AFRICA'S SECOND INDEPENDENCE
by Charles Quist-Adade
May 25 was Africa Liberation Day. This year the day is significant in two respects: It marks the first anniversary of the Africa Union. It also serves as watershed between old and new attempts to unify the continent.
Since it was designated 39 years ago in 1963 by the Organization of African Unity (OAU), May 25 has since been observed each year as an occasion when African politicians and academics focus on the continent's plight and map out strategies for alleviating its problems. At the time of the formation of the OAU, there were only 32 liberated countries on the continent. Today, 53 African countries have achieved political independence after several decades of struggle against colonialism.
One of the objectives of the founding members of the OAU was to rid the continent of all forms of foreign rule, including settler minority regimes. Thus the liberation of South Africa from the heinous apartheid system in the beginning of the 1990s was seen as representing the end to formal colonialism in Africa. It was the last stage of the first phase of the Africa Revolution, which began with Ghana's independence in 1957.
With the apartheid system now consigned to the garbage bin of history, Africans accomplished the first task the founding fathers of the OAU set out for the continent. The second phase, Africa's second liberation begins with the birth of the Africa Union. There is no doubt that African countries achieved only nominal independence, or what has been cynically "termed flag and anthem independence." Over nearly four decades after achieving independence, African countries find their economies still in a deadly embrace with their former colonial masters in a neo-colonial dependency.
Apart from the this neo-colonial dependency that has put African countries in an unjust international economic system that is so skewed against them, Africa is ruled by many illegitimate and incapable leaders. That is why the second phase of the African de-colonization process, i.e. economic emancipation and political unification of the continent will be even more difficult and protracted.
But unite we must, if we are to survive the 21st century. The visionary Pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah argued forcefully that it was only a federal state of Africa based on a common market, common currency, unified army (African High Command), and a common foreign policy that can provide the launching pad for not only a massive reconstruction and modernization of the continent, but also optimize Africa's efforts to find its rightful place in the international arena and to effectively checkmate internal conflicts, fend off superpower interference, predatory and imperialistic wars.
To many, the idea of a union government of Africa remains a utopia. True, the enormity of the task ahead is quite great; the task of ironing out political, ideological differences, overcoming the vestiges of colonial divisions and neo-colonial machinations are enormous. But this sense of utopia should not push Africans into resignation or inaction. After all, history has amply demonstrated that, all great ventures of human civilisation started, as it were, in the womb of utopianism. What is more, Africans should remind themselves that any programme, no matter how poorly conceived, if imaginatively executed, is better than complete inaction.
A continental union government may not have been a magic bullet or a panacea for all of the continent's seemingly intractable problems, but one can say without fear of contradiction, that the situation on the continent would have been better than it is today. For such a union would have made it possible for the marshalling and pooling of the continent's rich resources for the collective benefit of the citizens of Africa. Advantages of economies of scale, the avoidance of duplicity, presenting a united voice in world affairs, and a collective bargain in international trade (instead of competing among ourselves for the lowest commodity prices at the bargaining table) are, but few of the fruits to be reaped in a continental union government.
The examples on both sides of the Atlantic where the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement have united countries of disparate cultures, languages, and political and even ideological orientations, coupled with the surging globalization of the world economy point to the breadth of Nkrumah's vision.
The ongoing civil wars in various parts of Africa today stem partly from the inability of regimes in Africa to meet the basic needs of the people as leaders compete in cynical popularity contests parading as "saviors, "redeemers," and "liberators "in countries, some of whose national airlines have no more than one aircraft, whose only source of foreign currency earning is a perishable and dispensable crop. In fact, the only trappings these "nations" can boast of are a rickety, national army, a national flag and an anthem. How can such flag-and-anthem countries become viable in a lop-sided global economy that is so much skewed against small and weak nations?
Africans have themselves to blame if they continue to plough their narrow furrows instead pooling the efforts, human and material resources in order to stay in the race to a globalized 21st century. If Africans fail to take the challenge of continental unity now, the continent will inevitably be gobbled up by the colossus of capitalist globalism in this century, just as it was enslaved, balkanized, and exploited of its human and natural resources through the trilogy of slavery, colonialism, and neo-colonialism of the last century.
This article first published in TRANS SAHARA NEWS
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