My name is Godwin Kweku Tetteh Maulepe, I am from Ghana, I work as a journalist and I am involved in "Fix the country" to fix Ghana. I am looking for collaboration with you.....
I manage the production of a political TV and radio program in Ghana. We have gotten so much publicity that the leading media company in Ghana, MEDIA GENERAL GROUP, has given us a slot and sub-stations like ONUA TV, ONUA FM, TV3, 3FM, Connnet FM, Akoma FM.
The widely watched program with Captain Smart repeatedly exposes misconduct by the Ghanaian government and ruling class. It has been plagued with lawsuits, but so far all of them have been won by the station. Captail Smart has already been arrested and had to be released. The picture demanded his release.
With our broadcasts we reach 70 percent of the people in Ghana, viewers and listeners all over the world, including here in Germany. I turn to you to inform you about the situation in Ghana. I am looking for cooperation with you for the people in Ghana and for making this world our world together. A world that works not only for a small privileged minority, but
for all members of our one human family.
Sometime I moderate the show:
We have used democratic space in Ghana to build a strong civil society network of media and action groups, in the face of opposition from the Ghanaian government. It's called "fix the country," fix the country, with jobs, housing, health care and education for all.
In resource-rich Ghana, many people still live in extreme poverty, without food security, safe health care, and opportunities for education that helps people develop their potential. Ghana was a British colony for a long time and also a German colony in some regions. Before that, Brandenburg also took people from Ghana as slaves. The country was able to achieve formal political independence against Great Britain 60 years ago. But this has not yet created humane living conditions for all people. We no longer live in a colony, but we still live in a neocolonial system. It is still mainly the industrialized countries and a small minority of wealthy Ghanaians who benefit from it.
The situation in Ghana
Living conditions for the vast majority continue to deteriorate: Ghana is heavily in debt, and now interest rates are being raised in the United States and Europe. In the 1980s, this situation already led to a drastic deterioration of living conditions in our country: In order to pay back the debt to the rich world, the government made radical cuts in the health and social system. In addition, in Ghana, the effects of climate change are becoming more and more drastic for the people.
Now that more and more people are experiencing that the system is not working for them, many are looking for alternatives and starting to fight back, with strikes, demonstrations or looking for a way out for themselves by fleeing to Europe.
With the movement "Fix the country" we want to contribute to the development of a policy that secures life perspectives for all people in Ghana. To achieve this, it is not enough to elect competent new politicians. This needs many people who are competent to develop alternatives and to implement them together against the resistance of privileged people in our country and in other countries.
Strengthening the cooperation of people in Ghana, Africa and Germany and Europe from the bottom of society
We hope for your support and propose to establish the group "Let's Fix the german-ghanian relations". We invite you to be part of it. We want to set up such groups - as our capacities grow - for cooperation with other countries as well, and then combine them for continents, like (Let's Fix African- European Relations).
Changes are needed not only in Ghana
And this text has now members of Fix the country from Ghana and from the International PeaceFactory Wanfried as a proposal for discussion together and are responsible for it together
But we have even more in mind: The world is not only not working for us in Ghana anymore. In many African countries people are fighting back. In Europe and the USA, too, many workers are on strike today because their living conditions are deteriorating. Many young people are taking to the streets because they fear for their future in the face of the destruction of the earth's habitability by climate change and species extinction. The media hardly inform us about what the underprivileged in other countries are doing, so we cannot support each other or learn with and from each other. We can change that and contribute to the international networking of forces working for a humane world for all. Knowledge of foreign languages, migrants who can build bridges and the Internet give us opportunities today like no other generation before us. We therefore propose from activists in Ghana and the International PeaceFactory Wanfried to form an international network called "Let's fix our countries. Let's fix our world!" In the next months we want to see if and how enough forces are interested in this. Then, at the end of the year, the network could be officially founded.
Possible common goals for international civil society cooperation
What are our common goals? To create internal peace in the states. The conditions for this are well known. If one of them is not given, Inner Peace is in danger and they are constantly fought over, by no means secured forever and can all be lost again if society does not commit itself to it.
1) Settling conflicts without violence by establishing a state monopoly on the use of force under the rule of law and institutions for just conflict resolution.
2) Equal democratic participation of all citizens in elections and freedom of information and political opinion-forming, regardless of their social status, ethnic origin or faith.
3) Socially just opportunities and duties for all and social security, such as the right to work, sufficient pay, health care, education, food, housing, clothing, old-age pensions.
All these are not unworldly demands. Out of the experience that their realization is necessary to create or secure internal peace in the states, the states adopted them as goals in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as early as 1948. In the UN Social Covenant and the UN Civil Covenant in 1976, the states then made a legally binding commitment to implement these demands politically in their states and also to support each other in doing so.
However, we warn of a danger: The West has repeatedly justified interventions in other states by claiming that it is concerned with human rights. In fact, however, it has only deceived the world public. The motive for the interventions was hard-core self-interest, such as the control of raw materials, markets or zones of influence. We reject these interventions, which have created failed states and endless suffering and plundering of raw materials through the cooperation of militias in the destroyed states with Western states or corporations. It is necessary to stop these interventions.
