The
Union of African States is a persistent theme of the agenda of the periodic
conferences of the leaders of the continent. Its recurrence is the proof of the
importance of the subject; but, also, that the will to realize this big
intention is still far from being shared by all the Member states of the
African Union, at least by their leaders. Why? And is it again necessary to
wait?
1 - Union and democracy
Now one half a century ago us, citizens and citizens,
men and women, of Africa, attend a periodic debate on the union of our
countries. The fact that our plenipotentiaries discuss it so for a long time is
indicative of the gravity of the question, and the legitimacy of the
instigation of the Heads of State favorable to the project, following in it the
paragon of conviction, Kwame Nkrumah, whose name is self-sufficient to him, to
evoke the African federal intention.
In the course of these conferences and in spite of an imaginative
semantic, the reading of the final statements does not stop settling the
disappointment. Because the last word, that of the dead end, always belongs to
the afrosceptics; in reluctant neglected on one hand of national sovereignty,
for the benefit of a supranational character, of which, nevertheless, they will
be member of the all executive and control organs.
Somewhere else in the world, States established or are
establishing federations. Those are admired, respected and even envied by the
Africans, who assault their borders, even often at the risk of their life, to flee
the poverty and the poverty of their country. Then, who explains that these
same Africans are, or consider themselves, not capable of making it so much at
themselves? Is it because of inferiority complex or national egoism?
In reality, the chances are high that what explains
such a refusal, it is less the object, than its implications, the dominant of
which is the democratic governance. The framing of the national powers
federated in the global, respectful standards of human rights, will constitute,
naturally, a new reality, incompatible with the excessive behavior of
authority, such as they are practiced in numerous States of the continent, and
which are at the origin of its state worrying about very weak productivity.
The prospect of the institutional reforms, in favor of
modern governance, in high economic, respectful efficiency of the rights of
their fellow countrymen, is a cause for concern, very understandable, for the
upholders of the power of the arbitrary power and the misuse of social properties.
The thorough question of the union, would be so, fundamentally, the question of
the democracy and the liberties.
Moreover, the hesitation in the continental
supranational character appears itself, as an antidemocratic position, in the
fact that it does not reflect this need and this desire of union, felt as a
deep and constant aspiration of the peoples of our continent. Against the
brutality of the borders, the nonsense of the national differentiation within
families, shortage in a State of what is plentiful in the other one, the import
of products made with our raw materials, the disqualification of Africa for the
main world debates, its vulnerability in all the exclusions, the libelous
accusations and the imputations of all the pandemics.
There is no better popular indicator of this aspiration,
than the thematic recurrence of Africa and the unity in all the languages of
the continent, in the works of the writers, the poets and the artists of all
the disciplines. Manifestly, the conclusion of the debates felted the Summits
of Addis Ababa and moreover do not take into account it. The question would deserve
a direct consultation of the peoples. It constitutes the most justifiable of
the subjects of referendum!
2 - Derisory pretext
From 1963 till 2009, the essential motive for the
majority refusal of the project of Constitution of the United States of Africa
did not vary: the apprehension to lose the power. Precocity of the project and
the necessity of its maturation show to have been and are still, only assertions,
which did not stand the test of time.
«The idea of Nkrumah " was unrealistic and
dangerously revolutionary for the “Group of Monrovia”, in systematic opposition
to so-called "progressive" States of the “Group of Casablanca”,
partisans of the active non-alignment, and most of which of the leaders were in
political antagonism with their former colonizer. In a context of Cold War, the
ideological influences were not thus absent in the debate of the Founding Fathers
of the Organization of African Unity (OUA), the compromise of not executive
cooperation.
The poignant appeal of the president of the first
"sovereignty" extracted from the colonial power, and which had a
reason of pride to guard it, could not be heard, in these historic days of May,
1963, by the representatives of governments mainly pro-western diligent,
qualified of "moderated", by euphemism, in a time when the West did
not make difference between non-alignment and communism.
We would have been able to believe that the historic
error that was the refusal of the project of federal Constitution, May 24th,
1963, and adoption of the Charter of the OAU, the next day, was an effect of
these exogenous influences, so imposing on the diplomacy in first faltering
steps of recent "sovereignties". But the obstinacy of the
hesitations, five decades later, leads to suspect an ideological logic which
worries us. Quite rightly.
