African Unity, Seemingly A Dream Never To Be Achieved

• Posted by Modou S. Joof on March 4, 2010 at 10:14pm
• View Modou S. Joof's blog

Banjul, The Gambia (TNBES) The call for African Unity have been going on for ages and we seemed to be going nowhere near achieving a united continent, not at least at a time when every president on the continent want to be treated like a demigod in his or her owned little world. 

Nkrumah of Ghana took it upon himself to be the brainchild of a United Africa, with an African development bank in order to be independent of all those conditions that comes with taking loans from the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. 

However, his call was not heeded. Pan-Africanist also did try their utmost best to unite this continent; they succeeded in liberating Africa from colonialism though at intervals, that was a great achievement anyway. But their quest to unite Africa proofs futile, thus a sign that African leaders are greedy and would not want to surrender the title ‘President’ for anything not even for the good of Africans.

Disputably, history has it that prior to Nkrumah’s call; Gambian born Edward Francis Small has at some point called for a united Africa in one of the meetings held in London by the Congress of British West Africa,
during the colonial period.

Colonel Muhammed Gaddafi, the former President of the African Commission was the latest to be engaged into fruitless efforts to unite Africa. His proposal for an army of 7 million, an Africa under one president,
among other things was treated like an unpleasant dish by many of his
compatriots, thus he received little backing to push his agenda forward. &nb

The unanswerable question remain why are our leaders are not just looking forward to uniting this great continent of ours? There are a million of answers to it. Prominent among which is greed, African leaders are so greedy that they wouldn’t just want to leave office, even if they are doing no good to the economy or their
people.

This is why presidential term limits are less observed in Africa. Look at Muammar Gaddafi who was calling for a united Africa did not want to step down after his one year African Union presidency expired a few
days ago.

Now that Malawi’s Bingu Wa Mutharika has taken over, we know that he is coming up with a different agenda, food security and sustainability. We hope that his compatriots will help him save this continent, where famines, droughts, high food prices are the order of the day in a poor societal set up.

One of the reasons that African unity has and is likely never to be achieved is that way back memory lane our leaders have always disagreed on many positive initiatives. And that even failed the Organisation of African Unity. 

They even disagree on who should host AU Summits or head the Union. It is sad to note that the only time they unanimously agreed on one thing, was to denounce Al Bashir’s arrest warrant. Why, because what goes around, comes around.
Nonetheless, for the fact that it is taking longer than necessary for Africa to put together her human and natural resources under one umbrella, it is paramount to note that no one demigod can unite a continent, when others are not up for it. So this notion of a united Africa, is clearly seeming ‘a never to be achieved dream’.VOL:2 ISSN:66