The Managing Director for Insight Newspaper and Pan African Television, Mr. Kwesi Pratt has given a piece of advice to Ghanaians to assess the programmes offered by Parties and candidates for the 2024 elections and for working with revolutionary and progressive organiZations on the important issues facing us.
Our most important sectors are controlled by foreign businesses that exploit us and “repatriate” most of the wealth we generate. We are import dependant and do not create enough jobs. Millions have no work. Those who do are underpaid, unproductive, and insecure. The gap between the rich and the poor is exploding daily. Our state owes tens of billions of dollars but has nothing to show for this borrowing. The IMF has once again imposed an austerity programme on us.
Our society: Things are unravelling because the rate of exploitation is so high the State cannot spend on social programmes and because irresponsible rent-seeking elites increasingly control political power. Our political establishment is dominated by forces that see government as a means of self-enrichment rather than rendering service to the People. In 2023, our recurrent expenditure was more than 120% of our domestic revenue. That means, that we spent far more than what we raised. Yet Millions are homeless. Millions are uneducated and cannot afford proper healthcare. Our infrastructure is dilapidated. Our environment is filthy and breeds disease. Our streets are unlit and increasingly unsafe. According to the Ghana Statistical Service, 7.3 million Ghanaians are multidimensionally poor and are deprived in several dimensions, including education, health, and living standards. Of this, 44% are experiencing extreme poverty.
Our politics: We are in crisis because our political system cannot deliver economic and social change. Mainstream parties are too scared of our country’s exploiters to challenge them. Naturally, citizens are rapidly losing interest in elections. Since they cannot mobilize around the real issues, Parties try to build electoral bases around backward ethnic, traditional, and religious divisions rather than uniting society. Governments are increasingly repressing dissent by workers, farmers, students, women, and the youth. Governments use the armed services and private militias to terrorise the masses. There is a real danger of political violence in December and beyond.
Regional Turmoil: We are seeing an upswing in the generations-old struggle against the political systems that uphold exploitation and poverty. In West Africa, our exploiters have repressed dissent, imposed civil wars, promoted militant Islamist insurgencies, and Western military occupation to weaken democratic forces. Still, the masses struggle. The neo-colonial project is in crisis across West Africa. Western forces have been expelled from the Sahel. ECOWAS is in crisis after attempting to restore neocolonialism in Niger militarily. Young people are on the march across East Africa, inspiring new militancy back in West Africa. Great change is coming to our region. The next few years will be critical. And we must prepare.
The Ghana Project – Unfinished Business
The Ghana Project was Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah’s life work. It was about transforming the “Gold Coast”, “Asante Protectorate”, “Northern Territories”, and “Trans-Volta Togoland” – groups of economically and socially backward ethnic communities united mostly by a shared 500-year history of Western exploitation and oppression – into a united, sovereign African nation with modern manufacturing and an egalitarian and democratic social culture committed to a larger Pan-African socialist unity.
The CIA’s 1966 overthrow of the First Republic disrupted the Ghana Project. Our political elites, under the tutelage of the World Bank, IMF, and “donors”, have spent the last 58 years working to dismantle this Project. However, it remains the only project that makes sense of our independence and gives us meaningful identity. It remains Ghana’s unfinished business.
The Ghana Project has at least four pillars: political sovereignty, economic independence, social equality, and democratic institutions. This document describes each pillar and suggests what Ghana can do between 2025 and 2028 to move forward. We can use these to engage the next government. Most importantly, we can use these to develop popular alternatives to our neocolonial predicament. SMG will work constructively with all movements and organisations committed to this Ghana Project.
- Political Sovereignty
Ghana must assert our non-aligned national sovereignty. We must pursue egalitarian and reciprocal friendship with all countries, as we did in the First Republic. We must become a voice of Africa and the Third World defending the interests of smaller, poorer countries against Great Power bullying. Under the 4th Republic, Ghana’s sovereignty has weakened and has now collapsed. Today, we shamelessly host US military operations directed at terrorising our brothers and sisters in the Sahel.