Because, two generations later, the topology of groups
does not seem to have evolved a lot: the Member states of the African Union ( UA),
the heiress of the OUA, again are there to count, even if they make it now
there " instantists" and " gradualists ". The same majority
remain reluctant to an abandonment of "sovereignty", consubstantial
with the principle of a federal executive.
Africa so continues to waste time which is heavily
counted to him by the productive walking of the world. The indecision to be
taken in hand quickly the big emergencies of the continental development, framed
in the New Economic Partnership for the Africa’s Development (NEPAD), will be
translated in increase of financial, social and strongly compromising costs of
the ambitions of the road map of an action-oriented federal government.
3
- Sovereignties in shells
That is why we are worn to wonder to wonder what is
the interest, for micro-states, to lean on "sovereignties" which have
difficulty in becoming nations, and the "power " of which, to its
most intimate aspects, is assisted, often without sustainable effects, through
the interventions of the International Financial Institutions and the multiple
bilateral agencies which preserve them a visible reality.
In most of the domains of political and social
development, NGOs ( Non-Governmental Organizations) subtracted them the real
sovereignty, often to the satisfaction of the populations, which eventually
convince themselves that the State, " who cannot make everything ",
as it is said to them, is not for them there, but indeed the contrary. They
have difficulty in settling their debts, can protect, neither their products,
nor their producers against the invasion of protected exogenous products, which
create a local endemic unemployment, poverty and hunger.
After half a century of jealous protection, these
famous African "sovereignties", which refuse to our peoples to unite
to progress with the world, realized, globally, no convincing progress. Neither
for the health, nor for the education, nor for the employment, nor for the
energy, nor for the drinking water, nor for the infrastructures, nor for the
manufacturing industry. While somewhere else, and in less than a generation,
States, all federal type, devoid of raw materials (that they come to look in
Africa) populate the space of their endogenous artificial satellites, our
sovereignties show an inexorably lessening trend of their positive development
indicators.
At the deep of the bottom of the world classification,
the inexorable reduction of the international assistance, feeds their anxiety as
programmed victims of the globalization, because of non-productivity and power
of negotiation weakness, which increases the persistent economic extraversion, generative
of poverty shared by an increasing proportion of their populations.
This picture is little flattering of half a century of
singular African sovereignties so jealously protected from «the African
intervention ". They convinced neither their peoples, nor the nations of
the world, the capacity of the States of the continent to insure their
development. Their ineffectiveness is eloquently validating of the doctrine of Nkrumah.
The Ghanaian visionary had depicted to his unbelieving peers, the consequences
of their refusal to assume the federal project. The prediction comes true under
our eyes.
4
- Vision and reason
Nkrumah was not a nostalgic, even less a utopian. It
was a lucid thinker and a man of action with a redoubtable realism. If the
founding argument of the historic panafricanist project was the reconquest of
the dignity of the Blacks, scattered all over the world, according to the Slave
trade and the imperialist exploitation, the vision of the author of Africa must unite is, as for hum, just
prosaic. His analysis is factual, and its proposals are in touch with the
realities of our time and the heavy perspectives of a world, in which the
respectability of States, and the dignity of their citizens, will be strongly
correlated in their economic power.
This power is understood, including the monetary
credibility and the financial power, the industrial capacity, the strength
dissuasive defense, the means of active security, the capacity to educate and
to treat, to practice a profitable trade, to have functional structures and
quality infrastructures, laws guaranteeing rights and defining right duties. To
hoist Africa at this critical level of autonomy of decision and action, which
is called the development, will be the road map of a federal government of
Africa. It is the wishes of the Africans.
Nkrumah’s strategic program of the continental
development priority looked like to be mistaken in the NEPAD there, with this
difference that it was not conditioned in the foreign aid, but based on the
capacities of Africa. For lack of having managed to make it adopt by his peers,
he directed it, through the big projects of infrastructures, in his country;
this portion of the African territory which was only a “gold coast” and that he
renamed Ghana, an ancient Great West African Empire.
