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, ex
servicemen, 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
Below is the Statement.