President John Dramani Mahama has set Ghana on a new and courageous path. His resolve to wean Ghana from dependency on the remains of foreign harvests and to restore the unfinished dreams of Nkrumah and other Pan African pathfinders marks a historic moment. At no point since independence have we seen a Ghanaian president speak so clearly and decisively about the injustices committed against Africa and the Black world. His appointment of a Reparations Czar and his insistence that slavery stands as the greatest injustice in human history demonstrate that Ghana is once again stepping into its continental responsibility.
This is not an isolated vision. It echoes the boldness of leaders like Robert Mugabe, Julius Nyerere, Thomas Sankara, and Gamal Abdel Nasser. It resonates with the early Pan Africanists who understood that Africa cannot rise without reclaiming its history, dignity and authority. This is why the president deserves not only our support but also our counsel. Africa stands at a crossroads, and Ghana must lead the resurrection of our continental renaissance.
We are naïve if we believe that the Western world is interested in Africa’s development. If Western powers wished to see Africa prosper, it would have been the Bretton Woods institutions leading the charge for our transformation. Instead, these same institutions have plunged African economies into constant borrowing, painful conditionalities and a cycle of endless repayment. The West has adorned its museums with stolen African artefacts and borrows money from Africa under the guise of development, only to trap us with policies that sustain dependency.
It is the West that orchestrated many of the early coups in Africa. Through the CIA, MI6 and French intelligence, African nations were plunged into instability at the peak of their liberation period. These powers exploited our vulnerabilities and pitched African leaders and citizens against one another because they understood one truth. A united Africa cannot be manipulated, controlled or used as a dumping ground for the world’s waste. A united Africa would be too strong to exploit. A united Africa would control its resources and its future.
We should therefore not be surprised by the recent coups sweeping across West Africa. France, in particular, has a long history of destabilising African states and maintaining influence through the politics of chaos. Britain and the United States are no strangers to this strategy. They sponsor individuals and desperate interest groups, sell arms, supply money and use covert networks to create dissent within fragile democracies. They turn nations into rental states serving foreign interests. Look at Libya, where external intrusion destroyed a prosperous African country and plunged an entire region into instability.
These countries manufacture weapons, bombs and military machinery and sell them to Africans, only for Africans to destroy their own people. Nothing demonstrates the selfishness of global power politics better than this. Africa must therefore tread carefully. Social media has made it even easier to sow confusion. Fake news, engineered propaganda, and digitally manufactured anger can be used to manipulate the frustrations of African youth. Suddenly, democratic governments become targets, and foreign actors sit quietly behind the chaos.
Ghana must rise above this. As the winds of neocolonialism blow across the continent, we cannot fold our arms. Ghana must once again lead the African renaissance. The key lies in foreign policy. The West has never loved Africa. To the West, Africa is a Trojan horse, a tool to be used when convenient and abandoned when not. Western wars are not African wars. Conflicts over cyber security, drugs, opioids and global terrorism are not the battles Africa should prioritise. Africa must confront its own struggles in its own unique ways.
With this understanding, Ghana must reject bilateral agreements that chain us to neocolonial obligations. Agreements such as deportation pacts with the United States do not align with Pan African values. Ghana cannot preach Pan Africanism on one hand and sign away its dignity on the other. It is painful to watch African countries such as Rwanda, Swaziland and even Ghana betray their African brothers and sisters by accepting these arrangements. These agreements are modern forms of neocolonial bondage disguised as cooperation.
Ghana must also rethink its democratic system. The time has come for Ghana to align with its global South partners, especially China. China and Africa share common struggles of colonial exploitation, and China’s rise demonstrates that development does not require Western democracy. African development requires systems that are grounded in African values, African history and African experience. Democracy, as the West practices it, is alien to our cultural foundations. African societies are built on communalism, consensus building and social harmony, not individualism and competition.
Africa can design its own governance model. The Chinese model of governance, which blends meritocracy, long-term planning, decentralised experimentation and national unity, offers lessons. Ghana can build a system that includes a Council of Elders, district and constituency nominations to a National Assembly, a lower chamber elected through popular representation and an upper chamber composed of chiefs elected through adult suffrage. Parliamentary governance formed through coalition building rather than partisan extremism could purge Ghana of hatred, tribalism, religious division and political animosity.
When the foundation of governance is set right, Ghana must then reclaim every aspect of its identity. We must reject foreign names assigned to our rivers, towns, monuments and communities. We must rename them with African names that reflect our heritage. Our school curriculum must be overhauled. It must replace irrelevant Western content with African history, African heroes, African civilisations, African science and African philosophies. We must disentangle our people from borrowed ideas and rebuild African consciousness.
We must return to African attire, African languages and African worldviews. We must build resilience through local agricultural production and feed our people from our own soil.
Africa’s future will not be imported from the West. It will be built by Africans who understand that freedom is not given but earned. President Mahama has opened a door for this new era. Ghana must walk through it with courage, conviction and clarity. The dreams of Nkrumah, Garvey, Du Bois, Padmore and many others are not dead. They were waiting for a moment like this.
Africa is rising. Ghana must lead.
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Dr Manaseh M. Mintah is an Afrocentric scholar whose work spans environmental justice, African governance, and decolonial thought. Dr Mintah’s scholarship combines rigorous field research with a Pan-African intellectual commitment to restoring African agency, cultural identity, and self-determination in global affairs. He can be reached at mmintah@antioch.edu