From the day that Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo Addo stated that his economic program for Ghana was indigenous capitalism we knew he was mad. Not mad in literal terms as an alleged taker of illicit drugs without an educational certificate to show to date but mad in ideological and practical policy terms. The madness as we saw it stemmed from he Akuffo-Addo’ own opportunist and illogical ideological evolution from Nkrumaism and socialism to free market capitalism to indigenous capitalism.

Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo Addo once believed in Nkrumaism and he may still do. When his father was President of Ghana he used to attend NASSO meetings. That is not why he never smiles and looks angry. There is more to that. NASSO by the way stands for National Association of Socialist Students Organisation. NASSO had its organisational roots in the struggle for national independence long before Kwame Nkrumah arrived in Ghana in December 1947 then the Gold Coast. It had its roots in the political movement that sprung from Helena Blavatsky’s theosophy which had seen the victory of India’s Independence in 1947. Ten years later in 1957, the bearers of that torch who would join the spiritual dimension for the struggle for independence including Val Vanis from Dzodze, would join Nkrumah to proclaim Ghana a free and independent nation forever with its motto as freedom and justice. Those young men and women including the likes of Charles Heymann are those who later went on to form The League of Ghana Patriots which later metamorphosed into NASSO.

Those were the days of true Ghanaian Patriots (not todays New Patriotic Party who are anything but patriots) who could raise their voice in prayer thus: “Great God of Africa...”; and fast for African Gods – by which I mean leaders. But political independence was never an end in itself and CPP knew this and progressive Ghanaians all over the world also knew it. The Hannah Cudjoes and the Great CPP Women knew this.

Today’s voting youth do not know what their parents knew. Or else, how can they vote for NPP; let alone join it as Akuffo-Addo has done? We understood that political power was the means by which the political policy of the new Independent Ghanaian State could eventually be directed towards the social and economic reconstruction of Africa and later the rise of the Black Man globally as we the original race once again took control of our planet from the White Supremacist usurpers and their black collaborators.

We members of the Original Race have always meant to be Masters of our own Continent however long it took. And Masters of the Planet Earth too. We are the true Masters of the Universe with the philosophers stone and not financial wizards at the recently collapsed Lehman Brothers.

Ethiopia’s rise was to permeate every corner of the earth. And we knew we would once again become Masters of the Universe that the Original Black Man created out of himself.

Dubois had already said that the future would in all probability be determined by us and all knew it was true including principalities, rulers, powers and even those like the CIA, MI6 and APA engaged in spiritual wickedness against black self-determination, progressive development and unitarism.

Nana Addo-Dankwa Akuffo-Addo loved these ideas in their infancy or in different forms. Maybe he still does. As a young man he read socialist books and studied African Philosophy in Nkrumah’s writings, namely “Africa Must Unite”, “Conscienscism” and “Neocolonialism: the last stage of Imperialism.” Maybe like a lot of todays Left in Ghana, he never read them all or thought very little of Consciencism. But he knew the difference. Many Nkrumaists essentially do. And understanding this, he must have known that indigenous capitalism could never be the answer to our problem of economic dependency and national poverty. No indigenous private capitalist in Ghana is strong enough to withstand the force of foreign capital backed by the G8 or G7.

Foreign capitalists with African collaborators have the power to do anything and everything including murder and the undemocratic imposition of illegal regimes to get their way.

The history of post-colonial coups is just one example of the “awe and shock” doctrine that American Capital took from African to Latin America and then finally to Iraq in the quest to impose their will for the maximum extraction of repatriateable surplus.

The last decades has seen what amounts to a class war by the global capitalist class against workers and non-workers especially the youth to free themselves from any decent and civilised obligation within any national borders. They called the project Globalisation.

Only the State has the power or shall we say is capable of assuming the power to withstand the power of greedy foreign capitalists when it comes to a military showdown and say mercenaries are hired by foreign capitalists as a last resort.

But then the State can only be that strong if its Armed Forces are loyal to the State and is not prepared to commit treason as we saw in 1966 when three groups of Ghanaians - from the Danquah-Dombo-Busia tradition, the Ghana Armed Forces and The Ghana Police Service - took $13,000,000 bribe and unlawfully overthrew an elected government.

So the military must be part of the Executive Government that along with Ghanaian consumers, Ghanaian investors, Ghanaian importers and Ghanaian exporters constitute the key economic agents of Ghana’s gross national product. The lack of power of indigenous private capital is why the State must, and did under CPP and the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, set up State Businesses as an interventionist state using all means necessary including nationalisation and privatisation in the interest not only of a privileged few but the Ghanaian Majority and hence all Ghanaians.