The Ghana project requires that we subordinate our different ethnic, regional, religious, cultural, and other identities and create a mission-based non-sectarian, pan-African national identity. Nationhood must be more than shared borders or support for the Black Stars. As Osagyefo taught us, it implies a commitment to African unity and dignity and social justice for people everywhere.
We must:
● reject imperialism and colonial / neo-colonial exploitation and oppression by any nation;
● reject unilateral use of force in international relations; and
● uphold Pan-Africanism and the project for a “Union of African States” as the only way to ensure Africans’ collective sovereignty, security, and prosperity.
We must immediately repair Ghana’s current global reputation as an imperialist poodle and:
a. declare our support for the people of Palestine facing Israeli genocide;
b. support the peace process in Ukraine and promote a multilateral process towards a comprehensive and just peace in Europe;
c. repair and restore Ghana’s relations with our Sahelian neighbours and the damage to ECOWAS by President Akufo Addo’s baseless slandering of Burkina Faso and ECOWAS’ infantile invasion threats against Niger, through a programme of Pan-African democratic political reform and the pursuit of new healthy relations with the Alliance of Sahel States;
d. declare solidarity with the struggles of people fighting to defend their sovereignty against the Western bloc, including especially the Peoples of Palestine, Western
Sahara, Cuba, Venezuela, West Papua, Iran, Syria, and Yemen; and
e. work to reform the AU and refocus it on the historic task of continental unification.
- Economic Independence
We must return all sectors of our economy — mining, petroleum, finance, construction, manufacturing, and agriculture — to national control and stop exploitative arrangements with TNCs. We reject the notion that the State has no role in economic production and should just create an “enabling environment” for foreign investor profitability hoping that this will stimulate economic development. We welcome foreign private investors willing to work within a regime that prioritises the interests of our people and the transfer of critical technology to us. Today, our quest for economic independence requires urgent action on specific fronts as follows:
2.1. National Mobilisation
A national mobilisation strategy is especially important since we are cut off from the international financial markets for the next few years. The best way to build economic independence, reserves, and national capacity, is to fully harness Ghanaian expertise, ingenuity, management, technical and financial capacity, and muscle power to deliver our needs ourselves. Through mobilisation we can turn our immediate disadvantages into a long-term strategic advantage.
A national mobilisation programme would involve at least:
a. agreement on national project priorities;
b. co-optation of expertise and resources from universities, Uniformed
Services, State Enterprises, and the National Service Scheme;
c. volunteers willing to postpone part of their entitlements to invest in Ghana;
d. a coordination office (largely volunteer-staffed) to administer a national scheme; and
e. establishment of project-level brigades for execution.
Many Ghanaians are committed to our country and its self-reliant development. A mobilisation scheme can lay the foundations for a self-reliant economy.
2.2. Debt Crisis
Debt is one of the main instruments that international capital uses to suck wealth out of developing countries and keep them too weak to resist exploitation. Almost all the wealth we generate from cocoa, mining, oil, and gas, and timber is taken away as fees and dividends by companies owned by the capitalist elite. This leaves us with no savings. We then borrow money from the Banks owned by the same capitalist elite to fund “development” activities (which often means paying more exorbitant fees to consultants and contractors also owned by the global capitalist elite). Interest payments and bank charges then further drain our wealth. As our income dwindles, as is the situation now, the State must borrow the equivalent of 28% of national revenue to meet its monthly wage bill.
These banks profit more from lending to developing countries to commercial companies (supposedly because of the higher risks of third-world sovereign loans). International banks pressure our officials to borrow money that our society does not utilise properly or repay. Then, the Banks lend us additional money (“refinancing”) to meet our repayment obligations, worsening our crisis. Then, when the economy crashes, our leaders run to the IMF. The IMF represents the international banking system and Western States’ combined might. It pressures governments to impose austerity on their already suffering citizens to find money to repay the Banks. The IMF imposes “conditionalities” – wage freezes, lay-offs, taxes, state asset sales (e.g. Tema Port or SSNIT hotels), further liberalisation of investments, and accelerated repatriation of capital – policy measures to attract more foreign investment and economic development. The fact that Ghana is now in its 17th IMF programme since 1966 demonstrates clearly that IMF prescriptions do not lead to financial independence. They rather keep us in debt slavery.
