Adekeye Adebajo | The diamond jubilee of African unity

Last month marked the institutionalisation of 60 years of African unity with the birth of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa. To avoid border conflicts, the 53-member body froze the colonially inherited map of Africa, which contained 16 land-locked countries and mostly agricultural-based exporters of raw materials. Africa’s colonially deformed micro-states thus lacked the economies of scale to industrialise, with potential regional powers such as Nigeria, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Algeria being wracked by internal instability while South Africa was trapped under a racist albinocracy. Thus, economic development and regional integration proved difficult, and intra-African trade remains a paltry 14 per cent today.

The OAU sought, for four decades, to promote African unity and liberation, the territorial integrity of its members, and the peaceful resolution of disputes. External cold war proxy wars involving the US, the Soviet Union, and France in Mozambique, Angola, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Chad, as well as African political misrule and economic mismanagement, however, contributed enormously to the continent’s perennial socio-economic challenges. The OAU, nevertheless, achieved the liberation of the continent from alien rule by 1994, and African governments vastly extended education and health to their populations, particularly in the first two decades of independence. Africa, however, is still on a quest for late Kenyan intellectual, Ali Mazrui’s Pax Africana: a peace created and consolidated by Africans themselves.

BORN AS A SUCCESSOR

The 55-member African Union (AU) was born in Durban in 2002 as the successor to the OAU. It sought to move from its predecessor’s rigid insistence on “non-intervention” to an approach of “non-indifference” in order to stem military coups d’état, egregious human-rights abuses, and regional instability. Conflicts, nevertheless, still proliferate across the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and the Great Lakes, a situation exacerbated by the devastating impacts of climate change, an external debt of $650 billion. and a growing food crisis resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The continent currently accounts for a paltry three per cent of global economic output.

Regional integration thus remains essential as a conflict-resolution strategy to enable Africa’s development. Its main vehicle has been the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), launched by the AU in 2018. AfCFTA promotes the facilitation of trade; building infrastructure; establishing a common market for goods, services, and investment; and ensuring the free movement of people. It must, however, heed the call by Adebayo Adedeji - the Nigerian who helped set up regional bodies in West, Eastern, Southern, and Central Africa as executive secretary of the United Nations (UN) Economic Commission for Africa - to build strong subregional pillars before seeking to attain an African Common Market.

PIPE DREAM

Outside of West and Eastern Africa, the free movement of people remains a pipe dream as most security-obsessed African governments remain hostile to intra-African migration. African economies remain competitive exporters of raw materials rather than complementary exchangers of diverse goods. Road, rail, and port infrastructure remains poor. Rules of origin are often restrictive while non-tariff barriers are ubiquitous. Though the 15-member AU Peace and Security Council has contributed creditably to peacemaking efforts in Africa – with its Peace Fund having raised $380 million –its New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) has lacked the resources and capacity to develop the continent, the Pan-African Parliament remains a talking shop, and the idea of the diaspora as a sixth African subregion is an empty shell.

African regional bodies have, however, launched praiseworthy peacekeeping interventions into Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Somalia, Mozambique, and the Congo, even as Washington, Moscow, and Paris continue to conduct meddling military interventions across the continent. African armies still lack adequate funding and logistics and must be funded through assessed UN contributions. The AU’s 25,000-strong African Standby Force should also be urgently operationalised and democratic governance strengthened if the noble aspirations of Pax Africana are to be fulfilled.

Professor Adekeye Adebajo is a senior research Fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.