Good morning, Mr President. I write in your January 7 go to to Ghana to attend the inauguration of His Excellency, President John Dramani Mahama, the model new president of Ghana. The Ghanaian president honoured you an incredible deal by offering you with an ex-cathedra place to deal with the Ghanaians, Africa and the world. That’s quintessential pan-Africanism and I hope you bought the sense of the event.
To make certain, Mr President your speech invoked the spirit of our ancestors, on this case, the spirit of legendary Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah. You should be quoted as a result of the invocation is the highpoint of that quick speech.
In your phrases, “The spirit of Ghana’s first President, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, is right here in the present day, lifting that star larger and better. Simply as Ghana attracts inspiration and a properly of power from Nkrumah and lots of of its previous leaders, Nigeria equally attracts inspiration from its founding leaders who not solely fought for her independence but additionally cherished the shut relationship between our two nations…Could we at all times stroll in the way in which and the spirit of those enlightened leaders…Ghana is in concord with that spirit, and President John Mahama’s inauguration in the present day displays that.”
Mr President, as I listened to your speech, invoking the spirit of our revered ancestors, I mentioned to myself that you just have been turning a brand new leaf. To make use of the unconventional phrase, you have been about to commit class suicide, which I had suggested on this serial. I hope it was not sheer rhetoric and pathos woven into the speech to the viewers’s delight or within the phrases of the late Mr Igberase, my Faith Information trainer of yore, to bamboozle your hearers.
Mr President, let me inform you one thing concerning the spirit of the ancestor you invoked, the spirit of Nkrumah. That spirit is revolutionary, emancipatory, and pan-African in essence. A revolutionary believes in change. His universe is the individuals. He exudes love and abhors oppression. He tells no lies to the individuals. To be Pan-African means to consider within the black man’s self-determination, his freedom from racial oppression, and self-reliance, whether or not on the continent or diaspora. The hunt for the realisation of these values interprets right into a motion led by Edward Blyden, Marcus Garvey, Du Bois, and Nkrumah, all now within the pantheon of our ancestors.
Nkrumah impressed a technology of African intellectuals and leaders. His strongest weapon was the weapon of concept which inheres an incredible deal in two of his main works, particularly, Consciencism and Neo-colonialism, the Final Stage of Imperialism (1965).
Consciencism (1964) is a philosophical pathway to liberation from the obscurantism of the triple heritage embracing African conventional civilisation, Judeo-Christian custom and Islamic civilisation that has created contradictions in Africa’s historic trajectory of social growth. It’s a Marxist evaluation of African circumstances and the struggles towards imperialism. It arises from the context of colonialism, imperialism, disunity and absence of growth in Africa.
As Nkrumah places it, “Consciencism is the map in mental phrases of the disposition of forces which is able to allow African society to digest the Western and the Islamic and the Euro-Christian parts in Africa, and develop them in the way in which that they match into the African character. The African character is itself outlined by the cluster of humanist ideas which underlie the normal African society.”
A Marxist evaluation of African circumstances and the struggles towards imperialism. It arises from the context of colonialism, imperialism, disunity and absence of growth in Africa. Nkrumah underlines materialism as its foundation and notes that “The minimal assertion of materialism is absolutely the and impartial existence of matter. Matter is a plenum of forces that are in antithesis to 1 one other and thus endowed with self-motion.”
Neo-colonialism, the final Stage of Imperialism (1965) is a magnum opus, no marvel, he voted probably the most basic African mental of the final century. The work dissects imperialism and divulges in vivid phrases its entrails which can have prompted his overthrow by the CIA because the U.S. State Division declassified paperwork have proven. Nkrumah says the “e-book is subsequently an try to look at neo-colonialism not solely in its African context and its relation to African unity, however in world perspective.”
In response to him, “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is topic to it’s, in concept, impartial and has all of the outward trappings of worldwide sovereignty. In actuality its financial system and thus its political coverage is directed from exterior…The strategies and type of this path can take varied shapes. For instance, in an excessive case the troops of the imperial energy could garrison the territory of the neo-colonial State and management the federal government of it. Extra typically, nevertheless, neo-colonialist management is exercised by means of financial or financial means.”
Neo-colonialism is central to the struggles which are being waged by the younger officers in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, who bond collectively within the Alliance of the Sahel States. You noticed the ovation acquired by Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso, a Sankara incarnate. It’s as a result of he stands for his individuals and towards imperialism. That is the cross you sign to hold in your Accra speech. Mr President, don’t look again.Prof. Akhaine is of the Division of Political Science, Lagos State College.