Making it, the first president of the first postcolonial
black African Republic wanted to remind, or to teach those who ignored it, the
capacity of the Africans to create of big spaces of common life, like it
prestigious pre-colonial Empire, of which the territory covered approximately
the jurisdiction of the current Economic Community of the west African States (ECOWAS).
He wanted, also, by the example sustainable physical realizations, to infer dynamic
continental innovative transformations.
5 - The new heralds
It is thus happy that new generation of statesmen maintained
the torch of the Pan-Africanism, planted in the heart of our continent by Kwame
Nkrumah, Modibo Keita, Sekou Toure, Ben Bella and the other symbolic faces of
the group of Casablanca. Those current have names, among others, Mouammar
Gaddafi, Abdoulaye Wade, Amadou Toumani Toure, Yayi Boni, Atta Mils, Alfa Oumar
Konaré (whose departure from the African Union Commission, was profoundly felt
by the activists of the cause of the union). The Constitutions of their States
planned the abandonment of sovereignty for the benefit of the union, as the
founding dimension of their African policy.
Certain commentators, foreigners as much as African,
try to distort the project of the United States of Africa, by presenting it
with, often, a tasteless irony, as a hegemonic will on the Africans of the
Libyan Guide, Mouammar Gaddafi (as if he was not a son of Africa, himself) or a
dream of a blazing intellectual, Abdoulaye Wade, the president of Senegal.
Such judgments are the bookmarks of a pitiful
ignorance and a guilty unreliability of their authors. The truth, it is because
these heads of State carry the aim and the voice of the citizens of Africa,
just as much as that of most of their peers, those who are worried by the situation
of their continent, and the fate of their fellow countrymen. They express our
shared conviction that the federation is the institutional form suited to the
problem of the development of Africa; in the fact that it systematizes the
mutualization of the human and natural resources, establishes the active
solidarity, the freedom of establishment and free movement of people and goods.
Their ambition is the international parity, in rights and duties, in dignity,
in prosperity and in capacities, peoples of quite whole Africa with the other
peoples of the world, the most advanced.
6 - Paradox and syndrome
Africa is considered poor with, at least, the third of
the known world natural resources, the list of which would be boring to unwind
here; but Africa is hungry and thirsty, while its average climate and its
grounds are among the best, and while its streams drain 10 % of the continental
territory and pour in the oceans about 70 000m3 of fresh water every
second.
Africa misses energy, with a consumption per capita
showing a 77 % deficit, with regard to the world average, while Inga's
hydroelectric field, in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), offers a radical
solution in expectation of exploitation ; without counting the potentialities
in inexhaustible and of very strong intensity photovoltaic resource, on two-thirds
of the surface of the continent.
Africa, which carries the sixth of the inhabitants of
the Earth, is also under-populated, with 33 inhabitants by km2,
against a world average of 50, what shows that the demography is brandished in
scarecrow, that by incapacity of mobilization of the available resources, the
increase of the productivity and the country planning. Africa so presents the
paradoxical situation to be rich and poor, at the same time, and most
dramatically victim of the famous Dutch syndrome, as well as give evidence of
it the wars, the divisions, the political tensions, the exodus and the human
dramas of all kinds.
7 - Ten digits vs. fourteen
Enrich us and wait! Such seems to be the order wrongly friendly, which
seem to obey the Africans, convinced to be able to expect for their
development, in the current national borders, and meeting no resistance, from
the generosity of their foreign "partners". The experience of fifty
years should be enough to show the dangerous innocence of such a conviction.
The unimplemented promises by the NEPAD are rather
eloquent of the evidence of the fundamental changes which are taking place in
the nature of the relations of our continent with the international
environment, in their logic of migration, the more or less graceful assistance,
in strategic and strongly competitive exchanges.
What attracts the interest of the analyst it also is
to point out that the main industrialized powers of the address book of Africa
have the common peculiarity to be, all, supranational entities: Argentina,
Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the United States of America, India,
Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, Switzerland, the European Union, to quote only
those.
In the new type relations with these federal economies,
the disproportions are such as we wonder if he can exist reasonable chances of
profit, between an African "sovereign" State, the average GDP of
which (in dollars) displays 10-digit, in front of 13 or 14 of the one some of
his partners. The disproportion, which can so reach ratio of 1 to 21 300 (i.e.
