Senegal's Wade pushes for United States of Africa

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Senegal's Wade pushes for United States of Africa, roughhouse style
 August 6 2009

In a recent symposium on the envisaged United States of Africa at the Cheik Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, President Abdoulaye Wade criticised African leaders for putting a premium on the protection of their states’ sovereignty.The downside of the recourse to sovereignty is its assumption that other Africans are foreigners against whom power must be protected. This thinking also denies African economies larger markets for their products.

“Sovereignty” also masks the weakness of Africans at a time when other people have pooled political power in vast territories like China, India, Brazil, Russia and the United States of America. The very colonial countries that were the “foreigners” against whom independent African states wished to protect their sovereignty are themselves building the European Union as a bigger source of power in the global arena. In a twist of this thesis President Wade asserted that “in order to protect sovereign independence and be heard in the international political order, Africa must become a viable economic power” within a United States of Africa.

The subject of ‘sovereignty’ also led President Wade warn the European Union over its devious to plot to “take North Africa out of Africa” by enjoining North African States into a new “Mediterranean Union” of Europe, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania. An angry Wade noted that Europe was doing this despite its contradictory behaviour of hunting down, drowning and shutting out the so-called “economic migrants/asylum seekers” from Africa, while openly welcoming economic refugees from the former Eastern Europe.

Wade said he had told Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi that “he should leave Libya’s oil here on the continent” if he wanted to join Europe. In the same breath, Wade told President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt that “Egypt should leave the pyramids in Africa”. In the worst scenario President Wade would relocate the seat of sovereignty to vital resources. In the Dakar symposium, President Wade was talking to a receptive generation of intellectuals loaded with disillusionment over bad governance allover Africa outside Botswana and South Africa.

Sovereignty’s strongest defenders, like the Germany-based Prof Willy Jackson and University of Lagos’s Prof Victor Adetula, argued for sovereignty’s redefinition as “solidarity around the notion of a common good and a sharing of resources” rather than its current focus on balkanised territorial states. Prof Adetula called for a more vigorous role by the civil servants who run the African Union’s bureaucracy to evolve it into a vigorous super entity to coordinate of public administration by local officials in each African country.

There were echoes in their calls of Mwalimu Nyerere’s emphasis on seeing Africans as one family united beyond borders. Their pleas echoed President Wade’s hunger for a rapid rush to a United States of Africa. He had, after all, proudly said that he was not an alien in relation to Nigeria. “I have interfered in Guinea, in Madagascar and everybody will accept [that] because of the deep reality of relations between African states.”

The Chairman of the Commission of the African Union, the Gabonese Jean Ping, spoke in the same vein, saying, “I told Mauritania I have been paid by the African Union to come and interfere in your internal politics.” Mauritania’s military top brass had thrown out of power a regime that had been “democratically elected” in elections which the same brass had supervised.