And it is this organisation that can be strong enough to withstand the manipulations of foreign capital because all the security forces will be part of the economic structures as it was the case when military officers were also heads of organisations before some were murdered by PNDC members. It was not the fact that military officers were heads of public corporations under say General Acheampong that was wrong. It is was the fact that they held those positions without the mandate of the people of Ghana.

Good businesses will remain good if domestic markets are also guarded by our security forces as a result of which our Government cannot be illegally overthrown because they implement policies that end the export of our wealth to feed foreigners while Ghanaians live on less than $2 a day.

Afterall trade is war. And in war you need your best military minds. The best military minds in the world can be found among Africans and on Ghanaian soil. Ask anyone who knows.

So no amount of indigenous capitalism by which Akuffo-Addo meant small business as found in the informal sector being made part of the formal economy will create wealth for the progressive development of Ghana. The idea was complete madness. The fact he himself wanted to be President and not a small business owner in an informal economy was testament that it was unprofitable. Those there like Kayayei for instance are there because society has neglected them. But formalising them is not the answer either. The total destruction of our informal sector as a socioeconomic disease is the way forward. No amount of tinkering with our daughters to continue to enable them carry loads as beasts of burden in Accra’s CBD is sound national development policy. This goes for all aspects of underdevelopment called the informal economy.

Indeed the Ghanaian State may not even be strong enough to withstand a certain level of the power of foreign capital. In those cases, only a Continental State of Africa will have the kind of global power required to develop, own, manage and finance the kind of businesses needed to transform the lives of Africans in a highly industrialised and powerful single African co-ordinated continental economy.

Free Market capitalism falsely and dishonestly told Ghanaians under the leadership of autocratic liberals (now mostly in NDC) and autocratic conservatives (now mostly in NPP) to sell its State economic organisations and put that in the hand of another state organisation called DIC. The anomaly has not been obvious to those who create and manage the divestiture process. But many have become fat cats as a result. Through it state businesses were sold through the policy of privatisation. And those who said it was the wrong policy were labelled socialists until only recently the Communist State too staged a spectacular Olympics with the help of the same foreign capitalists who were asking us to sell our state organisations. But when the credit crunch hit them, instead of doing what they told us we should do when we were facing economic problems, which is ever more privatisation, they started nationalising. Today in UK, even the Governor of the Bank of England is threatening Banks to lend or face complete nationalisation. But then the anomaly is even that banks owned 60% by the British people is in the hands of private bankers. All this is to show that Ghana was misled. We who knew said so. We were ignored. Some of us then took our fight openly to Ghanaweb where we have been saying for some time that free market policy being foistered on us is a complete fraud.

All this Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo-Addo should have known because at NASSO he studied Nkrumaism and Socialism. Nationalisation, we were told, was supposed to be only a tool of socialists. Anyone with a modicum of commonsense would know that this is false. Nationalisation has never been an essential part of the theoretical structure of socialism or of Nkrumaism and Nkrumaism is not socialism.

And what Nkrumaism means by socialism is not what the enemies of Africans propagate. It was all anti-socialist propanganda. Now that even the most Right-Wing Government in Free Market USA is using nationalisation, we hope Ghanaians especially the fanatical free-market loving ones will wake up. The fundamental problem for Akuffo-Addo however started when unlike some of his mates like Osahene Boakye Djan who having read Consciencism and kept their sanity, he Akuffo-Addo joined the New Patriotic Party (NPP), a party with roots in his father’s political tradition which introduced coups into African politics. Unfortunately, the very tradition he had earlier rejected in favour of Nkrumaism then.

Was this not opportunism? And is it not the case of many former CPP people who are now in NPP and/or who support the candidature of Akuffo-Addo as President? These are the biblical Esaus who will sell their birthright for the bread of being Conservative President and allies today. Having embraced the Danquah-Dombo-Busia tradition of his father, which he had earlier rejected, he opened himself to ideological corruption and further embraced the savage economic nonsense of the freemarket which Alan Greenspan, not Alan Kyerematen, only recently discovered has a flaw in it as he told the American Congress.

We having been saying so all along if Ghanaian leaders will listen and put together an economic team of courageous Ghanaians who have self-knowledge and are prepared to die a little for Ghana including real soldiers – strategic thinkers - prepared to die for the nation.

So I said then to the annoyance of Gabby and The Statesman and still say that the promise of indigenous capitalism will take us nowhere. The indigenous capitalism that will work is Ghanaian Businesses set up by the State with the backing of all our security forces competing in the global market as a strategic war in which our best minds including military minds are employed to win.

This is not what the NPP Opportunist Akuffo-Addo is proposing and that is why he must not be elected President.

Kwami Agbodza