NEVIS Review N0 18
Section I
Ref# 18.1
June 3, 2013
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(Ed’ Note: We would like to thank Dr Solomon for
being supportive and positive in his response to our request to reproduce the
article below in NEVIS Review. The following article appeared in
africanarguments.org website, and was also presented
at the ISS Seminar on 15 May 2013 at the ISS Addis Ababa conference room. Solomon A. Dersso, PhD is Senior
Researcher on the Peace and Security Council Report Programme for
Institute for Security Studies)
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African unity after 50 years of OAU/AU: A dream
deferred?
By Solomon
Ayele Dersso (Phd)
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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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’.
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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’.
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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!’
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