Former President John Agyekum Kufuor has hailed Ghana’s founding President Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah and his peers for their pioneering roles in Pan-Africanism and Africa’s decolonisation.
The former President reiterated that the Manchester Declaration Conference marked the beginning of the united cause for African continental unity and heightened the African anti-colonial struggle.
Among the prominent personalities present then were Dr W.B. Dubois of America, George Padmore of the Caribbean, Hastings Banda of Nyasaland, now Malawi, Kenyans Jomo Kenyatta, Nigerians Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Chief Jaja Wachukwu, the Gold Coast Ako Adjei and Kwame Nkrumah, who was the organising Secretary of the Conference.
“We must with due respect remember these pioneering years of African liberation and of the colonized world,” former President Kufuor said in his remarks at the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park in Accra during the 80th Anniversary Celebration of Manchester Declaration, which is referred to as the Fifth Pan-African Congress.
The Fifth Pan-African Congress was held at the Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall, Manchester, United Kingdom, from October 15 to 21, 1945 under the leadership of Dr Kwame Nkrumah, the then future leader of Ghana, on the theme “The Challenge to Colonial Powers”.
Former President Kufuor noted that the theme of the 1945 Manchester Declaration Conference envisioned the continent of Africa as united in terms of humanity regardless of race, tribe, religion, wealth, or national origin.
The former President noted that within just two decades after the conference, the ambition of liberating the colonised states was largely achieved beginning with the Gold Coast attaining its independence in March 1957 to become Ghana under the premiership of Dr Nkrumah.
“The heroes we celebrate today vehemently propagated African unity and pan-Africanism and aspired for a people liberated from the shackles of the enslaving practices that were endemic in imperialism, colonialism and apartheid.
Significantly, we must admit that the euphoria that attended the initial success was to be exhausted barely within a decade after independence in the 1960s,” he stated.
Former President Kufuor said they were confronted with the realities of the artificial borders and scarified brainwashing that came with colonialism.
He said the colonialists had put hurdles of over-dependence on the colonial and neo-colonial structures that undermined and continued to undermine even to date our appreciation of our common Africanness and confident humanity.
“Sadly, now in the decades since then, these hurdles still persist today and have even been aggravated by the geopolitics of the current times,” he said.
“The early leaders saw these challenges and tried to do something that was the formation of the Organisation of African Unity later to be transformed into the African Union.”
Former President Kufuor said in spite of their noble and lofty efforts, the greater effort to galvanize the people-to-people involvement on the continent remained unachieved, and that constituted the new challenge to the governments and peoples of Africa.
He said the solution to this challenge must be to envision and achieve a borderless continent to facilitate trade, economics, infrastructure necessities, finance, communication, agriculture, energy, and cultural values for the needed economies of scale to attract investments and value addition.
“Today, the challenge is to ourselves and not to any external aggressor. Fortunately, this conference is taking place at a time when, in the next two decades, Africa will constitute about a quarter of the entire world’s population, with most of its people being youthful and well-educated who would have mastered the digital and related technologies needed for the rapid transformation of the world.
Former President Kufuor said, he and a few individuals have been championing a project called the Africa Public Interest Media Initiative (APIMI), which singular objective was to use highly professional media tools, incorporating the new technologies on a sustained basis, to allow the people of the continent to the stated strategic advantages of the continent, to become a borderless continent with a standpoint to interact from the grassroots, from bottom-up approach.
“So far, it’s been up-down. Meanwhile, the Presidents meet in conferences every year, but somehow their resolutions do not come down to the grassroots of the people, denying the continent’s people-to-people interaction,” he stated.
“This way, the people’s involvement with their governments will become real and in sync with the Manchester vision of 1945.”