In Ghana even civilian security services in the form of The Ghana Police Service has been privatised and you have an accident at your peril. Because, if you do, you will bear the cost privately yourself. You will pay for the police to attend the accident. You will pay for your vehicle to be towed. You will pay for all communications costs. You will pay to attend all meetings. You will pay for the repair of your vehicle if not fully insured. You will pay for the police to pursue the other party if it is not your fault. You will pay for funerals if someone dies. You will pay with your life if you are fatally hurt at the site of the accident. You will pay for all insurance premiums. All this payments are PRIVATE.
John Maynard Keynes, a British Economist who saved Capitalism in the 20th Century, said we are all dead in the long run. But Free Market social-political practice, the most wicked economic system ever devised by the mind of devils, indeed the personification of all that is evil in man, was determined to ensure we all died now. Hence, under this evil economic system, the democratic majority of the human race continued to live in poverty. But the Trans-Atlantic strategic partnership between Africans on the continent of Africa, The United States of America and the United Kingdom, was central in the defeat of colonial rule in Africa. Freedom was not given to us; Africans took it through the demand for Self-Government.
The key African actors of that partnership met in Manchester, UK, in 1945 and out of that Pan African Conference went the call to all Africans and African Leaders to fight towards colonial freedom or for the end of colonial rule. Self government was definitely better than the best form of colonial rule. After all, the end of colonial rule would give Africa the policy freedom to make political economic decisions that would lead to the creation of wealth necessary for the eradication of poverty on the African continent. Freedom was fraught with difficulties as is progressively developing a new and independent nation in self-determination; but it was better to be free, hungry and able to call on one’s inner motion of forces (powers) without political constraints than be a well-fed slave without the birthright of the light of self-determination, the power of and plan for development and the love of unity.
The African Esaus, who are forever calling for self-government in the shortest possible time or some future date and never in this life or our life time, disagreed, and are forever begging to be well-fed slaves in the Kitchen of White Supremacists or beggars at the capitalist G8 table like the sick and dirty Lazarus, when they could have all the wealth in the first place. But the divine desire for the light of freedom, the power of progressive development and love of unity would lead to the manifestation of the policy programme that emerged from Manchester 1945 that came to be known later as The Kwame Nkrumah Agenda. The fourth tenet of that Agenda was the social and economic reconstruction of Africa. It could already be found in the pamphlet “Towards Colonial Freedom”.
Thus was launched “The African Revolution”. Its most lethal enemy then was Global White Economic Supremacy (GWEC) led by Downing Street/The White House and its determination to continue to divert African wealth for a minority of the human race and a handful of families in Europe and America. But African warriors either as an Osahene or an Osagyefo or a Kaletor, have never been afraid because they know they are the Medusa with many heads; its only need is African time of which there is an eternal abundance; and the time will come sooner than later whereupon GWEC will be defeated, destroyed and buried forever and forever.
It is the inevitable advent of the new dawn that all members of the most advanced Caucasian secret societies know and which they fight as a supreme duty to prevent. It has been clear as an eternal prophecy that the people of Bilal can never be stopped when the time, as a thief in the night, comes as it will surely come, just as the end of colonial rule came and is now history. The African Revolution was not to be one of revolutionary violence with the shedding of blood that flowed only for those who came as liberators to impose their unlawful will on the nation. But armed struggle when it came was welcome by African freedom fighters with boldness, confidence and without fear. Ask about the Spear of the Nation, or the Mau Mau or The League of Ghana Patriots, or The Freedom Defence Society or The Philosophy Club.
Global capitalism had nuclear weapons which we Africans neither had nor desired. We had more powerful weapons. We had the pen and transformed MINDS: the most powerful weapons ever to be created by NATURE (a God) – which no weapon can defeat. If you kill transformed minds, they simply over time are reborn even more powerful than before. This is the Medusa with many heads. The Rebirth of God(s) as Man amongst us is the fundamental teaching of African Traditional Religion. But it is also the fundamental truth of the Torah, the Bible and the Koran.
The heart of the African Revolution thus was an intellectual revolution – MINDS - in which the thinking and philosophy of Africans was transformed through renewal from a colonial mind to a free and independent one. This intellectual revolution stood behind the social revolution that was to drive the social and economic reconstruction of Africa. And succeed we shall however long it takes. We mean to be Masters of our own continent. And we shall.
