Nipate
Forum => Kenya Discussion => Topic started by: Georgesoros on May 04, 2016, 09:30:15 PM
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With his murder, the vision took a detour.
http://www.newsweek.com/african-union-africa-rwanda-ethiopia-trade-455238
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Considering the rough-and-ready manner in which they disposed of him, apparently his people didn't think so .... And key to his True Vision was his being king of the United States of Africa ...
Still, Africa has never been short of visions (true and otherwise); there were numerous spectacular ones in the heady days of independence. In fact, the writer of the article does not seem to be aware of the fact that Gadaffi was simply recycling Nkrumah's vision:
http://www.pambazuka.org/pan-africanism/where-nkrumah%E2%80%99s-united-states-africa-50-years
The only bright future Nkrumah envisioned in Africa was one in which the entire continent agreed to a common market, a single currency, an African Central bank, a common foreign policy, a common defence system and a common citizenship amongst others. Anything short of the above was a recipe for further exploitation, decadence and a futureless people with hardly any potential for appreciable development.
What has been lacking?
Take this statement from that article:
In its Agenda 2063—a platform announced in 2013 outlining policies necessary to transform the continent over the following 50 years—the AU proposed establishing a Continental Free Trade Area by 2017, abolishing visa requirements for African citizens in African countries by 2018 and eventually introducing an African passport.
Raise your hand if you see anything resembling a sense of reality in such timelines. (2017 is next year, and 2018 is the year after.)
The article has this, by way of explanation:
“We’ve had decades of misery and war and poverty in Africa .... A lot of that, in my view, was a direct result of a lack of leadership, a lack of vision, a lack of regional integration and a lack in confidence that we had as Africans.”
Raise your hand if you can see a sudden change in any of that and especially in leadership. (Nkrumah himself went on to engage in the sort of nastiness that is only too familiar but which people would rather forget about him: he become "President For Life", rode roughshod over the law, turned Ghana into an unpleasant one-party dictatorship, ... and left office in the kienyeji way.) To my mind, a far better approach would be to start with regional blocks that really work and only then proceed to United Africa.
As for the AU, it could start by financing itself. Visions and Dreams that are to be financed by others have an inherent weakness in the realization.
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What AU lacks in sense of irony, they make up with ostentatious hype.