We must review Ghana’s borrowing operations. We must determine which debts were designed simply to benefit “family and friends”. We must:
a. punish officials who put personal interest ahead of the public interest and retrieve “stolen” funds;
b. sanction lenders who have colluded in imposing illegitimate debts on the
State;
c. set (or reinforce) strict rules for state borrowing;
d. establish effective mechanisms to ensure the Ministry of Finance and other
MDAs comply with the rules; and
e. convene a process allowing all the similarly debt-strapped African countries (like Kenya and Nigeria – with whose people SMG is in full solidarity) to develop a common position on Africa’s debt situation.
2.3. Peasant Agriculture
Agriculture is the foundation of our economy and the basis for industrialisation. Peasant farmers are the foundation of our agriculture, especially food production, and must also be the base for national industrialisation. Our peasants are threatened by policies that seek to displace them on behalf of (foreign-controlled) capital-intensive, oft-toxic “agribusiness”. By contrast, the Ghana Project must involve reversing peasant oppression by “landowners”, TNCs, and State officials and promote policies that empower peasant farmers within a planned economy.
Some of these core policies and programmes include:
a. assert national public ownership and administration of all arable land in Ghana with payment over time of appropriate compensation to current owners;
b. develop institutional arrangements to provide affordable and secure land access to peasant farmers without reference to ethnicity, family, or gender;
c. promote cooperative production and processing as a more productive and egalitarian form of economic organisation than extended families, casual labour, or corporations;
d. support MMDAs to:
i. earmark lands for cooperative food production with price guarantees to ensure food security for local institutions – (e.g. schools, hospitals, tourist facilities);
ii. build public infrastructure to support peasant production, processing, and marketing;
iii. establish research and extension centres to investigate local challenges and build farmers’ technical capacity and organisation; and
iv. establish seed banks to preserve indigenous varieties;
e. proscribe chemical and biochemical inputs and incentivise the development and use of Indigenous agroecological farming systems and bioinputs;
f. proscribe GMO food farming; and
g. compel banks to maintain portfolios of small-scale cooperative venture assets.
2.4. Manufacturing
Without manufacturing our economy cannot develop qualitatively and create jobs. Manufacturing development depends on steady agricultural surpluses for food processing, textiles, and pharmaceutical manufacturing for local consumption and export.
We must:
a. promote integrated sector-wide national planning with the full participation of all stakeholders, national institutions, and agencies and move away from the silo model of planning;
b. collaboration amongst farmers’ cooperatives, public enterprises, and private (primarily Ghanaian) entrepreneurs;
c. strategic marketing to access niche markets in the sub-region and further afield; and
d. linkages with our energy and minerals sector.
2.5. Extractives
Extractives (oil and gas, minerals, timber, rare earth, etc.) are important for the Ghana Project. Currently, extraction processes are highly mechanised, and we hardly process the raw materials. Thus, we create few jobs. Transnational Corporations (TNCs) realise most of the resource value abroad but leave our communities with tremendous environmental and social dislocation.
We must:
a. rebalance our economic relations with transnationals and multinationals in the extractives sector (e.g., stop mining companies from keeping up to 80% of foreign exchange earnings outside of Ghana);
b. use extractive incomes to create capacity and public enterprises that:
i. capture rent from TNCs;
ii. enforce laws that require TNCs to process in-country or supply raw materials to local processors to earn higher income and support our industrialisation;
c. review the investment regimes for new extractives investors to ensure that completion of rigorous social and environmental impact assessments and funded restoration plans are conditions for the award and retention of leases.
