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New Hope for a Beleaguered Continent
George B.N. Ayittey, Ph.D.
The choice of President Kufuor as the new chairman of the
African Union (AU) offers fresh hope to a continent that is
dysfunctional and lost. President Kufuor is one of the few
African leaders capable of steering the AU in a new direction.
The continent faces crises galore – in Guinea, Ivory Coast,
Togo, Sudan (Darfur), Chad, Somalia, Congo, Zimbabwe, among
others, while the AIDS crisis, food crisis, and debt crisis rage
unabated. The record of the AU’s defunct predecessor – the
Organization of African Unity (OAU) -- in resolving these crises
was grotesquely abysmal. By contrast, other regional
organizations, such as ASEAN and OAS (Organization of American
States), have been far more serious and effective in tackling
their regional problems. For example, the OAS refused to certify
Peru’s 2000 election when President Alberto Fujimori blatantly
rigged it to return himself to power. He later fled to Japan. In
Africa, the OAU certified every coconut election as “free and
fair.”
To most Africans, the OAU was a “den of dictators” and
irrelevant. Its grandiloquent pronouncements at its annual
jamborees, where despots sipped champagne and patted themselves
on the backs for their longevity in office, were largely
ignored. It never confronted any of the dictators running amok
on the continent. The late Julius Nyerere of Tanzania said as
much in a candid speech on Oct 9, 1997: “In a moment of extreme
exasperation, I once described the OAU as a Trade Union of
African Heads of State! We protected one another, whatever we
did to our own peoples in our respective countries. To condemn a
Mobutu, or Idi Amin or a Bokassa was taboo! It would be regarded
as interference in the internal affairs of a fellow African
State! (PanAfrican News, September 1998)
Indeed, in 1975, the OAU held its summit in Kampala and made
Field Marshall Idi Amin its chairman. One Ugandan Anglican
bishop, Festo Kivengere, was furious: “And at the very moment
the heads of state were meeting in the conference hall, talking
about the lack of human rights in southern Africa, three blocks
away, in Amin torture chambers, my countrymen's heads were being
smashed with sledge hammers and their legs being chopped off
with axes.”
Afflicted by intellectual astigmatism, the OAU could see with
eagle-eyed clarity the injustices perpetrated by white
colonialists against Africans but was hopelessly blind to the
equally heinous atrocities perpetrated against Africans by their
own leaders. It couldn’t even define “democracy.” It demanded
one-man, one-vote for blacks in apartheid South Africa but
elsewhere in Africa, its silence was deafening.
It crowed about its African (Banjul) Charter on Human and
Peoples’ Rights it adopted on June 27, 1981. Article 6 of the
Charter states clearly: "No one may be arbitrarily arrested or
detained." Article 7 guarantees "the right to a fair trial in an
independent court with a defense lawyer." Article 8 advocates
"religious tolerance" and freedom from religious persecution.
And Article 9 of the charter guarantees "the right to free
expression." But then the OAU watched as African despots
flagrantly violated those rights with impunity right under its
very nose. Currently, only 8 African states have a free and
independent media, where criticism of foolish government
policies is tolerated.
When Somalia imploded in 1993, the OAU was on vacation. The
following year, it was doing the “watutsi” when Rwanda collapsed
into genocidal mayhem. It then launched a 5-year inquiry, which
singled out France and the U.S. for particular blame for failing
to prevent the genocide. France was blamed for not using its
high level contact within Rwanda’s Hutu-led government to
prevent the deaths of 800,000 people. The U.S. was culpable for
failing to use its influence in the Security Council to
authorize a military intervention to prevent the killing. The
West, the OAU report claimed, failed Africa despite the
availability of copious evidence that the mass killings were
about to begin. A simple apology as already made by the U.N. was
not enough and the OAU demanded compensation, alluding to the
$13 billion Marshall Aid plan the U.S. launched for the
reconstruction of Europe after World War II. And did the OAU
itself did anything to prevent the slaughter?
By 1998, former President Mandela of South Africa had had
enough. He skipped the 1998 OAU Summit in Burkina Faso and urged
the younger generation of leaders to root out tyranny and put
the continent on the information superhighway. "People are being
slaughtered to protect tyranny.”
At the next Summit in Algiers (July 15, 1999), President Thabo
Mbeki of South Africa shocked delegates by stating that African
leaders who took power by force would be banned from future OAU
summits. But when asked about those leaders from Niger,
Guinea-Bissau, and Comoros who had seized power in 1998,
President Mbeki replied: “Well, in the meantime, we will be
working with them to return them to democratic society.” But in
the following year (July 2000), the OAU held its summit in Lome,
Togo, which had been ruled for more than thirty-three years by
the late General Gnassingbe Eyadema, who seized power by force
in a coup.