The African Revolution was thus beyond the puerile and White Supremacist struggles over capitalism and socialism. Barrack Obama is just a foretaste of what is in store when the stone that was rejected by the builders becomes the cornerstone in the universal Mosque, Church and Shrine unified in the concrete humanity of The Ancient of Days. The African Revolution was rooted in a synthesis that called for a progressive economics for a progressive social order for an increasing standard of life for Africans.
Sooner or later, the British led by the British High Commission in Accra and the Americans led by the CIA after the independence celebrations in Accra, began to take counsel to destroy the newly independent states of Africa. Top of the list was Ghana, the CPP and Kwame Nkrumah, who was the embodiment of God’s will for Africans at that point in time. Not even a bomb could kill him because the Angels lifted him from the ground when the bomb went off and he stood standing causing some to ask if he had not died. Before then even bullets had missed him. He died when he was ready to move on.
Meetings were held in the White House. And meetings were held in the IMF and the World Bank. And Secret Meetings were also held in neighbouring African countries. The sophisticated and tolerant British who had handed over political power to the independent state of Ghana were present at these meetings. Kofi Abrefa Busia and his strategic partners in the National Liberation Movement later part of United Party, now NPP, was also at some of these meetings. The strategic goal was to recolonise Ghana and Africa with the help of African rebels and traitors, who are loved above all else by the British and the British High Commission in Accra. No wonder the UPists shouted for joy when they heard the death of Kwame Nkrumah; it was like the Jewish High Priests celebrating the death of the Prophet Jesus. The result was that the African Consensus of Manchester 1945 was replaced with an alternative undemocratic military-imposed Washington Consensus. The Washington Consensus set aside the social and economic reconstruction of Africa and imposed the unconstitutional and illegal economics of structural adjustment (SAP) and its consequent PAMSCAD. In Ghana the DIC was set up under the Washington Consensus to sell State Assets at bargain prices to foreigners and Ghanaian collaborators. Essentially though it was an exercise in the weakening of Ghanaian Global Market Competition to clear the way for further exploitation. The DIC process is still in place, after PNDC (NDC and NPP), which had begun in 1966, advertising today in The Economist magazine.
The Washington Consensus run until by the end of the 20th Century it became unsustainable. Latin America then looked for an alternative consensus and came up with The Santiago Consensus. This was later to unfold as the Latin American Counter Freemarket Socialism for the 21st Century revolution led by Venezuela and Hugo Chavez, who like Kwame Nkrumah, the CIA has sought to either kill or overthrow.
But in Africa, unlike the Santiago Consensus, the World Bank developed a new consensus called the Comprehensive Development Framework (CDF) out of which HIPC – the highly indebted poor countries initiative- was born. Its strategy was to keep the Black God spiritually asleep and dead, spiritually blind, intellectually paralysed and physically sick without adequate nutrition, clean water and proper housing.
In Ghana by then the Liberal-Conservative Military-Civilian Junta who had imposed the Washington Consensus on us through the illegal Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) regime had formed new political parties called the NDC and the NPP to contest power and shut out the Progressives likely to be reborn as the CPP. Post-PNP policy was to do all to keep it buried deep in the earth. The problem was that the Earth was a Mother who just keeps having more of indestructible Black children that the British High Commission and USAID fund projects to prevent and celebrate in their documents as population decreases.
The NDC had held power for eight years and it was the turn of the NPP to also hold power for eight years. That was the liberal-conservative secret agreement that underpinned the creation of the 4th Republic. On the surface especially in public they were never to agree to create the impression that there was some fundamental disagreement between the liberals and the conservatives. Under this game, opposition was banned and Parliament became the House of The Majority and The Minority. By the time the CDF was crafted it was the NPP that was in power (2000) and they like the NDC before them implemented the new Post-Washington Consensus as HIPC.
Behind all these developments from 1945 onwards was Free Market Capitalism determined to impose its Capitalist class will willy-nilly on all and sundry from Accra to Latin America to Asia to Russia to China, while denying the same Class Struggle it was engaged in.
The Free Market successfully argued that the solution to all economic problems was greed and privatisation. Ghanaian politicians who found greed very profitable agreed. Many who found it objectionable for one man to have more than a house or a car and previously preached “accountability” or “one man one house” or “one man one car” suddenly also agreed.
