The Free Market denies that human beings are free and equal in dignity and rights. As an economic system or mechanism or person(s), it confers dignity and rights in a discriminatory way as a result of which the majority of Ghanaians today live without dignity and rights. And yet all Ghanaians are supposed to be entitled to these rights and freedoms regardless of whether they are 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.
In Ghana today, the free market has spawned the politics of ethnicism, religion, money and personalities thus discriminating against particular ethnic group(s), person(s), religion(s), and those without money (e.g. the Ghanaian Majority). The Free Market undermines the universal declaration of our human rights and freedoms which all Ghanaians are entitled to; a crucial question is what the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) is doing about this issue. It was to uphold our human rights that it was set up.
The Free Market in which the political class in Ghana believe denies the majority of Ghanaians the right to life, economic liberty and security of person. All Ghanaians cannot drink clean water and some cannot travel safely from one part of the country to another without a preventable accident at the hands of lunatic free market forces. The Free Market has subjected the whole of Ghana and the majority of Ghanaians, especially children from particular ethnic groups like girls from the North, to slavery or servitude.
The Free Market is subjecting Ghanaians to torture such as Alhaji Issa Mobila suffered. He, we will recall, was a politician who died in the custody of the securities at Tamale. Alhaji Mobila, whom many described as a philanthropist, died in military custody on December 9, 2004 as reported on General News of Wednesday, 29 December 2004 of Ghanaweb. The report of the pathologist at the time on his body indicated that he died as a result of suspected torture. According to the report, the deceased died as a result of the collapse of the left lung with haemothorax, fractured ribs and severe multiple abrasions on various part of the body and his larynx, trachea, bronchial tubes and brain showed congestion. Such methods are the speciality of Free Market Institutions such as the CIA who have over the years trained military officers all over the world in the art of torture. The Free Market denies Ghanaians the right to be recognised even as a person before the law, in our case, the 1992 Constitution. The result is that even the water sources of where some Ghanaians live have been polluted and many in mining areas have been sectioned into unsustainable new villages to enable maximum exploitation of their resources. Leading Free Market mining businesses and all political parties in Ghana are ensuring this by commission or omission.
The Free Market ensures that we are all not equal before the law. If you are white and work for a foreign free Market business, then you are above the law even when you excrete in the water buckets from which Ghanaians drink water. Free Market-Promoting foreign embassies are ready to assist in enforcing such inequalities before the law.
In Free Market Ghana today, the right to ask for legal help if your rights have been violated is illusory. If you have the right friends or have sympathetic NGOs on your side, you may get justice. But justice is a free market commodity; those who can pay get the most while the majority of Ghanaians have no legal help while the Free Market violates their rights not to live in mass poverty. The Free Market is still ensuring that Ghanaians continue to be subjected to arbitrary arrest; and all Ghanaians are not having a fair and public trial. A privileged few even enjoy immunity from a fair and public trial even though it is reported they have broken one law or another on corruption especially. The Free Market denies our right to be considered innocent until proven guilty; the Free Market denies our right to privacy; the Free Market denies our right to freedom of movement, which has become the subject of official visa racketeering for maximum income in most foreign visa institutions such as in the British High Commission.
The Free Market promotes and imposes anti-democratic economic policies but denies the right to seek and enjoy political asylum in other countries. Try leaving Ghana for the UK because of the political policy of free market mass poverty which the same UK supports in Ghana.
So Free Market Dictatorship denies the right to nationality and decentralised political power through the policy of destroying national boundaries in economic policy terms and subjecting all nations to a single autocratic market.
The discrimination of the Free Market ensures that majority of Ghanaians cannot enjoy the right to marry and have a family at an affordable price. The Free Market is promoting population decrease in Ghana with future catastrophic results while paying women elsewhere to have more children through different policy instruments.
The Free Market denies the majority of Ghanaians the right to own property while discriminating in favour of a privileged few and a minority who can, say, buy unaffordable private hotels. The goal is therefore to reduce the majority to slavery or servitude and subject them to the few and minority who will then own all the property under the free market. The story is no different for intellectual property rights.
The Free Market denies Ghanaians the right of anti-free market thought, anti-free market conscience and anti-free market religion. It wants global uniformity of thought on the free market and even murders those who will freely dissent or freely conceive of a world better than anything the free market can ever offer. Free Market ideologues are impatient and eager to shout down anti-Free Market citizens who want a just and free dream with a deadline in Ghana. As a result, the Free Market denies those against the free market the freedom of anti-Free Market opinion and expression.
The Free Market sponsors coups, police and military rebellion, torture and lawlessness thus denying the right to choose one’s government which will implement a just and free society. In Ghana, the Free Market through the PNDC has imposed a liberal-conservative two-party liberal-conservative political domination thus denying the majority of Ghanaians the right to choose a progressive government that will create an enabling society for all. Should Ghanaians decide to form an anti-Free Market peaceful association and assembly, they are infiltrated by Free Market security agents who will be expected to do everything to destroy them.
The Free Market has denied the majority of Ghanaians their economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to social security. Life is a Hobbesian jungle. As a result the State is not affording equality of economic opportunity to all citizens; and, in particular, the State is not taking all necessary steps so as to ensure the full integration of ordinary women into the mainstream of the economic development of Ghana. Some of these women are beasts of burden (kayayei) in Accra. The Free Market prevents the State from taking all reasonable and necessary action on the grounds of free market ideology to ensure that the national economy is managed in such a manner as to maximize the rate of economic development and to secure the maximum welfare, freedom and happiness of every person in Ghana. Indeed the Free Market ensures that everything is being really done to destroy the establishment of the basis for the full deployment of the creative potential of all Ghanaians. Therefore the Free Market ensures that Ghanaians do not have the right to work in employment of their choice, to equal pay, and to form and join trade unions. Foreign oil refinery engineers in Ghana would have been paid 2,700 dollars a month if that is what foreign engineers were earning in their country according to the free market. If the Free Market were really free, Ghanaians at home would have been paid the world price of the same 2700 dollars; but they were paid 900 dollars. The reverse is true and the same free market is used to justify it. But if Labour exercises its freedom of movement, the Free Market describes them as unpatriotic as Ghanaian Engineers at Tema Oil Refinery found. Under the Free Market, Ghanaian labour, and generally the labour of Black people, are almost always priced cheaper by anti-competitive forces. As the Ogoni in Nigeria found, the State is employed by the Free Market to crush their human rights. The prevalence of poverty for the majority of Ghanaians is clear evidence that the Free Market will never, even under trickle down wealth policy, ensure that Ghanaians have the right to adequate living standards. Ghanaian poverty will remain a permanent feature of our perennial social and economic depression unless something progressive is done by all progressive constitutional forces necessary.
The global economic order which the free market is fostering, imposing and insisting on denies the majority poor including Majority Ghanaians the right to a social and international order which permits them to realise justly their freedoms.
The double exploitation of the majority of Ghanaians on account of their race and their dependent position in the international free market economic order will ensure that the world community will never respect Ghanaians however much we respect the rights of others.
The Free Market has taken away the rights of the Ghanaian Majority to life and human happiness. And this is why Ghana must reject the Dictatorial Free Market and all its anti-Democratic economic policies. As in the struggle against colonialism, Ghana, with the support of all forces for good, are again being called on to lead and perform its duty to the oppressed and the poor.
Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.
