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Founder and Leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a populist political party in South Africa, Hon. Julius Malema, has attributed Ghana, and by extension, Africa's developmental challenges to a complete departure from Dr. Kwame Nkrumah's values and an excessive focus on privatizing key state assets.

Speaking to the media on the sidelines of a national dialogue spearheaded by a private entity in Accra on Tuesday, the Pan Africanist noted that, the solution to Africa’s problems is to have a corruption fee, state-led with less emphasis on privatization development.

“Well, if you drift away from Nkrumah’s principles of state-led development and you prioritize privatization of strategic sectors of the economy, you’ll never address the issue of unemployment because the interest of business is to maximize on profit and every time you privatize something strategic, the first victims of privatization is the workers’’, he said.

He added that, “They remove the workers in order to maximize on profit. So if we have a state-led corrupt-free development then you’re guaranteed to absorb as many people as possible because that role of the state is not to make profit, it’s to generate sufficient resources to finance its social responsibility programmes.”

Hon. Malema is in Ghana at the invitation of the Arise Ghana Youth Movement to partake in a national dialogue on Pan-Africanism.

According to the conveyers, the event is to provide the Ghanaian youths with a chance to connect with Mr. Malema’s activism and commitment to a liberated and a united Africa.

Mr. Malema noted that the dialogue is important to bring forward issues of Pan-Africanism and economic emancipation as countries on the continent struggle to find their footing in a tensely polarized world.

“We are happy to be here because Ghana is our home and always showed us the way. So we’re not here necessarily to educate anyone, we are here to learn from each other that’s why it is called a dialogue, and the central message will be Pan-Africanism and economic emancipation of the length of Africa not only in Ghana,’’ he intimated.

He further added, “The democracy in Ghana is very old compared to other democracies on the continent but the means of production are still old by those who previously colonized us. And how do we go beyond that because political freedom without economic emancipation is meaningless and this type of engagement seeks to ensure that the people of the continent are aware that if we stand divided, only the imperialist and colonial forces stand to benefit. The unity of Africa is a threat to the enemies of Africa."