As the AU is marking the 50th anniversary of the OAU under
the theme ‘Pan-Africanism and African Renaissance’, it is necessary to
subject the 50 years journey of the OAU/AU with respect to the question
of unity to critical scrutiny.
To this end, it is imperative that
we heed the counsel of former South African President Thabo Mbeki that
in the context of the 50th anniversary of the OAU ‘We must
answer some questions honestly: What progress have we made towards the
achievement of the objectives set by the OAU, AU and NEPAD? What shall
we do in this regard?’
This should involve an appreciation of the
dismal performance of the continent on the question of African unity.
Accordingly, in what follows I would like to highlight the road that
post-independence leaders pursued and how it led to the betrayal of the
promises of liberation and hence the dream of unity as well as the
catastrophic consequence of this failure of the post-independence
political class. In the process, I also hope to identify the major
factors that impeded substantive progress towards the dream of the
unification of people of the continent.
The OAU years during the Cold War: the case of unity betrayed?
The
birth of the OAU coincides with the emergence of the Cold War, which
shaped global politics and indeed the relationship of the newly
independent African states to global powers. In many ways, the OAU of
the Cold War period can appropriately be considered as a period that
manifested the betrayal of the dream of unity.
The defeat of Nkrumah’s vision of unity in the May 1963 OAU founding conference in Addis Ababa
It
should be stated that the OAU came into existence after a lengthy
debate between diverse group of leaders. Indeed, in that historic month
of May 1963 in Addis Ababa the 32 heads of state and government
represented various forces including revolutionaries, reactionary and
feudal forces, nationalists and puppets of former colonial powers. These
diverse group of leaders were divided into two large blocks: the few of
them supporting Nkrumah’s vision of a united states of Africa and the
conservative and gradualist block that sought nothing more than a loose
association.
In the ideological fight between the forces of unity and status quo, the OAU represented the victory of the forces of status quo and
the defeat of Nkrumah’s vision of unity. G. G. Collins, British High
Commissioner in Accra, in a 1963 memo described the defeat of Nkrumah’s
vision of unity in the following terms
‘He (Nkrumah) had asked for
a continental government of a Union of African States with a common
foreign policy and diplomacy, common citizenship and a capital city; he
got a loose organization which specifically provides for its members to
be able to renounce their membership.
He had said that the Union
of Africa would solve all border problems; he got a Commission of
Mediation and clauses among the Principles of the Organization referring
to non-interference in the internal affairs of states and to unreserved
condemnation of subversive activities on the part of neighboring
states.
He had asked for a continent-wide economic and industrial
programme to include a common market and a common communications system,
and a monetary zone with a central bank and currency; he got only a
promise that commissions for matters economic and social, educational
and cultural, scientific and technical might be set up.
He had
asked for plans for a common system of defense; he got only the promise
of a defense commission. When the conference Resolution to set up a
Liberation Bureau was implemented, Ghana was not included.’
Application of ‘We the Head of State and Government’ to its limits
In
the years following 1963, the OAU years of the Cold War further
entrenched existing divisions and added new once. First, the expression
in the commencing words of the OAU Charter ‘We the Heads of State and
Government’ was applied to its limits. The OAU became no more than a
trade union of heads of state and governments, many of whom became in
subsequent years violent dictators, Kleptocrats, self-appointed emperors
and presidents for life. As aptly portrayed in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah,
like the colonial authorities from whom they took political power, the
post-independence political class treated the masses of their people
with contempt, abuse and even brut force. Whatever unity that emerged
within the OAU was a unity in dictatorship, corruption and misery. As
the post-independence political class used its hold on power to
accumulate personal wealth, indulge in excessive abuse of power and
perfect despotic and violent rule as powerfully mirrored in Ngugi wa
Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, the promise and hope of the
liberation struggle including the dream of unity soon turned into
nightmare in many of the newly independent countries.
Most, if not
all, independent countries became not only poor economies but also
economies dependent on their former colonial countries. As Frantz Fanon
in his celebrated book The Wretched of the Earth aptly summed up,
‘the
national economy of the period of independence [was] not set on a new
footing. It is still concerned with the ground-nut harvest, with the
cocoa crop, the olive yield. In the same way there is no change in the
marketing of basic products, and not a single industry is set up in the
country. We go on sending out our raw materials, we go on being Europe’s
small farmers, who specializes in unfinished products’.
This
economics (mainly interested in accumulation of private wealth for the
political class rather than serving the interests of the masses of the
population and concerned with only export of raw materials) offered no
motivation to build communication and transport infrastructure that
connects the countries of the continent. Similarly, the logic of this
economics also ensured that there could be no chance of intra-African
trade and hence possibility of economic integration.
