Fifty years ago, on March 6, 1957, Ghana attained its independence from Britain, becoming the first sub-Saharan country to do so. Over 100, 000 people gathered into Polo Ground in Accra, the capital city, to watch the historic proceedings. The ceremony took place at midnight. The air was electric as the Union Jack was lowered and the red, green and gold Ghananian flag was hoisted in its place. Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana stood up to speak. He spoke about the presence of the 'new African personality' in the world and how African people were going to demonstrate to the world that they were prepared to lay their own foundation.

In the years that followed, similar ceremonies took place in Guinea (1958), Nigeria (1960),Uganda (1962) and Kenya (1963). African people gathered at their respective national stadiums to celebrate. Admittedly these were legitimate occasions for joy.

Fifty years on, we live in an Africa characterised by decay and decomposition of states. We have witnessed the woeful degeneration of former liberation movements. African nation-states are poorly resourced, undeveloped and under-developed. African states are locked in a dance of death within an in-egalitarian, unevenly integrated and highlypolarised world system shaped by the imperative of capitalist fundamentalism with its attendant quasi-religious ideology of privatisation.

The current dispositions of power in the global system have set limits to what has been possible for African nation-states to achieve. The ever-deepening poverty and indebtedness of so many African nation-states is a structural feature of the terms of the insertion of African countries into the global economy from which it has been impossible to disconnect themselves. Neo-liberal reality and the ideology of the 'free market' is such that many African countries now spend more on repaying debts to developed capitalist countries and multi-national corporations than they spend on education and health.

In many African countries, the gap between the people and the state has widened rather than narrowed. The leadership in a number of African states has a dismal record in terms of human rights and in terms of provision of basic standards of living, welfare and social empowerment. Poverty, unemployment, inequality, corporate domination of government, economic stagnation, environmental degradation, job losses and starvation wages continue to plague the continent yet national ruling classes and their international advisors pretend that capitalism has not failed in Africa. They refuse to accept that neo-liberal policies failed to bring economic development for the overwhelming majority of Africans.

Stories of brutality, corruption, ineptitude abound. Current male leaders and elite groups have come to identify their own maintenance in power as being of greater importance than the broader 'social' goods of democratisation, opportunity and equality. Africanist historian Basil Davidson in his book, The Blackman's Burden: Africa and the Curse of Nation-State, observes, 'social imperatives-those concerning the distribution of capital, resources and services-have been subordinated to 'national' requirement of elite entrenchment.'

The only effective remedy to the current blitz of rapacious international capital and the parasitic ruling classes at the helm of African nation-states is a people-centred Pan-Africanism from below. This entails a return to mass struggles and resistance against capitalist globalisation and the 'ideology of 'free market'. There is an urgent need to build a continent-wide movement led by African working classes in alliance with other exploited and oppressed groups. Profound unity of African people can only be facilitated by the collective effort of progressive groups, organisations and institutions. Only an anti-capitalist movement stretching from Mozambique to Morocco, striving for genuine democracy and equitable distribution of resources in opposition to the prevailing situation of globalised poverty, insecurity and hopelessness, can move African people a step towards the ideals of genuine independence, self-sufficiency, dignity and progress. Only then can Nkrumah's dream of a new African personality be realised. Otherwise then African dream will continue to be deferred and African people will continue to play with pebbles while their counterparts elsewhere use Africa's bountiful diamonds, uranium and bauxite to the optimum.