Africa continental government step too far for now
04 Jul 2007 12:54:00 GMT Source: Reuters
By Pascal Fletcher
ACCRA, July 4 (Reuters) - It was billed as a meeting of African leaders paying tribute to the lofty pan-African ideal.
But an African Union summit in Ghana this week failed to produce a clear roadmap for continental government and laid bare a potentially divisive battle of opposing visions and influence among some leaders of the 53 AU member states.
The three-day meeting, a lavish gathering on the world's poorest continent, was launched on Sunday with eulogies for Ghana's first post-independence president, Kwame Nkrumah, a pioneer of Pan-Africanism nearly a half century ago.
It petered out close to midnight on Tuesday with a cautious and inconclusive agreement to study further how and when to create a United States of Africa that would stretch from the Cape to Cairo under its own single union government.
Host President John Kufuor of Ghana put a brave face on the compromise that ended the summit, praising what he called a "common vision" for continental union.
But even he could not hide that three days of speeches and sometimes heated debate had failed to produce even a workable definition of what a United States of Africa would look like.
Instead, in a classic bureaucratic compromise, a ministerial committee was mandated to study details and timing and report to the next AU summit in Addis Ababa in January.
"The tensions were very serious, the political battle lines were drawn. It was about the continental influence of ambitious leaders," Professor Chris Landsberg, director of the Centre for Policy Studies in Johannesburg, told Reuters.
Prominent among the continental crusaders leading the charge for a strong united African federation and government was Libya's flamboyant leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Casting himself as a Quixotic "soldier for Africa", Gaddafi had unrolled a pan-African roadshow from Tripoli to Accra, travelling by car to the summit and holding rallies to lobby popular support to his call for a united Africa speaking and acting as one in a globalised world.
He was seconded in Accra by the dapper but temperamental Senegalese leader Abdoulaye Wade, who even suggested he might lead a small breakaway group of states willing to sign up to an immediate union government.
ECONOMY BEFORE POLITICS
But cooler heads prevailed.
In the end, the so-called gradualists, mostly southern and east African leaders grouped around South African President Thabo Mbeki, appeared to have won the day with their argument that improved regional economic integration should precede the goal of supra-national political union.
"Mbeki had a good conference. There was a clear message in favour of institution building," said Patrick Smith, editor of Africa Confidential, a publication which provides specialist analysis of the continent's affairs.
Smith said the "sentimental outpouring" of the union government debate had distracted the conference from more pressing real problems such as the AU's own weak administration, continental poverty and the conflicts in Darfur and Somalia.
"The AU itself is in crisis, its dues are not being paid," he said. He believed that the next summit in Addis Ababa was unlikely to dedicate a whole three days to the inspiring but clearly thorny topic of a continental government.
In launching the grand United States of Africa debate, the heads of state had ignored widespread scepticism among ordinary Africans, most living in poverty, who find it hard to relate these gatherings to their difficult daily lives.
"How can we unite in Africa? If I go to Togo or Benin or Nigeria they treat me different. This thing of a united Africa will take time," said Ghanaian taxi driver Kwakye Asare.
Civil society groups begged the summit leaders to show they were serious about unity by throwing open national borders to free movement of people and goods.
The Accra meeting left lingering fears of division.
"We must take care not to further divide Africa in our haste to unite it," Lesotho Prime Minister Pakalitha Mosisili told his fellow leaders. (Additional reporting by Orla Ryan)
