual interest in the socio-economic affairs of the nation;
d) establishment of good governance where the political elite services the nation rather than using the government as instrument to serve the pockets of the members of the political elite.
4)The control of the economic structure is to define the necessary and appropriate framework of domestic private and public economic activities in establishing the economic basis for the defense and maintenance of independence, sovereignty and pursuit of happiness. The relative interactions of the private and public sectors depends on the national vision regarding freedom and justice.
5) The vision of acquiring independence and sovereignty is to build Ghana as a unitary nation under the motto of Freedom and Justice within the general context of Africa. This vision has been lost and in its place has been instituted the vision of unproductive imitation of things foreign as a fine art of imbecility.
6) Our collective mental machine has been dislocated with semi-paralysis of our national life where loquacity (too much talking about unimportant things) instead of vision of nation building and social progress has become indispensable cognitive element of the masses and the members of political elite in such a way that international begging has replaced our internal strength and traditional pride.
7) Critical thinking regarding nation building and social progress in support of independence, sovereignty, freedom and justice has become a lost element in our collective cognition in such a way that we have completely come to overlook Nkrumah’s vision of building a unitary nation where the North, South. East and West of Ghana are integrated in such a way that tribal and ethnic affiliations are respected but unimportant to true and patriotic Ghanaians and where differences are seen as assets and strengths of the nation rather than as liabilities.
8) To get on the track of the vision of nation-building from our internal strength, and on the basis of which our forbearers fought for independence, requires the transformation of the collective thinking of all Ghanaians in a manner that does not allow us to think in terms of tribes and ethnicity but in terms of national unity and African progress.
9) Nation-building and social-progress from within Ghana demand the construction of an effective organization, a casting of relevant institutions and their efficient operations in a manner that is grounded in the African cultural unity but not on either the importation of faked external cognitive structures on the basis of advices from the same imperial predators whose claim to represent African interest or from the experts of international donor-grant institutions whose interest is to appendage Africa’s interest and history to the imperial exploitive machine.
10) The current reality is that all things considered and in the true spirit of African nationalism, Ghana, like most, if not all African countries, is living and operating in the zone of neocolonialism and still under the shadows of the Western imperial order of poverty generation, racism, and resource exploitation for the enrichment of the homelands of the imperial predators
In this part III, I would like to relate our current and past realities to the positive and negative activities of the so-called Western Nations who most of times are equated with Free and Civilized World by their propaganda machine. At this point, I would like to present to you, and for your individual and collective analysis of the positive and negative role of the Western Nations on Ghana’s struggle for independence, freedom, justice, emancipation and nation building relative to the ten summary points in Part I and ten summary points in Part II.. I must point out from the start that, contrary to the popular belief, substantial poverty and lack of respectable development in Ghana (Africa in general) are due to the activities of the Western nations in the process of trying to protect their incumbency and their imperial privileges. If you are not convinced by some of the propositions in my discussions just analyze the discussions of the Western fear of the emerging China economic power and her socio-economic activities in Africa.
In listening to the political, economic, legal and military voices from the Western nations leads one to understand that it is only the Western nations that have national interests. The interests of other nations are recognized by them to the extent to which such interests go to support the Western imperial interests and their neocolonial aspirations. You are put on the enemy list if your national interest diverges from and fails to support the Western aspirations. This imperial arrogance of Western Nations expresses itself in various strategies for the destruction of Ghana’s independence, freedom and true sovereignty. An example is attempts of external forces to establish military base in Ghana and other African countries that do not already have foreign military base. This is also the case for all African countries without an exception. The Western nations, who practiced competitive imperialism, during the period of scramble for Africa and her human and non-human resources, have abandoned the logic of competition as preached in their economic and political theories. They are now locked in the practice of cooperative imperialism that constitutes a monopoly as well as defining uni-polar world. They are, however, practicing policies of Africa’s disunity that is also supported by a number of African intellectuals and political elite without due regards for the interests of Africa’s future and welfare of the masses except their personal gains. Here Ghana is constantly being watched since she houses the conceptual seeds of Pan-Africanism and African-unity aspirations. This is due to the basic fear on the part of Western imperial nations of the revolutionary thought seeds sown by Kwame Nkrumah. These revolutionary thought seeds seek just international economic relations and fair trade but not simply free trade; and where peace is not the sole right of these imperial nations, where every nation’s interest must be taken into account in engineering global power balance and stability if there is going to be peace, spiritual tranquility and goodwill to mankind.