2.6. Power
We cannot industrialise without reliable electric power. Ghana has raw energy sources (natural gas, sunlight, wind, geothermal energy) and much of the infrastructure required to supply reliable power for industrial and social use. We have failed to do so largely because competing elements of the political and bureaucratic elite have interfered consistently with professional decision-making and repeatedly landed us with overexpensive and technically sub-optimal “solutions”. We must clean out the energy sector and install governance systems and long-term planning that protect our national interest.
2.7. Infrastructure
The construction industry is a job creator, particularly in a surplus labour economy like ours. Now that we are cut off from most external commercial and development financing, the design and construction of essential facilities – roads, railroads, warehouses, factories, schools, and hospitals – must be done locally. This could create thousands and thousands of meaningful jobs and lay the basis for an internationally competitive indigenous engineering and construction industry.
2.8. The Heritage Industry
Ghana was once a centre of black history and culture. We can be again. We can build a unique, dignified heritage industry around our unique geographical, historical, cultural, and political resources. We can retell the story of African civilisation positively from the dawn of civilisation to the classical pre-contact West African empires, to the debacle of slavery and slave trading that spread “Afro” cultures all over the world, to the fight for liberation and statehood and the ongoing quest for continental unity. Around this everexpanding template, we can build cinematic, theatrical, musical, culinary, dance, logistical, and tourism products, enterprises, and jobs (academics, writers, performers, producers, impresarios, hoteliers, restaurateurs, night clubs and logistics professionals) in collaboration with other Africans and the diaspora. This strengthens all pillars of the Ghana Project.
- Social Equality
3.1. Equality
True unity requires social equality. All citizens must have equal rights, opportunities, and access to public facilities and services, no matter how diverse we are in terms of race, ethnicity, language, religion, official rank, education, wealth, or other features. All are equal in their entitlements from society, obligation to serve society, and interpersonal relations.
Ghana today is far from the united, purposeful, and equal society Nkrumah charged us to build. Our leaders divide and exploit us by tribe, region, religion, gender, age, and political party. These differences deny many their rights or subject them to prejudice.
We cannot leave the resolution of this crisis to a future generation because it is too “sensitive” (i.e., it will cost elite patronage or even popular votes). We must push for social equality and solidarity. We need leaders who will build the political, legal, social, and cultural systems that make this sense of unity and equality possible.
We must:
a. operate an entirely secular state neither promoting nor interfering with religious practice, provided religions operate within the law and do not offend public policy or promote disharmony;
b. cede no political power to unelected social hierarchies based on wealth, ideology, or tradition;
a. assert national ownership of all natural resources, including land, and administer these resources purely through statutory bodies accountable to all citizens;
b. treat all traditional and other cultural institutions equally as private institutions, neither supporting nor interfering with them to the extent that they do not limit other citizens’ material or cultural rights or promote division within society; and
c. provide rounded, technology and science-based, fee-free education for all citizens.
3.2. Gender Equality
Gender equality is non-negotiable. The majority of our citizens are women with full constitutional rights. Women play a unique role in the reproduction of society, which we must protect and support.
We must, in the next four years, achieve:
a. 6-months paid maternity leave for pregnant women in both the public and private sectors;
b. arrangements for expectant fathers to support women in the care of newborns in both the public and private sectors and
c. establishment of early childcare facilities for young mothers in both the public and private sectors;
d. equal opportunities for men and women at all levels of all public and private institutions;
a. make proof of affirmative action a condition for bidding for public contracts; and
b. proactively removing barriers to women’s participation in public life, including an immediate end to taxation of sanitary products and subsidies on feminine hygiene products for women studying in state-funded institutions.
3.3. Healthcare
Ghana’s healthcare system needs restructuring. Our fundamental priorities must be:
a. to ensure minimum levels of nutrition, education, hygiene, exercise, and environment, to all;
b. enable regular medical checkups to detect potential problems before they become critical.
c. prioritise universal access to basic health facilities like CHPS compounds as well as health services in schools and markets and transport yards (at Unit Committee level);
d. Build and staff District Hospitals.
