The Accra Collective of the Socialist Movement of Ghana joins the working people of Ghana and progressive forces across Africa and the world in commemorating the birth of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, Founder of the Modern Republic of Ghana. We do not mark this day as a ritual of nostalgia. We mark it as a call to continue an unfinished revolution.
Ghana was not a gift from the departing colonial power. National independence was won by the organized struggle of ordinary people: the farmers, railway workers, market women, exservicemen, teachers, and youth who Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party mobilized into a mass movement. Nkrumah took the demand for self-government out of the drawing rooms of the elite and into the streets, and on 6 March 1957 he declared Ghana free, the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to win independence from colonial rule.
He then set out to build a modern nation on the people’s terms: the Tema Harbour, the Akosombo dam, expanded free education from primary school to university, public hospitals, state enterprises, and a national industrialization strategy. Others took part in the struggle, but the historical record is plain: the founder and architect of modern Ghana is Kwame Nkrumah. Founder’s Day belongs to him, and no revision of history can change that.
Nkrumah understood that political independence without economic independence is a trap. In Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism, he warned that a state may have all the outward trappings of sovereignty while its economy and policy are directed from outside. Six decades on, this warning describes the daily reality of our continent. Ghana exports its gold, cocoa, oil, and timber in raw form, imports finished goods at inflated prices, and is then told to solve the resulting crisis through austerity, privatization, and IMF conditionalities that fall hardest on workers, women, and the poor. Meanwhile, mining concessions enrich foreign capital and the local elite while our rivers are poisoned and our farmlands destroyed.
The SMG holds that the wealth of the land belongs to the people who live on it and work it. Ghana’s natural resources must be brought under democratic public control and used to industrialize, to create decent jobs, and to fund free, quality education, health care, housing, and social protection, not to fatten shareholders abroad or a rentier class at home.
Wesalute the working people of Ghana: the farmers, fishers, and miners; the nurses, teachers, and public servants; the drivers, artisans, and factory workers; the market women and kayayei; and the millions in the informal economy who continue to resist neo-colonial exploitation. They produce the nation’s wealth, yet too often are denied its benefits: paid poverty wages, denied secure work, and blamed for a crises they did not create.
We pledge to stand with the working people in the fight for a living wage, the right to organize, safe and secure work, an end to the casualization of labour, and a fair share of the wealth they create. We also stand with the women and young people of Ghana, who carry the heaviest burdens of an unjust economy and whose leadership is indispensable to any real transformation.
“Seek ye first the political kingdom” was never a call for politics as an end in itself. It was Nkrumah’s method for winning the power to transform society. He argued that Africa’s small, fragmented states, each negotiating alone with powerful capital and powerful governments in the colonial metropolis could never be truly free, and called for a Union Government of Africa.
Events have vindicated him. Africa holds much of the minerals essential to the world’s green and digital transitions, the world’s youngest population, and vast fertile land. Yet it remains the most exploited part of the global economy, drained by unequal trade, illicit financial flows, and unsustainable debt. Divided, African states are pressured into accepting terms that, as a united bloc, they could refuse. Unity is therefore not a slogan but a condition of survival and development. Africa must unite, and Africa’s resources must serve the needs and aspirations of Africa’s people.
As Africa and the Caribbean raise the demand for reparations for the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, and their continuing legacies, the SMG says: this demand is just and must be won. Centuries of enslavement, land seizure, forced labour, and plunder built the wealth of the industrialized world at the expense of Africa. That wealth was extracted from us, and justice requires that it be repaired. This must mean:
anend to IMF and World Bank conditionalities that force austerity, privatization, and the sale of public assets.
fair trade and an end to unequal exchange, with African countries free to process and add value to their own resources and to protect their emerging industries;
an end to illicit financial flows and tax abuse by multinational corporations, and the recovery of stolen assets;
climate justice, with rich countries that caused the climate crisis paying for the adaptation and loss and damage that Africa is bearing; and
the return of looted cultural heritage and recognition of the crimes of slavery and colonialism
We also call on our own governments to match their words with action. Demanding justice abroad while surrendering our sovereignty at home is not a serious position. Africa’s leaders must be held accountable to their people, and the struggle for a new world order must be accompanied by the struggle for a more democratic, equal, and self-reliant Africa.
Nkrumah’s legacy is not a monument to be admired but a programme to be fulfilled: national liberation, economic independence, socialist reconstruction, and the political unity of Africa. The task falls to this generation, and it will be carried out by organized working people, youth, and women, not handed down by any elite.
The SMG rededicates itself to this struggle. We call on all workers, students, farmers, women’s organizations, and progressive forces to join us.
Long live the memory of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah! Long live the working people of Ghana! Long live the unity of Africa! Africa must unite!
Signed
Blaise Tulo
Convener.