The intense power struggle in the global system in our contemporary world is a game of resource acquisition. The game is such that we have the Western cooperative imperialism that constitutes the incumbent, competing countries for simple positions of good modern slaves that are made up of the competitive fringe and the big emerging powers that are asserting themselves in the global sphere to constitute the tertiary competitive force. The incumbent and the fringe define the opposing actors in the theater of global power game for resource benefits with the members of the tertiary power sometimes siding with the fringe and sometimes playing neutrality in the game between the incumbent and the fringe. The incumbent is made up of a group of cooperative Western imperial predators while the emerging powers are the populous countries of the East.
There is one global game and one game only. The game is the control of sources of resources and direction of resource-commodity flows. The theater is composed of production centers and global market system. The producers and consumers are the world population divided into nations and states that have differential resources and abilities. Each nation is an organizational umbrella over different production and consumption units call firms, farmer and industrialists and other on one hand and consumers on the other hand.
Technically, the game is played by nations against nations on behave of their citizens but not directly by the internal producers and consumers. The outcome of the game depends on the nature of domestic governance, governmental policies, and citizens’ awareness of the nature of the global resource game, global power distribution, intensity of imperial power aspirations and domestic forces of resistances.
The trading nations are supposed to be independent and sovereign states that are internally controlled by the domestic collective decision-making processes in accordance with acceptable international laws, rules, decent behavior, national interests, socio-economic development and welfare of the nation defined in terms of citizens’ social progress. This structure is supposed to operate without external military aggression and intimidation from other countries. Under universal free and fair trade, with international freedom and justice the forces of global markets are to shape the direction of resource-commodity flows in accordance with the collective welfares of the countries. The rules of exchange are simply national independence, state sovereignty, freedom, justice and free and fair global market that is not interfered by some power of imperial dominance and external military actions against other states. Under no external aggression the will to trade (buying and selling) therefore, is guided by the welfare of the nation and her citizens. This has been an important justification for the refusal of some Western countries to trade some of their articles of technology. This is the principles of non-aggression, non-interference and free and fair trade that constitute the ideal for global justice and peace in the resource-commodity flows across national boundaries. Under the principle of self-interest countries may refuse to trade their resources if trading is to their disadvantage as viewed from ecological diversity, environment sustainability and the welfare of future generations.
This is a simplification of an ideal state of the resource-commodity game. Things are different and hearse, exploitive, deadly and outright wicked at the actual theater of the resource game. The wickedness starts with the partitioning of nations into incumbent, emerging global powers and the fringe. The incumbent is made up of cooperative imperial Western Nations in unity after experiencing the costs of competitive imperialism that cumulated to the imperialist wars of World, War I and II. The fringe is made up of nations that were at one point under colonial slavery of Western imperial predators and whose leaders are competing against each other to make their citizens as good servants to serve the incumbent. It further includes the nations whose leaders are struggling against the incumbent to be free in the use of their resources, sovereign in the manner in which they chose to participate in the global trade, and to pursue democratic processes in their terms and within the elastic bounds of their culture and history.
Here the game gets to be nasty, interestingly brutish and extremely deadly with respect to other people’s lives and their human dignities. The rules of the game are established by the incumbent in a manner that violates all rational rules of human freedom, fairness, and democratic decision-making. The incumbent is also the enforcer of the rules, the police of the system, arrestor and judge of the violators. It is also the jury and deliverer of punishment where other nationals are condemned to the neocolonial prisons of poverty and inferior social status. The incumbent is the gatekeeper of the neocolonial prison as well as the whole system of international justice as it is defined by the incumbent. These rules and behavioral regulations are made to be followed by the members of the fringe but not the members of the incumbent. The violators of these rules are harshly dealt with without mercy by the incumbent working in an inter-supportive mode of their members and international organizations such as the IMF, UN and the World Bank that the incumbent has set up.
