African unity is an idea whose time has arrived
By Oduor Ong�wen
Last Wednesday, two unrelated functions had me thinking about a federation of African states.
One was the Summit of the New Partnership for Africa�s Development (Nepad) at which the star speaker was President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda.
The other was a dinner co-organised by the NGO Council at which the guest speaker was Graca Machel-Mandela.
Museveni observed that Africa, with its 53 states, has the highest concentration of states. This makes the effort of mobilising resources for its development a daunting one.
For instance, Burkina Faso cannot plan for, say, a bicycle factory because it would exhaust its market within the first year.
Since you cannot plan for a market you don�t control, it cannot plan with the continental market in mind.
Similarly, it makes economic sense to network our rail-line from Mombasa to Kinshasa, with branches to Addis Ababa, Juba and Mwanza via Kisii and Kericho, for example.
Another critical resource that our economic integration can help us develop is energy. Currently, only less than 10 per cent of our hydro-electric potential has been tapped. With abundant and cheap energy, heavy industry will blossom. Consequently, jobs will be created and enough taxes will be collected to enable our governments to provide the required services without having to be what Museveni called "donees".
I differ though when Museveni avers that we in Africa are only capable of donating ignorance to the rest of the world. Politically, the union would enable the continent to be taken seriously on the international arena. Take, for instance, the idea of a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
An African Union incorporating the economic clout of South Africa, Egypt and the Maghreb states would have infinitely more clout than even the most populous nation, Nigeria, let alone minnows like Cape Verde and Swaziland. The AU, representing a tenth of the world population, will be hard to ignore.
There is also a chance that Pan-African institutions and sensibilities within a political union could help unlock some of the continent�s problems that appear intractable.
For example, it is the view of many that there would be less scope for ethnic conflict and national rivalry within an African Union than at present.
Countries are often destabilised, in part, by the colonial borders that sometimes divide ethnic groups.
Madam Graca Machel inspired me more. She delivered a message of hope.
"There is African renewal and I want to sincerely thank you, the Kenyan civil society, for spearheading it," she said, and added: "The landmark victory you delivered to the Kenyan and African people at your last elections, the outcome of Cancun, where Kenya played a leading role, and the elections in Rwanda which has produced the highest proportion of women parliamentarians in the world. All these have made Africa proud.
I am convinced that Graca was not playing to the gallery when she asserted that a united, prosperous and socially just Africa was not only possible but attainable. Many events point to this.
The notion of Pan-Africanism that inspired the likes of Kwame Nkrumah, Abdel Nasser, and Julius Nyerere, among others, in the 1940s and 1950s was re-born in the 1990s.
The liberation of South Africa rekindled it. The failure to dislodge apartheid had been one of Africa�s worst frustrations. However, when freedom finally came, it unlocked new possibilities, for the first time the unity of the continent from Cape Town to Cairo could be conceived.
The "inviolability" of the colonial borders has now been breached too by Eritrea�s long-sought independence from Ethiopia in 1993. The sheer absurdity of these borders has become even more evident.
In many parts of our continent, these borders continue to be ignored as people trade the way they have done for centuries, within and between ethnic communities, regardless of the colonisers� maps that have divided them.
From one point of view, these traders are smugglers; from another, they are Pan-African entrepreneurs.
The main influence propelling the continent to greater political and economic unity is globalisation. Faced with an economic system that grants transnational capital a carte blanche, African people are increasingly awakening to the fact that they have to hang together if they are to defend and advance their interests, or be hanged separately.
As individual states within artificial borders, they can easily be picked off or played against each other.
Although our presidents are still obsessed with 21-gun salutes, military parades, traditional dancers and motorcades, the more intelligent ones have realised that their power to change their people�s lives is severely circumscribed and that they have no alternative but to swim in a bigger pool if they want to make an impact.
Another impetus for the African Union can be found in the threat and example of the European Union. If Europe succeeded, what would prevent us?
"I have no taste for make-believe, for the hopes and illusions of the supra-national school. The union of a continent, blessed or cursed with many tongues, such rich and diverse cultures, such geographic breadth, is a pipe dream.
"A single currency? A common parliament? One court of human rights? Let us leave in a real world. This is a continent of conflicts, replete with tribal longings and memories of war. Nations cannot be suicidal: the Union is foredoomed."
The foregoing views are not about Africa. They are sceptical views about the idea of European unity common in the 1950s and 1960s, part of them a direct quotation from former French President Charles de Gaulle.
The echoes in the current climate of Western cynicism about Africa unity is inescapable, yet they forget that Africa�s nations are artificial constructs that have existed for only one century compared with the centuries of national pride and prejudice that the European Union has transcended since the days of de Gaulle.
My views may be over-optimistic. But, we would rather err on the side of hope than of despair.
*The writer is a director of Econews | 
