A time ago I wrote an article on the political decay in African revolutionary parties, yet if these parties like ANC, ZANU in Zimbabwe, NRM in Uganda, and CCM (Chama Cha mapinduzi) in Tanzania worked together in a revolutionary manner, we should be able to liberate the whole continent from grinding neocolonial controls, alas, most of them on arrival to power, they started treating it as a point of arrival and not another tool acquired to liberate the whole continent, this was how Nkrumah saw the CPP (Conservative People’s Party), it was a tool for African continental liberation, this is even clear in his independence day speech in March 1957, he said:
“The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the Total Liberation of the African Continent”.
Ghana was a Tool for the liberation and Unification of the African continent, even in Ghana’s 1960 constitution, it is clear that Ghana is willing to give up sovereignty to an African Union Government. This is the route all African revolutionary parties must take instead of degenerating into opportunism, purposeless political careerism, and the becoming of birthplaces for demagogues.
Nkrumah’s approach is similar to how CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is run, they did not look at ascendancy to power as a station of arrival, hence we see the urgency with which they worked, from Mao Zedong who worked tirelessly until his death as well as published relentlessly against imperialism, to Deng Xiaoping who worked with every tool he could get to lift the Chinese people out of poverty, to Hu Jintao and now Xi Jinping who feels China must modernize and complete the whole circle of modern technological development.
Xi Jinping even went further than that, he is de-worming the party, he has uprooted corruption from the party, as well as the private sector which had become indisciplined, corrupt, and arrogant to the point of threatening the interests of the Chinese people. It is because the party was built within its internal mechanisms the ability to self-correct. Power in the CCP can be decentralized and centralized on demand to correct the party.
For African revolutionary parties, apart from the CPP of Nkrumah, most integrated their African values with Western values favoring the latter in most cases, and the decay could not and can not be stopped. In fact, now, they go as far as killing any revolutionary leader if he comes to correct things that have gone wrong, an example is President Magufuli of Tanzania. They now see it as their divine right to enjoy corruption without interruptions.
This has put them in a position of vulnerability, to capture by imperialism, once external neocolonial pressure is exerted, they just surrender to continue the corruption and even feed from the hands of imperialism, hence further decay.
It is incumbent upon us Africans to build parties with a Continental outlook, parties interested in the affairs of all the African people, and parties that when they arrive into power, see it as just another tool acquired to advance the interests of the African people worldwide.
Such a vanguard party like the African Continental Unity Party (ACUP) is in a very good position with work to be molded into a tool for the total liberation of Africa, consolidation, and the rapid reconstruction of the whole African continent for its global population.
Kwame Gonza is a PanAfrican member of the African Continental Unity Party, a Mechanical Engineer, a geopolitical analyst, and the architect of the African Railway Triangle Network Master Plan.
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