SOCIALIST MOVEMNT OF GHANA NEW YEAR MESSAGE

As 2024 draws to a close, the Socialist Movement of Ghana (SMG) salutes the working People of Ghana. We also salute the progressive community – the socialists, social democrats, and democrats who have supported working people in their struggles over the last 12 months, especially regarding the elections.
Working people asserted authority over the State and delivered peaceful elections despite extreme provocation.
Working people decisively rejected economic hardship, social division, political manipulation, and the assault on national institutions.
Since 7 December, working people have also remained vigilant to ensure that cabals in the Electoral Commission and the Judiciary do not erode our rejection of arrogant incompetence. In 2025, Ghanaians will have the government they overwhelmingly voted for and for that, we should all be proud.
As we enter 2025, we must remain vigilant. Elections do not change society’s fundamental structure. Ghana remains a highly exploited and repressed neo-colony with an exceptional debt crisis and largely destroyed institutions.
We are entering a period of great socio-economic difficulty. The full impact of NPP’s reckless mismanagement and plunder will only hit us from 2025 onwards. As if this is not bad enough, the corrupt (electorally) defeated anti-social forces organised around the NPP are already mobilising with their massive war chest and their media networks to destabilise the new administration and beat down the People. They are preparing to fight desperately to avoid personal disgrace, confiscation of assets, and imprisonment. Working people must remain vigilant to protect the country from these forces and deepen our victory.
We also face an increasingly dangerous international situation with the capture of power by desperate right-wing political movements throughout the West, especially in the United States. These movements are openly panicked by the growing wealth and power of the Global South compared to the decline of the great imperialist powers.
They reject the Global South’s increasing independence in forums like the UN. They reject our right to build trade and investment relations based on our national interests rather than theirs. They assert the right to use force to bend Third World societies to their whims by both direct and proxy military force like the US and European bids to establish military bases in our countries and quiet support for the terrorists operating across the Sahel.
The fight to protect our physical sovereignty and ensure peace will also require a resolute and united working people’s alliance. We must also be vigilant to ensure that the incoming administration keeps substantive faith with the People. We must begin political conversations within and amongst our organisations. We must debate how much of the NDC Manifesto represents real value and is achievable, how much is just wishful “campaign” talk, and what is missing
in the NDC’s outlook. For example, the NDC manifesto is primarily technical and does not represent any political programme or strategy. Nothing in the NDC manifesto suggests that it has rejected the neo-liberal toolkit used by every government of the so-called Fourth Republic. Previous governments (including the previous Mahama
administration) have primarily deployed donors’ and private lenders’ funds to pay foreign consultants and contractors to build infrastructure and social programmes. This is a strategy that demobilises ordinary Ghanaians
(including grassroots party structures) and empowers the external forces that are exploiting us. If NDC continues the illusion that the task of developing Ghana is for “big men and women alone”, it will fail – and so will we all. We must, for example, ground the Mahama administration’s commitments in a national mobilisation programme.
Our immediate task is to develop a Working People’s Programme and shape the national dialogue President Mahama has promised to convene within 120 days of assuming office. We must aim to leave that meeting with a realistic plan that puts working people at the centre of a national (not just partisan) programme that advances the Ghanaian masses and not just the sections of the elite that facilitate foreign exploitation.
Despite the unfortunate debacle of the failed general strike in November, SMG believes that Organised Labour should be the centre of this working people’s mobilisation. And we would happily contribute under leadership of organised labour to advance this struggle. We hope others will join us.
SMG wishes the working people of Ghana and Ghanaian progressives’ clarity, unity, militancy, and peace.

Signed.

Kwesi Pratt Jnr
General Secretary