Some were even Die Hard Marxists who came to be seductively enticed by the sweet music of the Free Market Mantra. The neo-liberal revival that began in the 1960s and 1970s to be later called Neocons in America but The New Right earlier in UK, was complete. The following Leading Lights of the African Revolution, having completed their tasks, were also by now dead or in transition: Kwame Nkrumah, Elijah Muhammad, George Padmore, Marcus Garvey, Dubois, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X to mention a few.
Under the Free Market in the 21st Century contrary to Socialism for the 21st Century, even government was to be privatised and all done to downsize government, balance budgets and reduce spending on social programmes – meaning no bailouts for the Poor Majority in the form of social welfare spending of any description. Liberal-Conservative Politicians should more profitably spend their time dreaming of how to use public office and/or public funds to maximise private gain and/or simply create the right conditions for private businesses which some bought at cheap bargain prices from the privatised state; or which they created and then joined as board members with lucrative salaries after they left office. So it was. The justificatory stage had been set for the rise of the Anglo-Gold Ashantis and the Halliburtons and the building of the biggest American Military Base but termed an Embassy in Accra. But the origin lay partly and earlier in Hitler’s Germany and Nazism in which fellow citizens labelled Socialists were violently murdered or seriously wounded. Many of these socialists were Jews who were to suffer later in Concentration Camps for daring to take Germany on the socialist path. This anti-Semitism did not exclude Karl Marx. Militarised fanatical anti-socialism found its way into the “Bones and Skulls” and into the White House with the murder of President Kennedy and thence progressive leaders in Africa. A member of that secret society was the same Head of the CIA who oversaw the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah after a Lincoln student was installed as a Black USA Ambassador to Ghana. His son became the President under who the latest phase of the Free Market Revolution was the invasion of Iraq under “Shock and Awe” that had began in the origins of Nazi Germany and Milton Friedman’s Economic classes in unfettered free market economics.
Thus from 1957 to 2007 the Free Market with the frenzy of vampirism symoblised by the skulls and bones of dead people, literally transferred to Germany by German Soldiers under Nazism, imposed its privatisation programme on us all and argued all Markets be freed to enable private firms to greedily operate on a global scale freely. Global institutions like WTO were set up to ease this and national institutions like GIPC in Ghana under illegal military regimes were set up to further ease it. The Agenda’s policy was the same for Africa. It was as undemocratic as it was military-powered.
It is this fraud that privatisation is the solution to all economic problems – not capitalism itself -that collapsed with the global credit crunch. Instead of privatisation, private financial firms at the heart of the circuit of global capital are rather been nationalised or bailed out or given tax-payers money or served still-warm to others. Under the free market policy prescription this was not to happen. They were not supposed to be nationalised. More privatisation was supposed to be what should have happened. And if that did not work, more privatisation was the further answer. And if that did not work, you privatise even more and more. More and not less privatisation is the staple diet the global free market institutions fed the world. It was sheer madness of the schizophrenic type.
It is this mad fraud that all costs must be privatised that has finally been exposed for all to see that nationalisation is an economic tool that belongs to the people; as such it can be used to bail out a Wealthy Privileged few or a Rich Minority or the Poor Majority. The Liberal-Conservative Elites, called Neocons, as we saw in America being led by Paulson will use it if it is in their own private interest. We saw how the costs of financial collapse has been nationalised whereas before that the profits were privatised and one man then could earn bonuses of millions of dollars which clearly was unrelated to labour. But then value has been divorced from labour. The capitalists because they were in power ensured that. They also dishonestly claimed that when a group of people work to create wealth, somehow all the wealth belongs to the capitalist. Thus Progressives, for whom all economic policy tools must be used to lift up the Poor Majority, literally the majority of the human race, from now on must not be intellectually intimidated, cowed or ashamed to use nationalisation amongst others as an economic policy tool to implement national development for the eradication of poverty in Ghana and Africa, the economic and social reconstruction of Africa and the increasing standard of life of Africans. This is what I have been trying to say since I started publishing Anti-Free Market articles on Ghanaweb.
The time for Progressives and Nkrumaists has come. We must get ready to take Ghana back. We must get ready to take our beloved country and our continent back. We must prepare for Government and take back Ghana from the Liberal NDC and Conservative NPP and rescue it from Free Market Madness.
Note on Writer: Kwami Agbodza is a member of Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention Peoples’ Party (CPP).