When the OAU reiterated its demand for compensation for the
Rwanda genocide, even the quintessential and calm diplomat, Kofi
Annan, the then U.N. Secretary-General, had had it with the
contumacious tomfoolery. He ripped into the delegates, telling
them that “they are to blame for most of the continent's
problems” (The Daily Graphic, July 12, 2000). Africans were
suffering because the leaders were not doing enough to invest in
policies that promote development and preserve peace. He told
the Summit that African leaders bore much of the responsibility
for the deterioration of the continent's security and the
withdrawal of foreign aid. "This is not something others have
done to us. It is something we have done to ourselves. We have
mismanaged our affairs for decades and we are suffering the
accumulated effects" (The Daily Graphic, July 12, 2000;p.5)
Even the Ghana government-owned paper, The Mirror, couldn’t
resist lashing out at the OAU. On July 15, 2000, the paper took
aim at the then OAU Secretary-General, Dr. Salim Ahmed Salim,
dismissing him as a “big failure.” His committees on conflict
prevention and resolution had failed miserably to prevent and
resolve conflicts in Africa, the paper wrote. “Thus, as before,
nothing concrete is going to be achieved in stopping the
conflict in Angola, Sierra Leone, DRC, Uganda, Rwanda, Somalia,
Senegal, Sudan and other African trouble spots after the Lome
summit” (The Mirror, July 15, 2000; p.12).
When the African Union (AU) was formed 2001, most Africans
expected the new organization to perform better than its
predecessor. But, alas, the more things change, the more they
stay the same. The AU was nowhere to be found when Burundi’s
civil war flared up in 2003. Nor did the AU take a stance
against the rape of democracy in Zimbabwe. Instead, it selected
President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe as its new vice-chairman in
July 2003 – just as the OAU chose Idi Amin as its chairman in
1975. On the Darfur crisis, the AU’s peacekeeping operations are
execrable.
In 2002, it unveiled its New Partnership for Africa’s Economic
Development (NEPAD), trumpeting it as “Africa’s Plan.” But just
as the AU is modeled after the European Union, so is NEPAD
modeled after the Marshall Aid plan. Worse, NEPAD was crafted
without consultation with civic groups and other African
parliaments. And it seeks $64 billion in aid and investments
from the West. This was the same AU which issued a report in
August 2004, claiming that Africa loses an estimated $148
billion annually to corrupt practices, a figure which represents
25 percent of the continent's Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
(Vanguard, Lagos, Aug 6, 2004. Web posted at www.allafrica.com).
It did not occur to the AU that if it cut corruption in half,
the amount saved would be more than the $64 billion it was
badgering the West for. Nor did the departing Chairman,
President Denis Sassou-Nguesso of Congo (Brazzaville) did much
in his own backyard (DR Congo), let alone Darfur.
As the new AU Chairman, President Kufuor must bring sanity to
the organization and take it in a new direction. Speaking in
Accra on Jan 25, 2007, Mr. Kofi Annan, provided a hint of the
new direction: “African leaders must adopt three pillars –
peace, development and security.” But talk without action is
meaningless.
In African villages, one cannot become a member of a peasant
organization or king without satisfying an eligibility
requirement. Further, trouble-makers can be expelled from a
village and bad kings can be removed. Africa needs a new
organization that reflects these peasant ideals. Call it the
Organization of Free African States (OFAS). Like the European
Union, strict eligibility requirements must be applied. Not all
rogue nations in Africa should become members of OFAS.
Furthermore, countries that fail to meet the ideals of the OFAS
must be expelled. And if an African country collapses into
conflict and anarchy, OFAS must intervene to stop the killing
and, if necessary, take over the running of the country.
The imperative of OFAS must be to protect the PEOPLE, not
warlords or despots. As such, the first test of eligibility is
democracy, which must be clearly defined by OFAS. Only those
African countries that have an independent and free media (for
freedom of expression and free flow of information), an
independent judiciary (for the rule of law), an independent
electoral commission, and an independent central bank (to stanch
capital flight) would be eligible to join OFAS.
Africa doesn’t need the World Bank or outsiders to tell her to
put her own house in order.
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Dr. Ayittey, a native of Ghana, is a Distinguished Economist at
American University and President of the Free Africa Foundation,
both in Washington, DC. His new book is Africa Unchained
(Palgrave/MacMillan).
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