Ekiti State - SPEECH: Celebrating The 50th Africa Day And Reflections On The Memory Of Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem

[EkitiState]

OPENING REMARKS BY

His Excellency Dr. Kayode FAYEMI

Governor, Ekiti State, Nigeria

at the Africa Day 2013: Celebrating the 50^th Africa Day and Reflections on the Memory of Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem

Abuja, Nigeria

Friday, May 24, 2013

 Protocols

It gives me great pleasure to give the opening remarks at this symposium organized in honour of the late Dr. Tajudeen Abdulraheem who was one of the most zealous advocates of the Pan-African movement. This year's edition is particularly momentous considering it coincides with the 50^th anniversary of the founding of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), which was the first major step taken by the leadership of the various nation states within Africa towards a unified Africa. It is therefore a worthy tribute to my dear friend and brother that we are using the occasion of his remembrance to deepen discussions on the cause he lived his life for.

Indeed, it is not possible to review the progress of the Pan-African movement without remembering the contributions of Taju who died in a car crash on Monday, May 25, 2009 in an accident while on his way to the airport in Nairobi, Kenya to catch a flight to Rwanda to honour an appointment with President Kagame on the country's maternal mortality rate campaign, and to Nigeria for a meeting with the MDG Committees o the National Assembly. I first met Taju in 1989 in the UK where he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and had resided there since 1983. He was active in the African exile movement. Even then, he made a profound impact on me through his passionate and intellectually rigorous exhortations that Africans organize for change in Africa. At the time, I was more preoccupied with my academic pursuits and had suspended my political activism but Taju's radical fervour reignited my own deliberately suppressed activist inclinations. Taju was a comrade in arms during our days in Nigeria's exiled pro-democracy movement. But more than this he was a pan-Africanist to the core. He cared deeply about his country but his concerns transcended the artificial borders that divide up our great continent, evidenced by his commitment to the Pan African Movement which he served as Secretary-General.

At a time when Pan-Africanism has lost much of its allure, Taju is an archetype of the sort of activist we need today; as comfortable in the precincts of the academy where he was a respected intellectual, in the rarefied academic sense and in the broader public sense; as he was in the trenches of political activism where he was an adept organizer and mobilizer with friends all over Africa. His passing remains a great loss to pan-Africanism. One of his favourite axioms was "Don't agonize; Organize" – a saying that should resonate with us today. We should abandon the agonizing rhetoric that has become a sort of default mode of conversation about Africa and dare to have more constructive and imaginative conversations about the continent. We should also abandon hopelessness and despair and begin to organize.

The fervent idealism of a generation of African statesmen whose dreams and visions called their compatriots towards a united, powerful and renascent Africa has waned over the last five decades. Pan-Africanism, as a movement, provided the energy for the wave of liberation that swept the African continent in the late 1950s and 1960s. It established a momentum for the actualization of self-government that saw the transfer of power from colonialists to natives in several African states. Many statesmen at the time recognized that the political independence they had won was only the first phase in the long struggle to establish Africa as a force in world affairs. For total liberation to be achieved there had to be two further phases of struggle. Economic independence had to be won and the colonial boundaries that kept African people apart had to be overcome by continental unity. A United States of Africa was often regarded as the ultimate consummation of the Pan-African struggle.

In hindsight, Pan-Africanism was successful in providing the impetus for self-determination and galvanizing liberation and nationalist forces across the continent to win independence from colonial oppression. However, its report card is much less impressive in terms of building strong nations. Political instability, civil strife, ethnic conflict, poverty and corruption are some of the familiar plagues that have bedeviled African nations since their earliest days. As Ali Mazrui once noted, Africa still remains a marginal player in global affairs precisely because of her internal problems. The dream of a United Africa seems further away than it has ever been.

Factors Militating Against A United Africa: Weak Institutions and Poor Leadership

 Fifty years ago, Kwame Nkrumah urged Africans to come together to create the United States of Africa; to make one mighty nation out of many. Perhaps the most obvious challenge to the ideal of African unity today is the lack of institutional capacity to facilitate its realization. The Organization for African Unity was founded with this goal in mind but eventually settled for a less radical, more conservative posture of managing the continent's colonially-instituted boundaries and rallying African peoples against minority settler regimes in Southern Africa. In fact, it can safely be said that the ideal of African unity has been supplanted at the moment by more modest goals – the management of relations between nations and the creation of ad-hoc measures aimed at putting out the fires of conflict across the continent.

Institutional weaknesses stem largely from a lack of leadership. The golden age of Pan-Africanism was arguably between the mid 1950s and the early 1960s when a committed corps of African statesmen like Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Leopold Senghor, Sekou Toure and others spoke in broadly similar terms about African unity. These ceaseless advocates of continental unity and solidarity energized the Pan-African movement. The movement suffered severely with the passing of this generation from the scene, and has since been crippled by a lack of leadership that shared the vision of preceding generation of leaders. The most recent exponent of Pan-Africanism was the late Muammar Gaddafi whose eccentricities and penchant for fomenting trouble in other nations made him a very dubious model of continental leadership.

If Pan-Africanism is to resurface strongly in the African and global consciousness in the 21st century, we will need the emergence of new leadership and advocacy on intellectual and political fronts.  It is this new leadership that will drive the institutional innovation required to accelerate the journey towards African unity.

Unequal Trade Relations between Africa and Europe

Decades after the end of colonialism, Africa's economic status has generally not changed much. It is still largely a primary product-exporting economy; a source of resources extracted to benefit other countries and a dumping ground for western products. Its under-industrialization has made it a marginal actor in the global economy and also vulnerable to the price shocks that tend to trouble economies dependent on the sale of commodities for their health. Africa's economic marginality is also due to the current globalization regime in which Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) impose severe disadvantages on African countries. For example, farm subsidies in the EU and the US which those far richer regions no longer need are sustained at the expense of the agrarian economies of Sub-Saharan Africa. A great part of the problem is that while the EU negotiates as a bloc; Africa which itself is a potentially powerful bloc if united, is still negotiating as fragmented and inherently disadvantaged states.