The harsh treatments of the members of the fringe take the form of a) destabilizing the domestic economy (see John Perkins “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” Plume Book, 2004); b) Propaganda campaign with the incumbent’s extensive media machine for ideological war (see Harman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, Pantheon, NY, 1988) ; c) direct military confrontation with technically superior killing machine, state terror, practice the policies of regime change, preemptive wars and execution of a number of civilians and innocents in the name of bringing civilization, Devine protection and democracy to the primitive (see Noam Chomsky, Pirates and Emperors: International terrorism in the Real World, Claremont Research, NY, 1986; on primitive and civilization see Cheikh A. Diop Civilization or Barbarism, N.Y., Lawrence Hill, 1987 ); d) activates the poverty generating machine through policies of the IMF, Work Bank and other development institutions to bring about collective punishment for the people. (see Noam Chowsky, Profit and People, Seven Stories Press, NY, 1999; and Cheryl Payer, the Debt. Trap, Monthly Review Press, NY, 1974) and; e) activate the veto machine at United Nation’s Security Council and sabotage the legitimate complaints of the members of the fringe concerning imperial terror and the suffering of their people. All these happened in Ghana between the years 1957-1966 when Nkrumah was overthrown and beyond that golden period of Ghana and Africa. These imperial actions are happening now in Ghana and Africa with different faces that are more destructive, difficult to detect and correct. In mere extensive theoretical details, I have given an intellectual map of the strategies of the imperial predators in chapter 6, and the nationalist agenda (Chapter 7) in my book African Union: Pan-African Analytical Foundations.
Ghana’s current conditions and future realities must be understood in terms of the philosophic riddle of Sankofa Anoma that presents trinity of life’s logical reasoning in polarities and dualities. This philosophical riddle contrived by our forbearers in their own order with profound creativity and deep sense of original thinking cannot be underestimated. It must be an important guide to our social decision-choice actions. It must be conceptually connected to Asantrofi Anoma and Anoma-Kokone-Kone problems in the global relational setting within Ghana’s resolve. Ghana, like Sankofa Anoma knows or at least must know its current conditions (present) and past colonial and pre-colonial history. These conditions of the past and present must be analyzed and integrated through critical thinking into a system of understanding to guide Ghana’s domestic and international policies to construct future realties out of many potential outcomes. The Sankofa Anoma, Asantrofi Anoma and Anoma Kokone Kone relationally provide us with a sense of critical and original thinking whose philosophical principles must constitute cognitive foundations for understanding transformational dynamics that will help our correct global policy constructs to support our effort to build Ghana as a unitary nation in defense of her independence, sovereignty in the context of Africa as a unitary continent. An important question arises from the critical thinking and analysis of Ghana’s historical encounters and by logical extension those of other African nations in general as to what must be the optimal relationship that Ghana must construct with the Western nations? A number of cognitive paths are opened to our Nation. These paths are consolidated into two.
1) The numbers of the political elite through intimidation, self-greed, selfishness and pocket-lining activities can and usually do collaborate with predators of Ghana and adopt policies that will reverse the initial conditions of Ghana’s independence and sovereignty established through decolonization, and thus put Ghanaians onto a path of new slavery.
2) The members of the political elite through confidence, self-perseverance, nation-building goal, race-preservation and hard-work can adopt policies that will reinforce the path to Ghana’s independence, sovereignty and move Ghanaian into freedom and justice with a vision of social development for all Ghanaians and nation building of the State of Ghana.
