THE NEXT 55 YEARS MUST SEE GHANA EVOLVING INTO AN AFRICAN EQUIVALENT OF THE EGALITARIAN SOCIETIES OF SCANDINAVIA

Looking at Ghanaian society today, it is hard to believe that this is the same nation, which was initially moulded by Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah's vision. Our luck, as a people, however, is that Nkrumah's people-centred ideas still resonate with millions of ordinary people in our country - once they are made aware of those ideas.

It is to the eternal credit of the ordinary people of Ghana, that in deciding the nature and future of the newly-independent nation that was to replace the Gold Coast colony, on 6th March 1957, they had the wisdom to choose Nkrumah's vision of the future of the enterprise Ghana, over that of his conservative and tribal-supremacist opponents, in the crucial 1956 general election, which decided our nation's constitutional future.

They were also clever and farsighted enough, in that selfsame election of 1956, to reject the tribalism and elitism, of the local stooges for the British colonialists in the Gold Coast, during that period of our history - personified by the traitor and tribal-supremacist, Dr. J. B. Danquah.

Those quislings wanted the Gold coast to become a federation of pre-colonial tribal entities, dominated by the descendants of the pre-colonial traditional ruling elites, after independence. Naturally, those tribal entities in the post-independence federation, would continue to be the West's leading client-states in Africa - led by conservative men and women, faithfully serving their paymasters, the Western powers' neo-colonialist agenda, in the continent.

(And this, dear reader, despite the harsh and painful reality that the British colonialists had forcefully occupied our country for many decades, much against the wishes of our forefathers - some of who throughout that period had done what they could, despite the overwhelming odds ranged against them, to rid themselves of a perfidious colonial power, bent on purloining our natural wealth in the most ruthless of fashions. But I digress.)

Alas, fifty-five years on, sadly, our country is again firmly back in the grip of foreign powers and foreign commercial interests - because our post-Nkrumah era ruling elites have lacked the nous, imagination and intellectual depth, to enable them take advantage of the large movement of concerned individuals and protest groups in the West that demand a just world, and a new economic order, which promotes fair trade between nations.

As a collective goal for the next fifty-five years, we must aim to become Africa's most liberal society - in which every Ghanaian who works hard can enjoy a comfortable life: in a nation whose economy is underpinned by a sustainable development model that is knowledge-based and has a green ethos.

Above all, we must become a fair society in which the younger generation have every opportunity to realise their full individual potential. We must also become a gender-equal nation with a constitution that reserves half the seats in Parliament, as well as half the membership of the Cabinet, for the hard-working women of our homeland Ghana. In short, one hopes that fifty-five years hence, our nation would have become an African equivalent, of the egalitarian societies of Scandinavia.

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