Ghana resurrects socialist Nkrumah as Pan-Africanism Today indaba nears
The third Pan-Africanism Today conference will be held on Kwame Nkrumah’s birthday at Winneba in Ghana from September 21 to 23 this year under the theme – Unifying the Struggles of The Masses Against Capitalism and Imperialism, the Johannesburg-based Pan-Africanism Today (PAT) Secretariat have disclosed.
During a pre-conference media launch press briefing held on Wednesday in Accra, Ghana, Socialist Party (Zambia) General Secretary, Dr Cosmas Musumali, who is on the Political Directorate of the PAT Secretariat, said over the next seven weeks, the PAT Secretariat will collaborate with the media to ensure that the conference attains the required publicity and impact.
“Good morning ladies and gentlemen of the Media. On behalf the PAT Secretariat, allow me to welcome you again to today’s proceedings and to thank you for attending. My name is Cosmas Musumali. I am on the Political Directorate of the PAT Secretariat as well as the General Secretary of the Socialist Party in Zambia,” Dr Musumali told journalists. “We are here today to launch the Media efforts for the third Pan Africanism Today conference. This will take place in 7 weeks at Winneba specifically from 21 – 23 September under the theme – Unifying the Struggles of The Masses Against Capitalism and Imperialism.
Over the weeks ahead we will collaborate with the media to ensure that the conference attains the required publicity and impact. To start our journey together, I would like to pose and answer a few questions that might arise.”
Who is PAT and what do we do?
PAT is a platform of Africans and friends of Africa operating out of Johannesburg in South Africa and supporting campaigns for Pan-Africanism. We are committed to achieving the political, economic, intellectual, and cultural unification of our continent and its diaspora. We are inspired by the classic vision of pan-Africanism articulated by African leaders such as Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.
Our own mission is to strengthen networking amongst the various African organisations struggling to demand socio-economic rights, especially those that have already come to the realisation that continental unity and socialism are necessary conditions for the victory of their struggles. We work with anti-imperialist and socialist political parties like the Socialist Forum of Ghana (SFG). We work with popular movements for gender equality, children rights, Trade Unions, peasant farmers’ cooperatives, resource-rights campaigns, youth and student movements, cultural activists as well as journalism movements interested in telling the truth about our reality and in protecting the freedoms to do so.
We know that all of these important social constituencies can only realise their legitimate and crucial objectives sustainably in the context of a pan-African socialist movement. In the same vein, we know that neither socialism nor pan-Africanism can triumph without the active, purposeful involvement of all these social forces at the appropriate levels. More importantly, we cannot sustain whatever gains we make unless we continually spread consciousness across the social movement and build pan-African institutions that are directly accountable to the people and not just to the various neo-colonial governments. PAT is thus about facilitating pan-African consciousness, supporting pan-African mobilisation.
Why are we focused on Imperialism & Capitalism in the context of pan Africanism?
Pan-Africanism is an important element in the struggle to end the system of institutionalised greed that we call capitalism and its global institutional reach that we call imperialism. Defeating capitalism is the only way to create a just, secure and prosperous world for our children – here in Africa and everywhere else in the world.
We all know that humankind has the technology to produce more than enough food, water, shelter, and medicines than humankind needs to live decent lives. We know that if these resources were deployed we would see an incredible leap in the quality of life, knowledge and culture of our species. Poverty, famine, disease, climate instability, and insecurity are problems that mankind could have eradicated in the 1960s. That we did not do so and are not doing so today is because global production and distribution of goods and services is completely dominated by capitalism or the profit system.
Under capitalism all economic activity and all society’s institutions are structured not to solve society’s problems but to concentrate more and more wealth (profit) in the hands of the tiny global capitalist class and to protect this status quo – ideologically, culturally, politically and by force where it deems necessary. Under capitalism, social needs are only met if there is a way that the capitalist class can make profit from doing so or if they are essential to maintaining the larger status quo.
Africa has been a major victim of globalised capitalism or “imperialism”. In its imperialist phase,.capitalism has controlled almost all of the previously independent civilisations of Africa. It plunged the sub-Saharan continent into centuries of chaos through slave trading. When slavery ceased to be profitable imperial powers created colonies so they could directly control natural resource wealth in their competition with each other. When the devastation of World War II and the emergence of the USA as the dominant power dictated the break-up of Europe’s colonial empires, Europe and the US conspired to secure transition from formal colonial rule to puppet comprador governments who would preserve the essential exploitative features of colonialism. They failed initially in many places because of the militant resistance of liberation movements that were able to collaborate and support each other on a broad anti-imperialist pan-African platform.
