 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. Today we are going to be hearing from Gana, where a very important political development is taking place in the next coming days. The Socialist Forum of Gana is in the process of transforming into the socialist movement of Gana and the first Congress of this organization will take place from July 30th to August 1st. Now this is implications not just for the country itself but for the whole continent and to hear more about this we have with us Justice Henaku of the Socialist Forum of Gana. Thank you so much for joining us. This is the first question I would like to ask basically is about the upcoming Congress itself. Could you talk a bit about it and what prompted you to transition from the Socialist Forum of Gana to the Socialist Movement of Gana? Well, the Congress is very important and quite critical to the development of our country for the simple reason that the Socialist Forum of Gana, 20 or so years after its formation, to ensure that the idea of socialism and the need for it as part of our national discourse was not lost has reached a point where it has to transition to become a movement in order to mobilize the whole society behind the most pressing issues which confronted and that is the reason indeed the situation in our country demands for an alternative to the neoliberal market and to the helplessness and hopelessness by the people and also to shatter the myth which has been peddled that there's absolutely no alternative to the present system that we are in. Absolutely. Thank you. Could you actually also talk maybe a bit about the political situation in Gana right now? We know that there was a very controversial election recently. There's been a huge divide in the country. So how does the upcoming SMG actually evaluate the situation and what does it see as the steps to be taken? Well, since the left was defeated in 1966 temporarily, I must say, with the overthrow of the first president and the government of the Convention People's Party, we have Gana has gone through an experiment of a neoliberal system, an experiment of unbridled privatization of state-owned resources and unbridled resource thefts by foreign multinationals and corruption of the political system. Indeed, we've gone through three constitutions and we are under the fourth republican constitution and we don't see any relief for the sovereign masses of this country. We see a continuous destruction of the ecology of nature through mining and through non-adherence to environmental rules and regulations. We have almost given all our resources in return for nothing. We are even now having foreign military presence in our country with Americans being offered an airport and part of our national spectrum. The situation in Gana is dire, is dire economically, is dire socially, and is dire politically because the political system has almost become dysfunctional. The political system where there's a duple of alternative parties which believe in the same ideology and which continue to sink our country into an abyss has become untenable and we need to create an awareness and that's the purpose of the creation of the socialist movement of Gana to create an awareness that there ought to be and there must be an alternative to this present crisis of neoliberalism. Absolutely. And could you just maybe also take us to what are some of the maybe concrete proposals that the SMG is likely to put forward or some of the ideas you have been talking about in order to address the various dimensions of the crisis you talked about in Gana? Well the key slogan is that we are giving a social, we are offering a socialist transformation of Gana. It is very important because of course like I've indicated there must be an alternative, there must be alternative thinking, there must be an alternative model of development for our country. The present model of development has not served the people of this country and it has only served the interests of imperialists, the interests of the new capitalist class which rules our country. Again we want to look at the international situation in a very different way. We are for non-alignment, we are for not belonging to any military bloc, we are against the presence of military, foreign military forces in our country and we are for African unity, we are for solidarity with the international working class movement and solidarity with the progressive movement all over the world and with all struggles wherever they may be all over the world, struggles which are progressive, struggles which are in the interests of the masses of the people. The leadership members of the organization are expecting that they will be equipped to do steady and struggle in order to be able to create the necessary awareness amongst the populace in Gana and the whole of Africa. They are expecting that with their increased awareness we will be able to show the requisite support and solidarity with struggles all over the continent and even outside the continent. It is very important that we are able to grasp the tools of analysis to be able to analyze the national situation and the current situation both in Gana and outside Gana and how it affects each other. The economic partnership agreement, what is it, what is it a sense? The military presence in Africa creeping one and with overt one, coup d'etats and assassinations which are sponsored by the imperialist countries, how are we to understand all this? What is the cause of the ecological disaster which is looming at us and which is destroying our water and destroying our forests? Why is there a debt overhang on us while we see no development? The leadership and members of the Socialist Forum of Gana soon to be Socialist Movement of Gana, a space that will be able to create the necessary awareness, propagate the ideas of progressive change and unity of all struggles of the world. Absolutely. And finally one last question on how you have understood the role of imperialism in the region itself because we do know the United States for instance has plans to make a base. There's been a lot of talk about that and generally the whole region is very important for the calculations as far as imperialism is concerned. So could you maybe also talk about how your understanding of these actions is? Well the issue of imperialism is very serious in our region, in the African continent for the simple reason that they have never forgiven us for having fought for our independence from colonial rule and so they have invented new systems whether it's new colonialism, neoliberalism etc to keep us in their clutches and more so economically and politically. They've continuously subverted the political systems that would be created after independence. Economically the surplus investments from the exploitation from the super profits they made from us, they've reinvested in resource thefts. They steal our resources by investing in our uranium, in our gold, in our oil, in all other minerals that we have on the continent and as a result they've created Africa that is a military organization created by NATO and principally the United States of America to safeguard their interests, their economic interests and their political interests to subvert political regimes which try to be independent as to conduct assassination attempts and assassinations on heads of states which want to take an independent path for development and also station troops to safeguard their mining concessions like the uranium mines in Niger, you have the french troops there, you have the french troops in Mali or sensibly fighting against terrorism. Terrorism we did themselves have contrived to invent and they have naval maneuvers also on the Atlantic coast of the shores of Africa and have managed to safeguard and install new colonial regimes in Africa. So the whole the mere presence of the imperialists is against the interests of the real oneness of Africa, the continent of Africa, that's the masses of Africa and they aid and abet the repressive regimes which they managed to install in Africa. We now even in Guernasi military presence of the Americans in an unequal treaty at our airports having called in the whole session of our airports etc having taken over a whole spectrum of our national frequency given to them for free by their you know the cabal which is ruling our country and so imperialism must be fought and can only be fought if the people are made aware of their inimical you know interests which is against the national interests of the people.