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Integration Challenges in Africa: Reason to topple & destroy subhuman bondages
By Odimegwu Onwumere
Africa is facing divergent challenges as they relate to good governance, development, education, ethno-colonialism, name them in recent times, but most especially, the integration challenges in Africa calls for quick and responsive measures.
However, the aforementioned didn’t just come-up. As many people knew and have been saying, most African countries are post-colonial plantation demarcations. And Africa might not be integrated in the general Africa’s policies, even that all the countries in the continent proud as African nations, until people get that ‘plantation demarcations’ mantra-off their head. Even that in the year 1924, Marcus Garvey was it who mentioned the "United States of Africa" first in his poem "Hail, United States of Africa", many people still think the obverse in the recent times. A case study of this ‘plantation demarcations’ is Nigeria. Many Nigerians would say that Nigeria is a fake country owing to the fact that it was forcefully made-up by the colonial master called Sir Fredrick Lugard in 1914. This year was when all the ethnicities in Nigeria were amalgamated, and hardly are all the ethnicities agreeing on the concept called Nigeria today, as their nation. Notwithstanding, scholars argue in favour or against that it was/not Garvey's poem that necessitated the born of the Pan-Africanist movement in 1945. Not even the Movement could achieve the Integration of Africa.
Records accounted that the idea of a multinational integration of Africa is seen by the French publication Le Monde diplomatique as a successor to the medieval African empires: the Ethiopian Empire, the Ghana Empire, the Mali Empire, the Songhai Empire, the Benin Empire, the Kanem Empire and other historic nation states. The Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, United Kingdom, attended by W. E. B. Du Bois, Patrice Lumumba, George Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah. Later, Nkrumah and Haile Selassie (among many others) took the idea forward to form the 37 nation Organisation of African Unity, the forerunner of today's 53-nation African Union.
The Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi had pushed for the creation of the African Union at a summit in Lomé, Togo, in 2000. In 2009, he was the Chairperson of the African Union (AU), and he advanced the idea of a United States of Africa at two regional African summits: in June 2007 in Conakry, Guinea, and again in February 2009 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Yet, the integration could not hold for the proposed concept of a federation of some or all of the 53 sovereign states of Africa.
Even that he was the Chairperson of AU, Gaddafi once described the AU as a failure. He ascribed the failure to the emergence of untrue pan-African Africa, which created lapses in providing stability and wealth to Africa. Alpha Oumar Konaré, former President of Mali and former Chairperson of the African Union Commission were among a number of senior AU members who on the commemoration of Africa Day (May 25, 2006) spoke and supported the proposed federation, believing that it could bring peace to a 'new' Africa, yet no integration.
Proposed approach to examine the challenges of regional integration in Africa:
From what is going on in most countries of Africa – wars, political instability, social instability, and economic instability, any sane person ought to ask why these problems. From the inception of the world Africa has not known peace as a result of one or the other intimidation by the self-acclaimed-know-all apple-colour-people who have held Africa spellbound for decades and Africa must break the grip of their shackle.
- Like in the South Africa, Zimbabwe where these nose-speakers settled, in Egypt, the Arabs on our continent, invaded Egypt in 640AD. They Arabized Egypt and exhibited colour discrimination, a fact that explained that in Sudan, Mauritania and also Egypt, Arabs mounted ethnic cleansing and grabbed land from Black Africans – where both populations live together under one State.
- Africans, especially the Black Africans were/are intimidated in their continent and in the Diaspora. And because of this, it behoves any Black African who has not sold his/her mentality to slavery or to the neo-colonialism to ask, why me? Why am I regarded as a product of evil? This question should crop-up because of the shameful paint the apple-colour-people have painted the black man with. The people who speak from the nose created an indelible mark where a Black African is tagged a product of bestiality.
- Imagine!
3. Grabbing lands and this ethnic cleansing of the Black African, the inculcation of Islam as a-must reverence religion is rife. This would explain the fate of Black Africans in a United States of Africa if the proposal should hold, without first addressing the above mentioned issue. We have to think wise.