The forces for the implementation and realization of these goals must come from within each country; we can support each other across national borders with peaceful means.
Struggle for fair foreign relations: Overcoming national egoism with a fair foreign policy.
This international cooperation is also necessary, but to achieve it, countries must overcome their nationalegoistic foreign policies. It enables economically or militarily strong states to assert their interests at the expense of weaker states. This works all the better if their internal cohesion is weakened as much as possible and divisions within them are escalated.
The wealthy of this world profit from national-egoist foreign policy. By controlling investments, they have a decisive influence on the economic development or non-development of the individual countries. The individual states are thus under strong pressure to pursue capital-friendly policies at the expense of their populations in order to attract international capital. Global regulations are the possible antidote on which weaker states in particular depend.
Today's world order no longer works for Westerners either
For a long period of time, only a minority in the Western industrialized countries criticized the exploitation of the global South. Many were and are not informed about it. Others did not care because their lives worked. If there was resistance, it came from soldiers or the youth who no longer wanted to be burned in the colonial wars, as in Portugal in the Carnation Revolution of 1974, or in the U.S. against the Vietnam War, which brought death not only to millions of Vietnamese but also to tens of thousands of U.S. citizens.
Today, however, the crisis is also affecting people in the global North: The destruction of a human-friendly climate will sooner or later affect all inhabitants of the earth. The massive relocation of capital to low-wage countries has broken the industrial monopoly of the Western states and now threatens the relatively higher social standard of workers in the Western states in global competition. The U.S. struggle to maintain its global dominance by military means eats up more and more public resources needed to create or even maintain social security, including in the Western industrialized countries. Growing social insecurity is fostering the rise of right-wing and radical right-wing parties that increasingly threaten the internal peace and democratic achievements of these countries. And with these tensions between nuclear powers, the threat of annihilation is also growing, including for the people of the Western states. And these direct or indirect wars create more and more refugees. Today, all these can ensure, also in the industrialized countries, that the majority can see an interest in creating a just world order as a basis for a sustainable world, in which all conflicts may only be solved by peaceful means.
We can use international agreements
Good goals for global regulations have actually been promised to us by the states for a long time: with the adoption of the legally binding UN Charter in 1945, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the legally binding covenants for social and political rights in 1976. If we now unite internationally to jointly fix our world (Let's fix our world!) we can refer to this international law and demand its implementation. But it will only be enforced if we overcome the power of the lobby groups of the privileged, who only stand for these goals in words but boycott them in deeds, through global self-organization and cooperation as a civil society,
Get in touch if you want to help build this network "Let's fix our countries! Let's fix our world!", "Fix the german-ghanian relations" and Let's Fix African- European Relations
German-language: info@internationale-friedensfabrik-wanfried.org
English-language: godwinkweku4@gmail.com
more about our movement Fix the country in Ghana:
Ghana's youth network and demonstrate to build a just society
Movement Fix the country is moving many people to demonstrate for fundamental change in the major city of Tamale in the north of the country. A hope in a region where much violence has spread in some of Ghana's neighboring countries in West Africa. From the International PeaceFactory Wanfried we are in conversation with organizers of the movement: We discuss how awakening movements in Ghana and Germany can learn with and from each other and support each other in "putting our countries in order" and together address global problems - such as climate change, spread of war and violence, implementation of decent living conditions for all.
With a large demonstration, especially young people in the northern Ghanaian city of Tamale are calling on politicians at all levels to put people's living conditions in order. Similar demonstrations have taken place in other cities in the resource-rich West African country in recent months. The action in the north was preceded by several months of grassroots work by Fix the county activists in the region, and the demonstration shows it was successful. Fix the country moves the youth not to put their hope in fleeing to Europe, to rely solely on electing another party or even on violence, but to seek solutions to the major problems that plague many people, such as a lack of prospects for young people, unemployment, a lack of educational opportunities, a lack of health care or a glaring gap between rich and poor, through their own commitment to changing society.
On its homepage, the Fix the Country movement writes: "#FixTheCountry is a non-partisan and non-political civic movement by Ghanaian youth for Ghana. We demand a new society based on justice. We refuse to play by the rules of a political class that is so disinterested in the Ghana project. We demand a realignment and a change in the assumptions from which the pervasive immorality in our society emanates." It is not only targeting national politics, but also wants to start building the new society from the bottom up: with the project Enforcing Accountability, the movement aims to draw attention to the Municipal, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs). It sees them as the agents of local development and the most reliable actors for "fixing the country." From them, they demand detailed action programs and annual metrics for various areas of the district economy.
The state of Ghana was imposed on the people by the European colonial powers - in the case of Ghana by Great Britain and Germany. They organized a state for the interests of Europeans, not Ghanaians, and placed themselves above any general law that applied to the people of Ghana. This right to make laws only for the people and to put themselves above the law and thus enrich themselves from the people and the land was taken over by the elites from the colonial powers when they came to power at independence and continued. The movement criticizes this and, in a kind of second state formation of its own by the Ghanaian people in a peaceful and grassroots democratic way, now wants to create a state not only for the elites cooperating with the former colonial powers, but for all the people of Ghana. To this end, the movement is calling for a new, just constitution.