IS THE CEDI COLLAPSING?

Ken Ofori Atta

Asks Ekow Mensah

The alarm bells are sounding loud and clear over the weakening of the value of the cedi over the last two months and there are grounded worries about the consequences for the national economy.

In December last year, the cedi exchanged at four to a dollar but since then it has lost almost 20 per cent of its value.

As at yesterday, the cedi was being exchanged at some Forex Bureau at five to a dollar.

Some economists say that the fall in value of the cedi at this time of the year is not unusual and that it could be the direct result of speculation arising out of the change in government.

Given the fact that Ghana’s economy is heavily dependent on imports, the drop in the value of the cedi could affect the cost of many goods and services.

It is expected to have a direct impact on the price of fuel, in view of the fact that fuel costs are calculated in dollars.

The ripple effect could also lead to significant cost rises for power generation and distribution and push transportation fares and food prices up.

The apparent devaluation of the cedi is not a new phenomenon.

Indeed since 1983, the cedi has suffered cumulative devaluation of up to 28, 000 per cent.

Less dependence on imports as a result of a deliberate policy of Ghananisation of the economy is seen as a possible solution to the problem.

The privatisation of close to four hundred state –run industries established by Nkrumah government is also partly responsible for Ghana’s huge dependence on imports.

Some of the factories which have since collapsed include; Akasanoma; an electronic manufacturing concern, the Bolgatanga Meat Factory, the Kade Match factory, the Abosu Glass Factory, three textile industries, and a brick and tile factory.

Ghana has become even more dependant in the agricultural sector with increasing imports of food items such as tomatoes, poultry, beef, cooking oil and rice.

It is feared that the cedi will continue to slide dangerously until the Government embarks upon the self-reliant path to economic development.

For now, citizens have good reason to worry about the rising cost of living.

Editorial

URGENT TASK

The cedi is tumbling against the dollar and this would have very serious consequences for national economy.

Indeed over the last two months, the cedi has lost 20 per cent of its value and experts say that it will continue to fall.

Our worry is that Ghana has become a very dependent economy and therefore the continuing fall in the value of the cedi would mean a rising cost of living.

If the fall in the value of the cedi is not arrested immediately, the prices of fuel, food, clothing and many other items would soon shoot up.

The Insight urges the Government to do something pretty quickly to stem the falling value of the cedi.

This is an urgent task that must be performed by any responsible government.

Halt idea to set up digital migration company – Nduom

Papa Kwesi Nduom

By Kent Mensah

Astute businessman Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom has advised government to nip the idea to set up a digital migration company and collect revenue from it.

Dr. Nduom in his recent Facebook post noted that there are more “socially responsible” and “necessary economic problems” which government must channel its efforts at solving.

“We must do what is needed, before we attempt to do what we desire. Health care facilities, schools, roads, water, bridges, electricity needed!” he stated.

Below is the full statement of Dr. Nduom on Facebook

A TERRIBLE IDEA WILL REMAIN TERRIBLE NO MATTER HOW IT IS DRESSED UP.

I found this somewhere on the internet written by a well-known media person:

“How will government generate revenue?

The idea is that, government will set up a digital migration company that will manage the channels. That company will take a commission for all content encrypted. So that the more content and the more subscribers that pay for content, the more revenue at hand for government.

For instance in a particular month, 10 million Ghanaians have each paid 2 cedis for content ranging from people who watched Ghana’s most beautiful on TV3 PLUS, those who viewed entertainment programs, news programs and special event programs, the government receives commissions and fees for being the spectrum operator, those monies can be used to run the system to reduce burden on tax money.”

Government to set up a digital migration company and collect revenue? Why? Bad, bad idea. Let’s nip this in the bud. Government has more socially responsible and necessary economic problems to solve. We must do what is needed, before we attempt to do want we desire. Health care facilities, schools, roads, water, bridges, electricity needed!

