The Chairman of the Kwame Nkrumah foundation and former chairperson of the convention Peoples Party, Samia Nkrumah says the failure of African leaders to put in place strategies to protect their people has resulted in the setting up of military bases by foreign powers.

Speaking at the all African people’s conference in Accra, Samia Nkrumah said, African leaders must plan for their people.

” We must start a common defense strategy; our security must be planned together and in this way, we definitely had we follow that route we will not have had many foreign bases on our continent. A military high command, a pan African army that would ensure peace and security not only in Africa but for the whole world.”

The All-African Peoples’ Conference

The All-African Peoples’ Conference (AAPC) was partly a corollary and partly a different perspective to the modern Africa states represented by the Conference of Heads of Independent Africa States. The All-Africa Peoples Conference was conceived to include social groups, including ethnic communities and anti-colonial political parties and African organizations such as labor unions and other significant associations in the late 1950s and early 1960s both in Africa and the Diaspora such as Europe, North America and South America.

The All-Africa Peoples Conference was conceived to represent the position that Africa should be returned to the peoples and groups, such as ethnic communities, from whom it was grabbed by colonialism. The idea was mooted in Accra in April, 1958, by John Kale from Uganda. This was at the end of the first African Heads of State Conference in Accra, Ghana in March, 1958. John Kale, then operating from exile in Egypt, who was one of the organizers of the first African Heads of State Conference, was already the initiating secretary (and later Chairman) of the African Liberation Committee, the Africa Executive of Afro-Asian Solidarity which had its secretariat in Cairo and shortly after the Africa representative on the World Peace Council on which he was the Vice President.

The first All-Africa Peoples Conference was attended by delegates from independence movements in areas still under European colonial rule, as well as by delegates from the independent African countries, including representatives of the governing parties of some of those countries. In the Conference’s own words, it was open to “all national political parties and national trade union congresses or equivalent bodies or organizations that subscribe to the aims and objects of the conference.” The Conference met three times: December, 1958, January, 1960, and March, 1961; and had a permanent secretariat with headquarters in Accra. Its primary objectives were independence for the colonies; and strengthening of the independent states and resistance to neocolonialism.