This platform was possible because pan-African strategists such as Dr Nkrumah recognised first, that the defeat of colonialism and neo-colonialism were only possible with a continental mobilisation that brought the entire African people into play against the imperialist world and second, that an effective African Union that provides a real alternative to imperialist (colonial and neo-colonial) exploitation and repression of our peoples can only be based on socialism. Osagyefo also recognised and taught us that for this reason Imperialism would fight tooth and nail to destroy, dilute or subordinate Pan Africanism and its institutions. As individual balkanised neo-colonies we are weak and easy to control. As a united and conscious continent, we would be powerful beyond measure. It is precisely because of Osagyefo’s pan-African agenda, its visible popularity across the continent and Ghana’s demonstration of what was possible when ordinary people, rather than transnational corporations controlled their resources, that Imperialism overthrew his government and has spent the last 52 years in a futile attempt to diminish and undermine his legacy.
Osagyefo’s overthrow must be seen in the context of a wider global neoliberal counter-revolution that appeared to have triumphed by the late 1980s. This saw the defeat of the socialist governments in Russia and Eastern Europe, heightened assault on revolutionary movements in Latin America, seizure of power by right-wing military leaders willing to directly repress and disperse progressive movements enabled a sustained ideological and institutional attack on socialism and pan-Africanism. This attack was led by the IMF, World Bank and donor agencies who brought up an entire generation to believe that socialism and indeed anti-imperialism had “failed’ and that there really was simply no alternative to capitalist development.
Inevitably, the true empty character of the neoliberalism soon became evident. Countries that followed IMF/WB prescriptions limped from economic crisis to political crisis. Client states became more and more repressive. The West has had to intervene brutally directly or through proxies like Israel and Saudi Arabia to keep the status quo in place. Huge banks are failing and have been caught in illegal schemes designed to shift even more wealth from the working poor to the fabulously wealthy. Today, according to investment banks like Credit Suisse the concentration of global wealth is so extreme that the richest 8 individuals in the world control more wealth than the half (3.7 billion people!) of the world today and the richest 10% control more wealth than the rest of the world put together.
Millions of young people across the world have rejected the neo-liberal order. More and more people realise now that the only way to raise living standards and improve nutrition, health, security, and culture sustainably across the world is to end the capitalist system and release resources for the democratic control of the world’s people. This has translated in Africa to a renewed interest in both pan–Africanism and socialism.
Why is PAT holding continental conferences on Pan Africanism?
To achieve our mission, we must identify and link up pan African political and social movements across Africa and begin to create synergies that can sustain us.
Second, we need to discuss the policies, strategies and tactics for a renewed continental unity bid.
Third we have to table the question of socialism directly. We must reclaim its central position in the discussion of alternatives to our current neo-colonial debacle. Socialist thought is once again mainstreaming in some for the greatest bastions of imperialist ideological domination in the West including the United States and the UK.
Why are we doing it here in Ghana?
This is the third Pan Africanism Today conference. We held the initial conference in Lusaka, Zambia (Southern Africa) in 2016. We followed up in 2017 with a conference in Borj Cedria, Tunisia (North Africa). In our scheme of things we would like to move conferences around the different Regions of Africa. Logically 2018 could have happened in Central, East, West, or diasporan Africa.
There are however much more cogent arguments for bringing PAT specifically to Ghana in 2018. The first reason is to enable the pan-African movement to pay fitting tribute to Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah the founder of Ghana and chief strategist of African liberation and African Unity. It is no accident that we have timed the start of our conference for 21 September, which is celebrated throughout the continent as Osagyefo’s birthday. We have agreed with our comrades in SFG that their annual Founder’s Day celebration will take place this year in Winneba on the afternoon of the 21st. This will allow the 250 delegates from all over Africa and beyond to rehearse the role that this proud son of Ghana played in the elevation of all African people everywhere. The details of the Nkrumah celebration will be announced in due course. We intend it to be a vibrant community-wide celebration.
Thanks in part, no doubt, to Ghana’s Nkrumaist legacy it is the case that in the pan-African renaissance we are nurturing there are many comrades and organisations we can work with. Other than SFG as the hosting organisation, the following organisations are sponsoring the conference; the National Union of Metal workers of South Africa (NUMSA), the Workers Party (Tunisia), the Democratic Way (Morocco) and the Socialist Party (Zambia).
Credit: The Daybreak News
