By TazoachaAsonganyi in Yaounde.
Society is in
permanent flux, with new patterns of needs and interests emerging continuously.
A great challenge of political parties is usually how to harmonize what is good
for the party with what is good for the society as a whole. In spite of
blueprints and programs that political parties adopt from time to time, leaders
have to act continuously like catalysts that fasten the emergence of new
policies to address the changing patterns in society.
This is why
political parties are usually faced with the problem of nourishment – the
generation of new ideas. Such new ideas depend on the vision and thought
patterns – some would say ideology - that order(s) the course of the party. And
such nourishment is best sourced from structures not animated by timeservers –
those who for selfish reasons adapt opinions to the times and comply with the
humors of the powers that be.
Kwame Nkrumah
was one of the main actors at the fifth Pan African Congress that held in
Manchester in October 1945. The congress adopted the principle of African
socialism based on African humanism as a means of resolving the African
colonial question. Nkrumah later adopted the principle as the ideology he used
to lead the fight for the independence of Ghana. The political party, the
Convention People’s Party (CPP) he created in 1949, had an ideology he later
described as “consciencism” or “scientific socialism.”
When Nkrumah became
the president of Ghana, he formed a youth wing of the CPP, the Young Pioneer
Movement (YPM) in June 1960 in primary and middle schools; it had as a pledge
to “live by the ideals of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, Founder of the State of
Ghana and Initiator of the African Personality…” Students in high schools
learned trades and ideology in scientific socialism in their extracurricular
activities, while students in university institutions belonged to the National
Association of Socialist Student Organization (NASSO) which had branches in
colleges and universities. Further, there was a Kwame Nkrumah Ideological
Institute (KNII) founded at Winneba for the reeducation of adults and public
officials.
Nkrumah’s
efforts to “teach” his “conscienscism” in these “schools” failed because he
equated the state to his political party and imposed himself as a strong
executive president that controlled a weak legislature and a weak judiciary.
This undermined his vision of emancipating and developing Ghana. Robert Yaw
Owusus’s glowing description of Kwame Nkrumah’s philosophy in his book - Kwame
Nkrumah’s Liberation Thought - does not diminish Cameron Duodu’sopinion in a
recent issue of New African Magazine that Nkrumah’s government considered the
people’s enjoyment as a superficial aspect of life; only industrialization and
other abstract words usually ending in “-tion” or “–ment” mattered to his
socialist government. The CPP government enacted the undemocratic and
repressive Preventive Detention Act that allowed it to detain “dissidents” for
five years without trial! How this all sounds like the way power and “dissidents” are
treated in Cameroon!
As defined by
Joseph Ernest Renan, a nation is a moral conscience created by a big
aggregation of people, pure in spirit and warm hearted. The dictionary
definition of conscience usually turns around a sort of force within us which
decides on the rightness or wrongness of our own actions and affections. And the
word moral is also usually defined as the capacity to distinguish between right
and wrong as determined by duty. Each component of the aggregation of the
component people - the citizen - is assumed to possess a moral conscience. This
guiding idea of moral conscience and people with pure spirits and warm hearts should
be regardless of the temporary occupants of the power positions within the
nation.
In such nations,
moral conscience, purity of spirit and warm heartedness may be taught to
children through the mainstream school system. In society, it is nurtured not
through “schools” but through free debate and discussion in the free press,
free association of citizens and the abundant existence of other freedoms –
which all breed a “common sense” and feelings of solidarity among the
aggregated people.
The Labour Party
in the UK is nourished by the Fabian Society, an independent group of free
thinkers founded to promote the “reconstitution of society so as to ensure the
general welfare and happiness.” The Fabian Society promotes socialist
principles and produces socialist policies that it circulates to the public
through regular reports, tracts and essays. The Labour Party benefits from it
not because the policy documents are directed exclusively to it but because it
has adopted socialism/social democracy as its guiding principles.
It is obviously quite difficult for
a thirty-something years old regime to initiate a shift to a new policymaking
mode - to disrupt its usual way of thinking and action. A
party that has created more martyrs of misgovernment than heroes of ideas cannot
be trusted to engage in reflection
on democracy and related issues. A party school or whatever it is called of a
party like the CPDM that has shown itself to be incapable of facilitating the
emergence of a constructive democratic society, and seeks to “give"
democracy to society through imposed laws and commissions, will surely end like
the Kwame Nkrumah “Schools”.
We can expect very
little or nothing from any political “school” that will influence the allures
of the CPDM government in Cameroon. What we urgently need is a change at the
helm of the state to provide a fresh impetus to state matters that upholds the
nation as a moral conscience.