Second, the
OAU served as a framework for entrenching the juridical sovereignty of
its member states, which more often than not was used to shield the
corrupt and violent system of governance perfected in many of its member
states. First, shackled by its dogmatic adherence to the principle of
non-intervention, the OAU became witness to the rampant miss rule and
the many violations that took place in many countries including Central
African Republic, Uganda, Equatorial Guinea, and former Zaire. Second,
in the Cairo meeting in 1964 OAU member states adopted the principle of Uti Possidetis
thereby affirming the deeply arbitrary colonial division of the
continent. Third, OAU members adopted legal regimes relating to tariff
and customs as well as entry and exist requirements.
The above
developments had two negative consequences to the unity of the
continent. First, they solidified and hardened the colonial fences
separating the countries and peoples of Africa, deepening the colonial
division of the continent and limiting free movement of people and
goods. Second, they gave rise to a politics of indifference that
blocked OAU and its member states from coming to the defense of the
people of Africa who, soon after independence, forced to endure a rule
as brutal as that was found under colonialism.
The Cold War added a
further division between the countries of the continent, as a divided
and weak Africa was soon turned into a major theatre of the Cold War. As
in the past, the interventions of the Cold War by global powers on the
continent proved to be destructive.
Former South African President Thabo Mbeki best captured this devastation in the following terms:
Concretely,
among other things, this resulted in such negative developments as the
corruption of the African independence project through the establishment
of the system of neo-colonialism, the overthrow of governments which
resisted this, support for the white minority and colonial regimes in
Southern Africa, seen as dependable anti-communist and anti-Soviet
allies, the assassination of such leaders as Patrice Lumumba, Thomas
Sankara and Eduardo Mondlane, sponsorship of such instrumentalities as
UNITA in Angola and RENAMO in Moçambique, support for predatory and
client regimes such as those of Mobutu in the then Zaire, and of
Houphouët-Boigny in Côte d’Ivoire
The above political, economic and security developments produced Africa of the 1990s.
The OAU in the 1990s: African states individually disintegrating
In
his advocacy for heeding his vision of African unity, Nkrumah warned
Africa that the failure to unify had serious consequences. He thus
stated:
Salvation for Africa lies in unity…for in unity lies
strength and I see it, African states must unite or sell themselves out
to imperialist and colonialist exploiters for a mess of pottage or
disintegrate individually.
The 1990s was a period when Nkrumah’s
worst prophetic warning of the disintegration of African states
individually was literarily born by actual events in many parts of the
continent.
Thus, the immediate post-Cold War period became one of
the darkest, bloodiest and bleakest of times for Africa. Outside of the
slave trade and colonial era, at no other time violence have been more
horrific and devastating than during this period. OAU member states were
‘disintegrating individually’ and it was as though Africa has gone
‘from the frying pan into the fire’.
In the 1990s Africa saw the
descent of Somalia into protracted lawlessness and anarchy, the
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), formerly Zaire, into one of Africa’s
brutal civil wars in which millions of people perished and Sierra Leone
and Liberia civil wars that unleashed untold horor on civilian
population of the two countries.
However, it was the 1994 Rwandan
genocide that shock Africa to its core. In a period of one hundred days,
close to 800,000 Rwandese, almost one tenth of the population of the
country, were mercilessly massacred.
With none of those who
scrambled for controlling the direction of the continent showing
interest to come to the recue of people of the continent, ‘Africa was
suddenly left to fend for itself’ as former Secretary General Kofi Annan
put it. Unfortunately, the OAU, which developed into a disappointing
symbol of the (dis)unity of the continent, failed terribly to do
anything meaningful to avert or mitigate many of the calamities of the
1990s. As in the past, it did very little other than being witness to
the brutal death, mayhem and displacement of millions of Africans and to
its member states ‘disintegrating individually’.
The AU: A false dawn of African unity?
The
transformation of the OAU to the AU is indeed a major development in
the evolution towards achieving the ideals of pan-Africanism. As Murithi
rightly pointed out the AU ‘was supposed to usher Africa into a new era
of continental integration, leading to a deeper unity and a resolution
of its problems.’
The transformation of the OAU to the AU involved both normative and institutional Changes.
At
the normative level, under the Constitutive Act of the AU, the AU made a
complete break from the OAU in two major ways. First by redefining
sovereinty where by the divisive OAU principle of non-intervention was
replaced by a solidaity principle of non-indifference under Article 4
(h) of the Constitutive Act.
These normative changes were also
accompanied by institutional changes. This involved the establishment of
decision-making and implementation structures (the AU Assembly, the
Executive Council, AU PSC, PRC and the AU Commission) representative and
judicial institutions (Pan-African Parliament and the African Court of
Justice and Human and Peoples’ Rights) as well as a continental
development framework taking the form of the New Partnership for
Africa’s Development with its governance monitoring and review process
called the African Peer Review Mechanism.
Compared to the OAU
years, Africa indubitably registered some commendable progress under the
AU. This is particularly true with respect to peace and security.
However, the promises unfulfilled are far more than those realized.
Quite a number of limitations have been witnessed in the past decade.
The
most notable and widely recognised limitation of the AU system is its
heavy dependence on donor funding for its activities. For example, close
to 90% of the funding for AU peace and security activities comes from
donor funding.
