We have entered a New Year and the Convention People's (CPP) wishes you all a healthy, happy and prosperous New Year with success in all our social and economic endeavours in the coming year and thereafter.

May the year 2015 be a year of increased opportunities to enable us improve the quality of our lives. Above all, 2015 should be a year of active preparation for a big change in the next general election.

The CPP laments that our nation today has lost a great deal of the confidence, the can-do spirit, the self-help and great motivational drive which set us apart and propelled us to rapid development soon after political independence.

We suffered a shock when the development vision of the CPP government under the leadership of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah was truncated and abandoned and with that, we lost our ability to fight back as a nation and to rediscover our lost confidence and destiny.

Over the subsequent years endemic corruption, mismanagement, a visionless approach to development, and lack of planning among many negative interconnected factors, have driven our nation to poverty and hopelessness, leaving a ruined economy dependent on aid and external loans to survive.

Our vital state assets have been sold or disposed of; resources which would have helped us take back control of our national economy and enabled us to provide basic needs like clean drinking water and uninterrupted power in every household. Instead, today we now have no manufacturing base to produce for consumption and for export. Rapid population growth, mounting filth and squalor, environmental pollution and degradation all threaten our security as a nation and feed into our loss of freedom and sovereignty.

As we usher in the New Year, the CPP wishes to pose these pertinent questions:

1. For how long must we as a nation continue to sell raw materials to keep the factories of other nations running?

2. For how long must we continue to import expensive finished products into our country to meet the ever-growing market demands of our people?

3. Will it not make economic sense to set up hundreds of factories to produce many of the products we need right here in Ghana?

These are some of the pertinent questions, which the CPP wishes to pose for careful consideration in the coming years. Answers to these questions must reflect in the votes we cast in the 2016 elections.

The CPP will continue to be the voice of the people in 2015, insisting that our resources benefit and help millions of Ghanaians and not just a few.

On behalf of the entire membership and sympathizers of the Convention People's Party, I wish you a happy and prosperous New Year.

Samia Yaba Nkrumah

CPP National Chairperson and Leader

www.conventionpeoplesparty.org