Prime Minister attended Ghana Day Celebration

Office of the Prime Minister, Guyana, March 6, 2017

Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo, has appealed for descendants of African slaves and Indian Indentured labourers to unite as Guyanese to build our homeland. It is not an option to go “back to Africa or to India”, he declared.

The Prime Minister was addressing the Annual Ghana Day Celebration event on March 5 at Congress Place in Sophia, on behalf of President Granger.

Prime Minister Nagamootoo who took part in celebrations on the Corentyne in 1957 to mark Ghana’s Independence, lauded Dr Kwame Nkrumah for being not only the founder of Ghana’s freedom but as an icon of African liberation.

The Prime Minister expounded that both founders of Guyana’s United National Liberation Movement Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham were inspired by Kwame Nkrumah, because of his socialist ideology.

He recalled that both Dr Jagan and Mr Burnham in 1957 attended Ghana’s Independence celebrations and perhaps, some He said that the political history of Guyana would have been different had talks that were expected in Ghana under Nkrumah as mediator, succeeded in reuniting the two Guyanese leaders before the 1957 elections. “The historians have not produced a definitive analysis, but I suspect that Nkrumah was under tremendous pressure from the British West Indian leaders, not to foster unity of the two leaders who were considered to be communist or left wing or socialist. Nkrumah himself was a strong advocate of socialism and was brabded a ‘communist’.

Guyana’s history, Prime Minister Nagamootoo noted, is closely linked to the movement for liberation on the African continent, and even influenced it, as leaders were mentioned by Caribbean intellectuals such as George Padmore, CLR James and Arthur Lewis.

Prime Minister Nagamootoo said that while Nkrumah was a visionary, he failed to transform the colonial structure in Ghana, and independence was compromised by the corrupt elite and one party rule.

“While we must be proud of our roots and ethnicities, we are united by our nationality and must go forward”, the Prime Minister said while concluding his remarks.