When Dr Kwame Nkrumah spoke of African unity, he was proposing a strategy for survival.
That is the central truth that must not be lost as Ghana marked yet another Nkrumah Memorial Day, and it was forcefully restated last week by veteran journalist and Pan-Africanist, Kwesi Pratt Jnr., at a public lecture on Nkrumah's legacy (Read story on front page).
Mr Pratt reminded the nation of what we have allowed textbooks to reduce to slogans: Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanism was not merely about cultural solidarity as Africans.
It was a political, economic and strategic project aimed at giving the continent the collective strength to determine its own future.
It is a distinction we must take seriously, especially now.
Mr Pratt argued that the borders inherited from colonial rule have created African states that often lack the economic and strategic scale to compete effectively in the international system.
He is right. Look at the map of Africa today. It is not a map we drew. It is a map that was drawn for us.
The lines that separate Ghana from Togo, Burkina Faso from Mali, Nigeria from Cameroun were not drawn in Accra, Ouagadougou or Lagos.
They were drawn in Berlin in 1884-1885, at a table where no African was seated.
European powers, with a ruler and a pencil, divided peoples, rivers, forests and goldfields among themselves.
Africans had little or no role in determining the boundaries that eventually became the borders of independent African states.
And that creation continues to shape, and distort, our lives.
nyone who has lived along the Ghana-Togo border knows what it means.
The Ewe family whose farm is in Togo but whose home is in Ghana.
The trader who must cross two customs posts to sell in a market that his grandmother walked to freely.
The schoolchild whose relatives live 10 minutes away but in another country.
This is the African reality, and it is not just on the Ghana-Togo border; it is everywhere.
It is everywhere, from the Somali people divided among four states, to the Hausa spread across Niger and Nigeria, to the Mandinka across six West African countries. Colonialism did not just colonise our land; it colonised our geography.
Dr Nkrumah knew that political independence without economic integration would leave African countries vulnerable to external influence.
A flag, a national anthem and a seat at the United Nations do not guarantee sovereignty if your economy is too small to negotiate, your market too fragmented to industrialise, and your army too weak to secure your resources.
That was why Pan-Africanism could not be left as a sentimental attachment to blackness.
It had to be a continental government, a common market, a common defence, a common voice able to bargain with America, Europe and the Soviet Union on equal terms. Sixty years later, his prophecy has come true.
Today, Africa, with 1.4 billion people, still accounts for less than three per cent of global trade.
We export raw cocoa and import chocolate.
We export raw bauxite and import aluminium sheets.
We export crude oil and import petrol.
We have 60 per cent of the world’s uncultivated arable land, yet we are a net importer of food.
We have the minerals that power the green transition — cobalt, lithium, manganese, graphite — but we have no common strategy to set their price.
Why? Because we negotiate as 54 small fragments, not as one power.
Pan-Africanism, therefore, was never a parochial project.
It was a global project for the dignity of Black people everywhere, and a structural answer to the question: How can a divided, exploited continent become free in substance, not just in form?
That question remains unanswered.
The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), headquartered here in Accra, is the closest we have come to Nkrumah’s economic vision.
But AfCFTA will remain a secretariat building if we do not deliberately address the divisions created by colonialism.
We need a common industrial policy, common infrastructure, free movement of people, and above all, the political will to cede a little sovereignty to gain real power.
We cannot continue to celebrate Nkrumah with wreaths and speeches while we ignore the core of his message.
If Africa wants to be respected, not pitied; if we want to determine the price of our cocoa and our gold; if we want to stop begging for vaccines and climate finance; if we want our children to live in economies that can employ them — then we must return to that strategic project.
The borders were imposed on us.
The unity must be chosen by us.