Source:Starrfmonline

Pan-Africanism, Feminism And Finding Missing Pan-Africanist Women

Amy Ashwood

By Ajamu Nangwaya

There are numerous women in the African Diaspora who have worked for the liberation of Africans under the banner of Pan-Africanism. They must be rescued from political obscurity. Pan-Africanism as a revolutionary ideology must firmly embrace feminism.

We are commemorating the 58th anniversary of African Liberation Day on May 25. When most of us think of Pan-Africanism and its major icons, women will not instinctively come to mind. Pan-Africanist history and activism might appear as the exclusive domain of African men. However, I am encouraging readers to embrace the position of the radical hip hop group Public Enemy and “Don’t Believe the Hype” about women not being major contributors to Pan-Africanism. In the Hakim Adi and Sharika Sherwood authored book Pan-African History: Political Figures from Africa and the Diaspora since 1787, forty Pan-Africanists are surveyed and only three of them are women.

Pan-Africanism is an ideology and a movement that calls for global solidarity and cooperation among Africans in order to liberate themselves from racist oppression and (neo)colonial and imperialist domination. Africa holds a central place in Pan-Africanist thoughts and organizing. It is the ancestral land of Africans. The harnessing of the continent’s resources for the benefit of the people will serve as the basis for liberation. A Pan-Africanism of liberation should be based on the labouring classes as its principal constituency and, as such, must be an anti-capitalist, feminist, anti-imperialist and anti-racist movement. This article will focus on Pan-Africanist women from the African Diaspora.

Diaspora Pan-Africanist women have contributed to movement Pan-Africanism from its inception at the Henry Sylvester Williams-initiated Pan African Conference in 1900 in the city of London. According to the Haitian Pan-Africanist Benito Sylvain’s conference report, its principal goal was to “examine the situation facing the African race in every corner of the globe, to solemnly protest the unjust contempt and odious treatment which are still heaped upon the race everywhere.” This conference wanted to form an organization that would coordinate the worldwide struggle against the oppression of Africans and advance their interests. Sylvain’s historic report is available in Tony Martin’s book The Pan-African Connection: From Slavery to Garvey and Beyond. 

There were at least six African women (Anna H. Jones, Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Barrier Williams and Ella D. Barrier from the United States, and a Mrs. Loudin and Ms. Adams from Ireland) among the fifty-one African delegates at the conference. These women were not simply observers at this international gathering. Anna Julia Cooper, an educator, a women’s club leader and anti-racist advocate, delivered a presentation entitled The Negro Problem in America. Her compatriot Anna H. Jones, a linguist, women’s club activist and educator, tackled the subject The Preservation of Racial Individuality. These women delegates were actively involved in social movements committed to transforming the oppressed condition of Africans. For example, Ella Barrier was an educator and an active participant in the Washington, D.C. Colored Women’s League.

The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) was the foremost 20th century Pan-Africanist mass organization that mobilized Africans for the fight against colonialism and imperialism. Rhoda Reddock, a Caribbean-based academic and feminist, suggests in her article “The first Mrs Garvey” that the UNIA was “one of the most successful pan-Africanist organisations of all time and certainly the most internationalist.”

Garvey is universally celebrated as the founder of the UNIA. However, that perception is not accurate. Amy Ashwood Garvey was a co-founder of the group as she states in the document “The Birth of the Universal Negro Improvement Association,” (appended to Martin’s “The Pan-African Connection”). She was the founder of the UNIA’s internationally circulated newspaper The Negro World and served in other significant roles. She later participated in other Pan-Africanist organizations and initiatives such as the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist International African Service Bureau and involvement in organizing the Fifth Pan-African Congress.

As a feminist, Amy Ashwood centred the emancipation of African women as a major part of her politics. In the 1 April 1944 edition of the African-American publication New York Amsterdam News, she demonstrated her feminist and internationalist commitments: “There must be a revolution among women. They must realise their importance in the post-war world … Women of the world must unite.” At the October 1945 Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, she objected to the marginalizing of African women: “very much has been written and spoken of the Negro, but for some reason very little has been said about the black woman – she has been shunted into the social background to be a child bearer – this has been principally her lot.”  Amy Ashwood also addressed the exploitative working condition of “The labouring class of women who work in the fields, take goods to the market, and so on” in Jamaica and the lack of solidarity from African men.

