A new political party— Progressive Alliance for Ghana (PAG) — is set to be inaugurated on Monday, 1 July 2024, in Cape Coast, capital of Ghana’s Central region.
One of the founding members of the party, Nyeya Yen, announced at a gathering on Friday in Bolgatanga, Upper East region’s capital, that the party’s “presidential candidate and potential members of parliament” also would be introduced at the upcoming Cape Coast congress.
The party has been at least 10 years in the making. In 2014 the Concerned Nkrumaists of North America (CNNA) launched an 18-month-long mediation effort to unite the fractured Nkrumaist front, which failed. In its aftermath, a decision was made to form a new party.
Discussions in 2018 led to the Social Justice Movement of Ghana (SJMG) being invited by the CNNA to form PAG as a nucleus of a new Nkrumaist party. PAG was set up by Ghanaian Nkrumaists and activists home and abroad who feel honour-bound to continue the legacy of Ghana’s founding president, Kwame Nkrumah, and remain committed to his ideals.
PAG has since grown into an alliance of 8 grassroot Nkrumaist organisations across Ghana, including the United Nkrumaist Front, Republican Alliance Party and All African People’s Revolutionary Party among others.
The drivers of the party, according to Nyeya, are people who have been part of the country’s post-independence social justice affairs for decades, serving in various roles. Some of them are serving on the party’s board.
They include: Prof. (Med) Thaddeus Ulzen, an Academic Psychiatrist at the University of Alabama School of Medicine and University of Cape Coast School of Medical Sciences and past President of the Ghana Physicians and Surgeons Foundation of North America, as Chairman; Nyeya Yen, a co-convener of the SJMG, as President, and Dr. Kofi J. Roberts, a member of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, as Secretary.
Also on the board are: Prof. Eugene Asola, Educator and Managing Editor for the Multicultural Learning and Teaching Journal, as Chief Finance Officer, and Dr. Nicholas Atampugre, co-founder of London-based African Foundation for Development (AFFORD), as Member in charge of Orientation.
The other members are: Ms. Phyllis Dadson Bourne, head of PAG’s Recruitment and Membership Committee; Max Vardon, head of the PAG’s Resource Mobilisation Committee; Kojo Brew Acquaisie, a lawyer and development economist with the United Nations (UN) in Nairobi, who heads the party’s Constitution Committee and Daniel Bentil, a Construction Management expert based in Florida, a member-at-large.
The party also has an interim National Coordinating Committee made up of members and coordinators from zones across the country. The committee is chaired by Phanuel Yao Ayawli and has Stephen Koduah as its National Coordinator.
A member of PAG’s Orientation Committee, Hillary Adongo, stated that the party had met the Electoral Commission’s criterion for political parties seeking registration to have offices in at least two-thirds of the country’s 275 constituencies under the Political Parties Act 2000 (Act 574).
Adongo also disclosed that the party had set up about 143 offices so far across the country.
PAG intends to end foreign exploitation in mining sector
PAG expressed the view that “despite being resourced with gold, manganese, lithium, bauxite, iron and diamonds among several other expensive minerals in vast deposits, Ghana has remained underdeveloped and largely dependent economically on foreign aid since gaining political independence in 1957.”
This is so because the extraction of these mineral resources generally has been under a one-sided control of foreign mining companies that allocate very little royalties and meagre shares to the country in accordance with the agreements they sign with it.
The agreements mostly lack transparency and they end up not serving the general good but just the interest of the foreign investors and a few indigenous government appointees found at the forefront of the deals.
While the towns where the expensive minerals are being extracted in the country are left in ruins and their people groan in severe hardship, the foreign companies earn large amounts of money and develop their own countries, where the lion’s share of the mining profits end up.
In addition to that, Ghanaians employed or contracted by the foreign mining firms do complain about some human rights abuses willfully perpetrated by the companies against them or the host communities.
While addressing the gathering, Nyeya said PAG would restructure the mining sector in the country’s interest. He said the planned reform was part of a number of socialist policies the party had outlined in line with the vision Nkrumah conceived for the country decades ago.
“The major problem facing this country is who controls the economy. We have a lot of gold around us. In the Upper East region, almost everywhere, there is gold”.
“But just see how some foreign companies are plundering our resources everywhere. We are of the view that our extractive sector must belong to us,” Nyeya told the gathering.
“At least 51% of the [mineral] wealth must belong to us,” he added. “And it is not only the 51%, but you must also know what is being taken out, because even if you own 80% and you don’t know what is going out, it’s useless.”
Why PAG was formed and why it rejected merger proposals from some parties
Nyeya said PAG came into being “not because we wanted a different political party” but after members of the SJMG and the CNNA tried unsuccessfully to reunite a number of political parties that emerged from the Nkrumah ideological bloodline and had remained disconnected from one another for years.
He was referring to the Convention People’s Party (CPP), the People’s National Convention (PNC) and the Progressive People’s Party (PPP).
Nyeya revealed that some political parties approached PAG recently with proposals for a merger ahead of the 2024 general elections. These requests, according to Nyeya, have not been accepted because the ideologies of those parties do not fall in line with Nkrumah’s ideas. PAG, he says, is open to an alliance and functional collaboration with all true Nkrumaist organisations and existing parties ahead of the polls.
“All the 600 factories the NDC, the NPP, the PNDC sold out and destroyed were built by Nkrumah. Even now, if you walk around, you can still see Nkrumah’s unmatched impact in the areas of education, health, agriculture, mining, the national economy, et cetera, all of which are now in tatters and which the PAG is determined to revive and restructure,” he emphasised.
“The party was formed to fight for our economic independence. It was formed to complete the battle for independence. It was formed to continue what Nkrumah stood for,” he stated further.
The gathering was chaired by one of the party’s co-founders, Richard Asueme, who in his closing remarks urged Ghanaians, particularly the youth, to hold those in leadership positions accountable and follow the path of self-discipline, self-confidence and selfless service charted by Nkrumah in the interest of the country and Africa.
Source: Edward Adeti/Media Without Borders/mwbonline.org
Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah was the leader of the Convention People’s Party and that was the vehicle used to achieved and attained political independence followed by CPP industrialization drive to make Ghana self-sufficient,hence the establishment of these 600 import substitution industries and institutions.This act of continuous perfidious narratives to isolate the CPP from these indelible economic record achievements of the Convention People’s Party under the leadership of Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah and tagging these achievements to only the name of our illustrious founder is a great disservice to history and a very serious distortion.if you claimed to believe in Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah then you must be very honest to set the records straight,this diabolic approach of pretending to cheaply distort records to achieved some level of leverage would backfire.The CPP will set the records straight, enough of these shenanigans.The CPP and Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah are inseparable.Thank you for reading my comment.