3.4. Education
Our Education must produce enlightened well-rounded citizens with a firm grasp of human history, wholesome social values, an understanding of science and technology, and personal skills that allow each to contribute collectively and meaningfully to the Ghana Project. We must:
a. emphasise the “compulsory” element in FCUBE and adjust school calendars and timetables to local farming patterns to make childhood education less of a sacrifice;
b. educate parents about school and urge them to allow (especially girls) children to attend and, where necessary, sanction recalcitrant parents,
c. make state education at all levels effectively free at the point of delivery but require greater responsibility from beneficiaries (e.g. food production and building maintenance) and a more effective national service and student loan scheme (for tertiary students);
d. make history a core subject at the SHS level so all citizens understand their history, pan-African identity, mission; and
e. deliver a massive “Literacy for Development” programme for non-literate adults.
- Building a Democratic State
The Ghana Project requires higher official accountability to the grassroots and greater participation in national policymaking. How can we democratise the State?
4.1. Electing and Managing Leaders
Democracy prioritises the needs of the many above the privilege of the few. Ritual elections every four years is not democracy. What we have now is “electoralism” rather than democracy. We must rethink our democracy and establish in law and practice that:
a. Democracy is not just the periodic election of officials. It involves increasing participation in socioeconomic policymaking and oversight of elected officials.
b. Elections must be transparent, substantive, issue-driven, equal-opportunity processes, not wasteful, diversionary elite auctions. A restructured EC must ensure the integrity of our electoral processes and hold politicians and political parties to standards that serve the national development agenda. The EC must also grow the capacity of MMDAs to hold quick, cost-effective referenda on critical issues.
c. Elected officials at all levels must serve at the people’s pleasure. We must develop mechanisms for the instant recall of underperforming elected officials by the appropriate bodies.
4.2. Decentralising Government
Democracy requires constant devolution of power and finance to the people. We must:
a. devolve more ministerial functions and operational decision-making for agriculture, education, health, justice delivery, and public safety to MMDAs and develop the relevant MDAs as standardising and monitoring technocracies providing backup for MMDAs;
b. focus RCCs on policy monitoring,
c. democratise MMDAs so that citizens can elect all Assemblymen and MMDCEs directly; and
d. give Assemblies more collective responsibilities and slate more issues for District referenda.
4.3. Lawmaking
Ghana’s legislative function needs reform to increase democratic participation in lawmaking and reduce associated costs. We must:
a. link MMDA and Parliamentary legislative processes to increase grassroots participation in the debates that inform national legislation;
b. draw national legislators from MMDAs or adopt a proportional representation system in which political Parties’ ranking of individuals’ capabilities is the basis for election to Parliament rather than the corrupt, individualised constituency “beauty pageants” we have now;
c. separate legislative and executive oversight functions and upgrade the Auditor General’s Department to report publicly on executive policy performance;
d. restrict Parliamentary sittings to a single session of four months in a year;
e. make the position of MP a voluntary one that attracts an allowance rather than the salary and perks currently in place; and
f. prohibit MPs from holding ministerial office.
4.4. Settling Disputes
Citizens of Ghana do not enjoy justice. Our judicial system is undemocratic and archaic.
Our judicial system is the quintessential colonial institution, priding itself on its alienation from society and its roots in a normative system that evolved to prop up feudal and capitalist exploitation of ordinary and especially colonised people.
Our judicial system does not promote or even recognise citizens’ collective or socioeconomic rights. It does not enforce our constitution’s “Directive Principles of State Policy”. It is not development-oriented. It does not protect organised citizens from routine abuse by other state agencies like the police and military.
Our judiciary suffers major problems of corruption, caprice, indolence, and impunity in its dealings with citizens and staff, with the Chief Justice exercising too much power.
We must democratise, modernise, and liberate the judicial function. We must collectively consider the following measures:
a. cap the number of judges at the Supreme Court;
b. introduce fixed terms for judges;
c. subject judges and court registrars to the same asset declaration requirements as elected officials; and
d. re-establish and develop a system that offers lower access costs, simpler procedures, and greater emphasis on distributive and restorative justice for citizens, especially at the community level.