The Gambia-USA) for the GDP, and 1 to 900 (i.e. Gabon-China) for consumers
markets, leave, naturally, little vital economic space to the African State. The
aggregation of the economies of the continent is thus the way sine qua not
towards the critical threshold of international parity, allowing a profitable
visibility in the world competition.
The world competition opened on the resources and the
market shares drive most of the economies of Europe, Asia-Pacific and America,
in spite of their nevertheless high level, to develop regional convergences dynamics
of extension or constitution of regional groupings, coupled with strategies of
mergers of companies. The institutional and industrial mega-powers which result
from it will leave little room with the weak national entities, dependent on a foreign
assistance subjected to a process of inevitable contraction in the dimensions
of an objective egoism.
8 - The end of palavers
Africa cannot, without long-lasting risk, stand apart of
these big reconfigurations which liven up all the nations of the world for always
higher economic performances. It would not thus be reasonable that Africa sets
more time than it made it up to now, to set up its first continental executive
structures.
Half a century of delaying behavior convinced in
smugness of the determination of the positions within the African Union, concerning
the federal project. On one side, about twenty States convinced of the vital
need of mutualization of their resources, to give the capacity to resolve the
emergencies of their peoples, and, the other one, governments apparently
followers of a type of governance which did not convince its efficiency, to
bring sustainable solutions to the problem of the development.
In such a persistent stability binary configuration,
it does not seem productive to wait for a simultaneous membership of all the
States of the continent. A longer expectation would drive neglected of the
federal project, which would confirm and would stress the function of passive
supplier of raw materials and ambitionless receptacle for all the rubbishes of
the world.
No African wishes such a fate his continent. So, on
the basis of the principle of free membership, which is the one of the formation
process of the modern federal groupings, the fast answer to the expectation of
the peoples should consist of a progressive process, which would consist in:
a) With the group of about twenty Member states of the
African Union which declare themselves ready for the membership, to establish,
without waiting even more, the Federation of the African States (FAS/FEA), to
call so to avoid the homonymy of the " United States of Africa " with
the United States of America (USA/EUA); this Founding-States will so constitute
the hard core of the first federal States;
b) Maintain opened the offer of membership and welcome
the new members, according to the evolution of the political will of the
concerned governments. In such a plan, it will be naturally that:
· The territorial nearness and the continuity will not
be considered as criterion of constitution of the federation, nor the
membership of a State;
· The African Union would leave the place with the FAS;
· The FAS shall define a convention of cooperation
with States not parties to the Federal Constitution.
· the Regional Economic Community (REC) will not be
envisaged as primary federal frame, considering the fact that they share with
the African Union the same disparity towards the federal project; they will be functionally
adapted as basic cooperation frames, between the Federation and States not parties
in every region. It is very likely that an operational federal government will
have a stimulating effect of the interest of the hesitating States, and an Inciting
effect, in favor of the fast increase the number of federated States.
It is difficult, and even painful for the collective
dignity, to think that he can exist African leaders who would persist in the
option consisting in perpetuating the principles of the general Act of the
conference of Berlin, February, 1885, which, by establishing one-sided rules of
sharing of the African territory, carry the responsibility of our disastrous
situation, which the project of federal union has for aim to settle. It will
not be doubtless easy to these leaders to justify to their people a walking in
the opposite direction of the History.
Primacy to the African
solidarity.
adyusufi812@hmail.com
(Original; French)
To quote this article
Adyusufi812@gmail.com© Copyrights
____________________________________________
(1) Cf. Assane.Y.Diallo « G20 à Londres. Et après ? » http://www.afrology.com
(2) Cf. Assane.Y.Diallo « NEPAD : quelle relance ? » http://www.afrology.com
(3) Title of his eponymic book –New York, 1964
(4) Cf. K. Nkrumah « Address to the Conference of African Heads of States and Governments; 24th may 1963 – cité par L. Kaba in “Nkrumah et le rêve de l’unité Africaine” – Ed. Chaka, Paris
(5) Cf. Assane Y.Diallo: “Eclats d’Afric” - Ed. Edilivre, Paris (2007);
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