4. Whatever we do today, we must bear in mind that posterity is the best Judge. Gadhafi’s Lebensraum statement at Arabs League meeting in Jordan in 2001: “The third of the Arab community living outside Africa should move in with the two-third on the continent and join the African Union ‘which is the only space we have” should be redressed. Col. Mouammar Gadhafi’s statement at the Arab League, 2001 should be taken seriously as a clue to his intentions and what he and his Arabs will set about doing to Black Africa once they have us in their United States of Africa. This is the fear.
5. Professor Chinweizu once opined: “There is a vital need to think through the Black African interest, and negotiate in detail to secure its requirements, before agreeing to this proposal. After it is signed, the Arabs will, predictably, treat any second thoughts and objection to the details as treason without any pre-agreed quid pro quo, and got nothing after the Arabs had exploited African support...”
These reasons should be outstanding because they are immeasurable. The plights of Africa are in plurals. There is the qualitative need on our side in helping to re-shape Africa to attain the height that our forebears had in mind, where each and everyone will be the brothers keepers and not the brothers kidnappers, relating to or based on the quality or character of Communalism Africans once shared and enjoyed, often as opposed to the principle of Capitalism.
It is the principle of Capitalism that has brought about the dreaded disunity among people and countries for their self-aggrandizement. It is our duty to widen people’s mental horizon that even as they practice Capitalism, there is still the need to wear brotherliness as a garb. On this, no religious institution can achieve it, except humanism, and this is what Africans need in the present times.
Planning for a single African military force, a single currency and a single passport for Africans to move freely around the continent might be imperative, but the most essential is selling the idea that Africans are one irrespective of who is the “indigene” or “settler".
There is need to re-discuss African Union’s stages of planning and ambitious targets and the need to separate ‘politics’ from ‘leadership’, the former being the bedrock of disintegration, not only in Africa, but in any organized organization.
What is important is integrating Africans in the mind, and not in the papers, as wont that the United States of Africa may exist from as early as 2017 and African Union, by contrast, has set itself the task of building a "united and integrated" Africa by 2025.
Africa’s integration should not be theoretical, but practical. It is supposed to be in everybody's everyday speech and behaviour. It should be in the relationship between an individual and another and between a country and another.
We should be our brother's keeper which is in-built in our culture. Africans should see beyond the white man’s gesture who did not find external worship (anything good) among Africans and to make up for it he imposed a religion on Africans and call it Animism. Buddhism to Zoroastrianism (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Jainism, Shintoism, Taoism, and all in between them) were all human created religions. The white man forgot to say the truth that it was only in Africa that God is centred and not in theory. We should always remind ourselves the address to the United Nations by H.I.M. Haile Selassie Oct 6, 1963, which was an excerpt of a three day Addis Ababa Conference where thirty-two nations in attendance demonstrated to the world that when the will and the determination exist, nations and peoples of diverse backgrounds can and will work together in unity, to the achievement of common goals and the assurance of that equality and brotherhood which we desire.
Selassie’s Addis Ababa Conference agreed thus: That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned: That until there are no longer first-class and second class citizens of any nation; That until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes; That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; That until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained; And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes that hold our brothers in Angola, in Mozambique and in South Africa in subhuman bondage have been toppled and destroyed; Until bigotry and prejudice and malicious and inhuman self-interest have been replaced by understanding and tolerance and good-will; Until all Africans stand and speak as free beings, equal in the eyes of all men, as they are in the eyes of Heaven; Until that day, the African continent will not know peace. We Africans will fight, if necessary, and we know that we shall win, as we are confident in the victory of good over evil.
Odimegwu Onwumere, Poet/Author and Media Consultant, is the Founder of Poet Against Child Abuse (PACA), Oyigbo, Rivers State. He sent this from Nigeria. +2348032552855. apoet_25@yahoo.com
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