http://vibeghana.com/2014/10/27/african-union-was-stillborn/
African Union Was Stillborn
October 27, 2014 | Filed under: Opinions | Posted by: VibeGhana
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
E-mail: okoampaahoofe_at_optimum.net
Prof. Henrietta Mensa-Bonsu may well be the Nana Yaa Asantewaa, the
immortalized Obaabarima, of our time. At a lecture hosted under the
auspices of the Alumni Lecture Series of the University of Ghana, the
Director of the Legon Center for International Affairs and Diplomacy
was reported to have caustically lambasted the African Union (AU) for
looking on passively while African dictators frivoled with the lives
and destinies of their peoples (See ” ‘African Union Fails Africa’ ”
Daily Guide / Ghanaweb.com 10/25/14).
Such Odyssean failure begins to make sense, once one learns that the
major funders and donors of the erstwhile Organization of African
Unity (OAU) are Libya, Algeria, Nigeria and South Africa. The first
two North African countries have been effective and absolute military
dictatorships ever since anybody can remember. Nigerian democracy
verges between sheer anarchy and brutal intimidation, having been
dominated by retired strongmen and their largely bumbling civilian
political sidekicks. And like most of the emergent and fledgling
democracies on the continent, South Africa is confronted with its own
set of daunting domestic problems dating from the racist Apartheid
era.
In other words, the caliber of the administrators of the African Union
can only be expected to be as effective as the political cultures of
its key national funders. What makes Prof. Mensa-Bonsu’s lecture a gem
of its kind in recent years, is its no-holds-barred exposure of such
regressive tyrants and dictators as Zimbabwe’s President Robert
Mugabe, whose young wife is presently preparing to replace her
nonagenarian husband, after 34 years of Mr. Mugabe’s ham-fisted
one-party dictatorship.
I was particularly impressed by Prof. Mensa-Bonsu’s take on the at
once odious and extortionate Blaise Campaore regime in Burkina Faso,
Ghana’s immediate northern neighbor who has virtually become a sacred
cow in the discourse of many a Ghanaian political scientist or
scholar. Indeed, the critical spotlight, when it comes to discussions
of dictatorial regimes in the West African sub-region, has invariably
been focused on Gambia’s President Yahya Jammeh, perhaps obviously
because the Gambia, being the smallest parcel of British colonial
legacy, is also the safest to critically savage and readily get away
with the same.
Prof. Mensa-Bonsu was also dead-on-target to carp the AU bureaucrats
in Addis Ababa for pursuing a weak-kneed policy in the face of the
catastrophic Ebola Virus epidemic. But, of course, such morally
scandalous passivity is nothing new. The AU has always lacked the
steely determination to confront the very problems for which its prime
movers and shakers claim to have made its establishment a practical
upgrade of the erstwhile Organization of African Unity. Thus such
emergency crises as Libya, Egypt, Ethiopia-Eritrea, Somalia,
Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, Western Sahara, Sudan,
Gabon, Togo and Uganda, among a host of others, continue to fester and
worsen.
Under the preceding circumstances, it can hardly be gainsaid that the
savvily pragmatic political orientation of Dr. J. B. Danqah is still
the more foresighted, while Mr. Nkrumah’s pan-Africanist geopolitical
imitation of the United States, where he had had his college
education, remains decidedly illusory and a veritable pipe-dream. You
see, what makes Dr. Danqah the greater and more foresighted of the two
Ghanaian leaders is that unlike President Nkrumah, Dr. Danquah
recognized the imperative, inescapable and logical need for
postcolonial African nations to first establish viable institutional
frameworks of national cohesion before presuming to take on the
complex problem of continental African organic socioeconomic, cultural
and political unification.
Contrary to what the Nkrumacrats would have the rest of the world
believe, Dr. Danquah was never against the geopolitical unification of
the African continent; he was simply more pragmatic and intellectually
and emotionally mature enough to recognize the fact that one cannot
sprint long before one has learned to crawl and walk. In sum, the
African Union was rather scandalously and sophomorically rigged up for
failure by leaders who were too pathologically naive and exuberant to
reason critically and progressively.
Received on Mon Oct 27 2014 - 12:01:56 EDT