Amy Jacques Garvey, the second wife of Marcus Garvey, is adequately recognized for her contribution to Pan-Africanism. After the imprisonment of Garvey, she disseminated his Pan-Africanist ideas by editing and publishing his writings in the book The Philosophy and Opinion of Marcus Garvey. Her 1963 memoir Garvey and Garveyism exposed the thoughts and legacy of Garvey to the Black Power Movement. Keisha N. Blaine states that Jacques Garvey could legitimately be “be credited as co-creator of Garveyism” given her influence on Garvey’s thoughts and her intellectual input into his articles and speeches as someone who helped him in writing them.  

Jacques Garvey spread the ideals of Pan-Africanism across the world in her position as editor and columnist of The Negro World and creator of “Our Women and What They Think” – a page dedicated to politically educating women. Jacques Garvey was a liberal or bourgeois feminist. Her 25 October 1925 column Women As Leaders, approvingly highlighted the emerging gender “equality”: “No line of endeavor remains closed for long to the modern woman. She agitates for equal opportunities and gets them; she makes good on the job and gains the respect of men who heretofore opposed her. She prefers to be a bread- winner than a half-starved wife at home.”

Jacques Garvey’s article “Listen Women” in The Negro World on 9 April 1927 elevated bourgeois white men’s perceived treatment of white women as the model of gendered relations between African women and men: “They have braved the tropical jungles, slain black men, in order to get gold and diamonds with which to adorn their women… build up a great republic, so that their women may live in comfort and luxury.” Obviously, white working-class women were not living such a lifestyle.

Claudia Jones was a Pan-Africanist, feminist, anti-imperialist and communist whose constituency was the working-class. During her American years, she had a more internationalist than Pan-Africanist focus, except for her articles on the Caribbean. On international questions, she opposed United States’ imperialism and exploitation in the global South and its military aggression and threat to world peace. In her work as a communist organizer, educator and journalist, she placed the triple oppression of working-class African women at the heart of her theoretical work as evidenced in We Seek Full Equality for Women and An End to the Problems of the Negro Woman.

Jones’ Pan-Africanist commitment intensified after her politically-motivated deportation to Britain. Jones created the West Indian Gazette as an instrument to resist racist and class exploitation of Africans in Britain. The newspaper was also used to expose imperialism in Africa and the Caribbean as well as elsewhere in the global South. The West Indian Gazette positively covered the Cuban Revolution, exposed the criminal activities of apartheid in South Africa, covered the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and advocated for decolonization in the British Empire. Carole Boyce Davies brought to light in Left of Karl Marx, a political study of Claudia Jones, that she “influenced pan-Africanists – such as Nkrumah – from the standpoint of bringing Marxist-Leninist views to bear on their pan-Africanist thinking.”

In conclusion, there are numerous women in the African Diaspora who have worked and/or working for the liberation of Africans under the banner of Pan-Africanism. They must be rescued from political obscurity. There is a need to elevate the Pan-Africanist work of Diaspora women in countries whose official languages are Spanish, French, Portuguese and Dutch. When Pan-Africanist women are placed in a position to express their needs at the strategic, operational and ideological levels of the liberation project, they are going to consummate the union of feminism and Pan-Africanism.

In order for Pan-Africanism to serve as a revolutionary ideology and movement, it must centre the emancipation needs of African women by way of a firm embrace of feminism. It would have to be an ideological stream of feminism that is opposed to imperialism, capitalism, racism, heterosexism/homophobia and other forms of oppression. Liberal or bourgeois feminism is an enemy of working-class African women. Claudia Jones’ intersectional and revolutionary feminism is a good starting point for the marriage of feminism and Pan-Africanism.

* Ajamu Nangwaya, Ph.D., is an educator, organizer and writer. He is an organizer with the Network for the Elimination of Police Violence.