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By hosting US military, Ghana departs from non-aligned foreign policy
Ghana is a member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a group of states that are not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc with at least 120 members.
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Ghana is a member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a group of states that are not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc with at least 120 members.
It was created and founded during the collapse of the colonial system and the independence struggles of the peoples of Africa, Asia, Latin America and other regions of the world and at the height of the Cold War
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"The purpose of the organization has been enumerated as to ensure "the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries" in their "struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony as well as against great power and bloc politics," by Fidel Castro in the Havana Declaration of 1979.
The countries of the NAM represent nearly two-thirds of the United Nations' members and contain 55% of the world population.
It started when Presidents Sukarno of Indonesia, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Josip Tito of Yugoslavia and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India co-hosted the Bandung Conference of 1955.
They invited all governments who did not wish to join one of those two world power alliances.
They would later be joined by Ghana's President Kwame Nkrumah in Belgrade in 1961, a meeting conventionally seen as the start of NAM.
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"We face neither east nor west, we face forward,” Kwame Nkrumah said regarding the NAM.
Ghana's new military cooperation with US, many security analysts have said, contravenes Ghana's foreign policy tradition of not aligning with any military power.
They argue Ghana has taken sides with a major world power and that Ghana has betrayed the African continent owning to its enviable foreign policy record.
Daughter of Nkrumah, Samia, reacting to the Ghana-US military pack, quoted her father's warning to African countries of the danger of signing individual defence packs with foreign powers.
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Kwame Nkrumah tells us in Africa Must Unite (1963) that: “if we do not unite and combine our military resources for common defense, our individual [African] States, out of a sense of insecurity, may be drawn into making defense pacts with foreign powers which may endanger the security of us all," he posted on Facebook.
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