These two policy paths will help to define the type of relationship that Ghana must have with the Western nations and imperial system of resource exploitation and predation. Any of these policy paths entails costs and benefits with differential distributional effects to Ghanaians and Africa. Let me take a short trip over each of the paths. The first path takes our people to Slavery and national subservience with long-range devastating consequences and temporarily benefits that accrue to the members of the political elite. This is the policy path where the members of political elite are enticed by the imperial predators to trade off Ghana’s national freedom, sovereignty, social progress and the vision of African Unity for small personal gains that temporarily enrich the members of the political elite at the expense of Ghana’s progressive path and Africa’s emancipation. In this policy path the members of the political elite subscribe to, and accept the bankrupt ideological propaganda that only the Western nations have national interests and the only interests that Ghana has (and similarly for other African countries) are those that go to serve the interest of imperial predators and their incumbency status as well as to be a “good friend to the West”. The members of the Ghanaian political elite will, if they have not already, degenerate into nothing but imperial cronies on this policy path holding a big beggar’s basket to globally beg for water to finally find emptiness when they arrive home (I have outlined in substantial details the operational methods of the imperial predators in my book African Union published by Adonis-Abby, London, 2006 www.addonis-abby.com). This path is the path of slave-master relationship whose total cost must be calculated in terms of continual slavery, poverty, dependency, social retrogression and racial insults without nation-building aspirations and sustainable national progress.
When the true African leaders arise from our midst and take a complete cognizance of the structure of global system and understand it in terms of power distribution and power game in the resource-commodity game as Kwame Nkrumah did they will immediately pay a critical attention to the advice of Cheik Anta Diop (one of formative African intellectuals and thinkers) that
“We must stop fooling the masses with minor patchwork and bring about the ultimate break with all the fake structures, --- which have no historical future-----. We cannot go on running with the hare and hunting with the hounds.” (Black Africa, Lawrence Hill & Co., Westpost Conn., 1974).
The truly enlightened members of our political elite will recognize that the first path is a policy path to Ghana’s destruction (and by logical extension Africa’s) where the long-run and medium-run costs far outweigh the scanty short-run personal benefits to the members of African political elite and their parasitic intellectuals.
The second policy path is the path of nation building in support of true independence, sovereignty and perseverance of Ghana’s self-interest through self-reliance for socio-cultural progress. Its foundations rest on the conceptual system of sustainable social development but not simply on economic growth or development. In order for such a social development to be sustainable its forces of motion must arise from the internal dynamics of the Ghanaian society. The internal dynamics must be drawn from the awareness of the citizens of Ghana who constitute the driving force of Ghana’s social development and nation building. The driving force is given the material and spiritual content from our national pride of self-reliance, self-progress without the stigma of begging. This policy path is contrary to the path of what the political elite of Ghana is moving on now. The whole policy notion that something can be obtained from the Western countries free without cost is false at the best, and stupid at the worst.
In the system of competitive struggle by nations over resources and technology there is no free lunch. A country that fails to protect her resources in this global resource game will have her citizens condemned to impoverishment and prison of beggars. Ghana’s relationship with the West or other area of the world must be on equal footing and on basis of Ghana’s and African’s interests. This is another revelation of the principle of equal standing in nature and society as provided by the African conceptual system.
This principle of equal footing can not be compromised. We must view Ghana as a nation of thinkers and doers but not a nation of foolish imitators and beggars where the members of their government carry empty baskets around the Western world just to be filled with water and to arrive at Ghana with emptiness, insults and disgrace. No nation has developed by begging and nobody has grown out of poverty by begging with dignity. If we are to protect the conditions of independence, sovereignty of Ghana; freedom and justice of Ghanaians; and to work toward the true independence of Ghana with nation building and economic emancipation then we must take the bull by the horns and rid out minds of the depressing notion of getting something for nothing from the West. There is no such thing as free lunch in imperial system of struggle over resources and in competitive World trading system. Every AID ,either as grant, loan, gift or others is part of the imperial strategy of deception to create neocolonial states that are locked in dependency syndrome for subjugation and exploitation. This does not mean that AID should not be accepted. That is not the point. It means AID should be accepted on conditions where the core of the national interest, independence, sovereignty and sustainable national progress is protected but not compromised. This should be our guiding principle in crafting and managing our relationships with the Western Nations as well as our fundamental working principles of global diplomacy.
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