Moreover, most AU member states do not make the
diplomatic and military contributions needed for the effective
implementation of the decisions they made. For example, the AU Mission
to Somalia (AMISOM) consisted of troops from only Uganda and Burundi for
far too long, although all PSC members were involved in the decision to
deploy AMISOM. Major contributions in terms of both troops and other
resources for peace operations are borne by fewer than a dozen countries
on the continent.
The AU’s slow pace of achieving consensus, the
failure of its relatively well-positioned member states to provide
expected levels of leadership and the resultant lack of appropriate
action led to both political and security vacuum. Although it started
off very well, currently the AU suffers from a dearth of leadership even
on the part of its most pivotal member states such as South Africa and
Nigeria.
There is also huge gap between commitments that member
states made and their practice on the ground. Regime security continues
to trump the demands of human security to which AU member states freely
subscribed under various AU instruments. In this regard, former South
African President Thabo Mbeki pointed out that one of the AU’s failures
is ensuring that member states ‘respect the imperatives for democratic
rule as spelled out in the Constitutive Act, and related decisions,
centred on the strategic perspective that the people – the African
masses – must govern’.
Another major issue has been the lack of a
unified voice. This is evidenced by the divergence in the policy
positions that AU member states take in their capitals, in Addis Ababa
and in international forums such as in New York. In this regard, one
area of manifest failure President Mbeki raised was what he called ‘the
shameful African disunity and indecisiveness which resulted in the
debacles in Cote d’Ivoire and Libya, which put in serious doubt our
ability to determine our destiny, with present and continuing serious
negative consequences for our continent’.
Conclusion
The
foregoing clearly illustrated that ‘this question of African unity’
encountered betrayals, failures of catastrophic consequences, missed
opportunities and in some ways false dawns.
It was not anchored on
a firm ideological conviction on the part of both the post-independence
and subsequent political leadership of the continent. The leaders with
the required conviction and vision were very few and far in between.
Many others declared their conviction to African unity in public but did
everything and conspired with others to exactly impede and frustrate
the unification of the continent. The dream of African unification also
lacked constituency among the wider public on the continent. In the
years following the establishment of the OAU, it was made a reserve of a
self serving political class with very limited, if any, presence in the
works and practice of civil society, the media, public intellectuals of
the continent.
Apart from its weak ideological and social
foundations in the practice of the post-colonial African state and
public, the required socio-economic infrastructure capable of
facilitating its realization was also lacking. There were no transport
and communication infrastructure to network and link up the countries
and peoples of the continent. The solidification of the colonial fences
through entrenching juridical sovereignty, sanctifying colonially carved
deeply arbitrary borders, and the adoption of regulations imposing
restrictions and tariffs on movement of people and goods further
deepened the division inherited at independence. Lack of industrial
development also mean that there existed very little for African
countries to trade between themselves.
While under the AU there
have been promising developments, the division and rivalry among African
states are allowed to persist. Much of the current political class
lacks the ideological conviction for advancing the ideal of unification
with the urgency and determination it requires. Those with the position
and capacity to mobilize the continent for higher level of political and
socio-economic integration are divided and remain indecisive in
providing the leadership expected of them. The continent has as yet to
develop the required regulatory and physical infrastructure
(communication and transport infrastructure, standardized trade
frameworks, industrialization for producing finished products essential
for intra-African trade) that facilitates economic integration and
intra-regional trade.
The result is the continuing state of
disunity among African states. After 50 years journey African unity
still remains a dream deferred.
The major challenges to be overcome include addressing
- the deficit in the ideological conviction of the political classes of the countries of the continent,
- the lack of sustainable political commitment, and
- the current dearth of political leadership on the continent
- the development of the required socio-economic and physical infrastructure
- absence of societal wide awareness of and support for the unification project
Steps to be taken include
- re-articulation and reaffirmation of the commitment for African unity as the surest means both for extricating the masses of the people from the prevailing socio-economic and political ills they find themselves in and for enabling Africa to participate in and contribute meaningfully for global development and prosperity as well as in the global quest for a just and humane world order
- creating societal wide awareness of and constituency for African unity,
- achieving the emergence of a coalition of countries with dedicated political leadership and commitment for pursuing the dream of African unity
- outline a realistic and incentivised roadmap and strategy with benchmarks and realistic timelines as well as follow up mechanisms for integration
- translating declarations and rhetoric of unity reflected in the plethora of commitments made under the AU into actions by contributing the required diplomatic and material resources to achieve the kind of integration and unification along the terms aptly put by Frantz Fanon:
The
inter-African solidarity must be a solidarity of fact, a solidarity of
action, a solidarity of concrete in men, in equipment, in money
Failure
to achieve the above would leave countries of the continent divided by
petty conflicts and struggles deferring the dream of unification for far
too long. And as former South African President Thabo Mbeki warned ‘If
this dream is deferred for much longer, surely, it will explode!’
