The scramble for Africa during the 1884 and 1885 Berlin Conference, in Germany, remains intact to this day despite decades-long initiatives to address such issues.
The purpose of the conference was to ensure that Africa’s future was decided as a supplier of resources and raw materials to the West.
After this, every possible initiative and media became unleashed to rattle Africa’s image and prospects. It was the formation of the Organisation of African Unity (now the AU) in 1963 in Addis Ababa, which became not only momentous but also gave hope to Africans.
The formation of the OAU sought to promote Pan-Africanism and maintain the sovereignty of African states. In essence this was to ensure the addressing and advocating for the reversal of colonial decisions, as they were meant to paralyse Africa for good.
At the centre of this decolonial project was the ideological debate of presidents Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere, which has been forgotten. This debate should be resuscitated to become a regular feature in our reflections if Africa Day celebrations are to be meaningful.
These reflections put us in a position of hindsight over Nkrumah and Nyerere. I do not think we have taken full advantage of this hindsight, but instead it seems we have become way too comfortable to contend with the chaos of poverty, inequality, economic migration, exclusion and youth unemployment, among other things.
This comfort position continues to delay the prosperity and competitiveness of Africa even more on a global scale.
So, Nkrumah’s position regarding the need for an immediate united Africa with a continental government needs revisiting, especially considering geopolitical issues that are currently shifting in favour of the global South and China in particular.
His position was also propelled by his own mobilisation of the West African nations’ support to reverse what I consider to be the colonial agenda to conquer, divide and exploit Africa for eternity. This position was always going to ruffle the feathers of colonial powers, as it represented a radical change that was going to require resilience, courage and sustained efforts.
This is now an opportune time for Africa to revisit this position in an intentional and concretised manner.
For Nyerere and his support base from other countries, the position was to ensure that uniting Africa considered processes over a period of time to preserve state sovereignty.
This was meant to consider a ground-up strategy to ensure a systematic process that would reverse the outcomes of the Berlin conference.
Despite Nyerere conceding much later to the foresight of Nkrumah, the OAU’s error of judgment has clearly left Africa paralysed and bleeding for decades on end. This has projected the unity of Africa as a pipe dream and requires the AU to urgently reconsider this matter afresh.
The current AU Agenda 2063 remains a paper tiger when it comes to African experiences on the ground. Despite all the ambitious continental and country visions and plans, the challenges pertaining to Africa’s development remain insurmountable.
But this is because Africa has not sufficiently moved forward regarding the vision of our founding fathers who came together in Addis Ababa in 1963 to unite the continent.
Clearly, there is a need for Africa to agitate for unity more than ever before. This should go beyond the economic integration targets set by the current AU Agenda 2063. Perhaps an urgent reform plan regarding Agenda 2063 should be considered to drive political integration through a system of states.
This means South Africa could pilot the question of forming states as a system and a new architecture that considers members of the Southern African Customs Union of the Kingdoms of Lesotho and Eswatini and the Republics of Namibia and Botswana.
We should also adopt Azania or something similar as a new name and further reduce the number of provinces that currently exist in South Africa and revise administrative regions in other countries to municipalities.
It would be in this context of the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) that South Africa must lead the way in a more careful and practical way. This means we must be careful and thorough in our planning and execution of the envisioned state of Azania.
The role for South Africa’s leadership is obviously on the basis of its position as a regional power and its infrastructure and resource advantages.
Having these countries as part of the State of Azania and not as provinces should incentivise the necessary arrangements for the political and economic integration in taking a critical step forward to facilitate the long-deferred dream of African unity.
This is not only an urgent matter but also essential to scale up our relationships, economies, policies and decisions in the current geopolitical environment.
It is through these kinds of meaningful and practical arrangements at the Sadc level that realising the objectives of AU Agenda 2063 would revive our hopes and aspirations as Africans.
It is for this reason that dismantling colonial agendas requires us to revisit the original discourses of Nkrumah and Nyerere in a manner that allows Africa to experiment with Nkrumah’s position in the current context.
These geopolitical changes provide huge opportunities that cannot be missed. It is in this case that our celebration of Africa Day could revive our hopes for dignity, unity and prosperity!
- Phago is a professor of public governance and the dean of the faculty of economics, development and business sciences at the University of Mpumalanga.
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