Aid Dependency 

One of the more tragic developments has been the entrenchment of a certain image of Africa in the continental and global consciousness as a place of dire need, poverty and war, perennially requiring the benevolence of outsiders for survival. Many African countries depend substantially on foreign aid to run their governments or provide social goods such as healthcare and education. Seen from the perspective of those lofty pan-African visions of yore, this is a terrible reversal. It is a result of the economic mismanagement and monumental corruption that has reduced too many African states to recipients of charity. In these same states, it has also fostered a retrogressive culture of dependency. Many observers have astutely noted that such dependency undermines the sovereignty of these nations.

Strong Men and Weak Institutions

Africa's challenges of leadership remain. As asserted by President Obama during his visit to Accra, Ghana, many of our nation-states lack strong institutions and are instead ruled by strong men. The clear cost of sustaining strong men is the weakening and in some cases, the outright abortion of other institutional possibilities. Democracy, civil liberties, a free press and an independent judiciary are subjugated by the sovereign absolutism of authoritarian leaders. This trend is intensified by the dynamics of Post-September 11 American statecraft which has put American foreign policy on a "War on Terror" footing. In search of proxies with which to wage wars against "terrorist movements" in Africa, the US is reviving cold war era partnerships with dictatorial regimes and undermining legitimate local struggles for group rights by dubbing them "terrorists." Not surprisingly, some African regimes see the war on terror as an opportunity to abbreviate civil liberties, victimize legitimate opposition movements, and deploy repressive authoritarian tactics against opponents. Democracy in Africa loses.

The transfer of power from strong men to the people and the strengthening of democracy-enabling institutions have to be seen as a critical next phase of the Pan-Africanism project. African unity cannot be conceived solely as a top-down enterprise orchestrated by the coming together of national leaders; it has to be approached as a convergence of civil societies of the various countries.

Managing Diversity and Separatist Impulses

Even as we pursue the goal of continental integration, we must also address the challenges of convergence that stem from Africa's heterogeneity. With over 2000 ethnic communities, the continent has witnessed tribal violence on a horrific scale with the forces of micro-nationalism frequently colliding with those of nationalism in several countries. We have to evolve conflict resolution frameworks and pre-emptive conflict-prevention mechanisms that stop ethnic and sectarian discord from flaring into war. Despite the partitioning of Ethiopia and Sudan, and the pattern of civil wars in other countries, it is by no means a given that Africa's heterogeneous nations must disintegrate. Tanzania and Ghana are countries which despite their multiethnic makeup have succeeded in establishing stable polities.

Moreover it is not in Africa's interests to permit continuous disintegration along ethnic and sectarian lines. The challenge confronting diverse African states is that of common citizenship. It as Thabo Mbeki once said about ensuring "that nobody in the country should feel marginalized, discriminated against, left behind, excluded on whatever basis." Beyond this, Africa's chances of prospering in an intensely competitive global economy significantly depend on her commitment to convergence rather than disintegration.  As Mbeki has pointed out, fragmentation will lead to more conflicts and the creation of several unviable states. Yet, it is trite to note that too many African states are simply too small. In order to create prosperity, we need larger economic entities and this calls for regional integrity; a coming together of nations. From the perspective of Pan-Africanism, separatism and balkanization not only offend the African communal spirit, they represent a step backward and a retreat from the future.

Eliminating Economic Barriers to Continental Integration

Inter-African trade remains an area of dormant capacity with African nations investing far more in trading with the world than they do in trading with each other. Yet even as we seek freer and fairer trade with the rest of the world, it is only sensible that we dismantle the artificial barriers that have kept us from trading with each other. In the pursuit of African unity, we have to see the constraints on the free movement of goods and peoples in Africa as suffocating impediments. The same obstacles to trade also afflict travel and tourism. We Africans do not know enough about each other. Nigerians are more familiar with the popular culture of Canada than that of Congo. We do not relate enough. Eliminating these barriers would shatter the walls of unfamiliarity that keep Nigerians from Tanzanians, or Sengalese from Zambians. Establishing a continent-wide free trade zone would make Africa a far stronger economic player in the world than she currently is.

CONCLUSION

 

Most scholars and statesmen believe that an African renaissance is possible; I agree. There is a new window of optimism over Africa. The bleak and dreary headlines about the continent that portrayed it as a place of suffering are now tempered by newer and more optimistic narratives that proclaim that Africa is rising. A number of economists and scholars of development have projected that Africa will significantly account for the next wave of emerging economies. In the last ten years, African countries have recorded some impressive growth despite numerous challenges. Middle classes have grown as well across the continent. These indicators constitute a mosaic of optimism which offers a window of opportunity for a second coming of Pan-Africanism; one in which it is configured to meet the challenges of the 21^st century and to consummate the objective of a unified political and economic bloc.          

As a first step in his direction, there is ample opportunity for developing creative transnational synergies not just between states and governments but between civil societies as well. The 21^st century Pan African movement must belong to the people; in particular, it must engage the dreams and visions of Africa's teeming young population. This emergent generation will carry the torch of Pan Africanism forward. For this reason, I am particularly glad that the organizers of this event ensured the robust attendance of young students who are in their impressionable years; whose hearts and minds are viable grounds for the planting of the seed of Taju's type of passion and conviction for the Pan-Africanism struggle.

I would like to conclude by encouraging all of us who share the dreams of the dear departed we are celebrating today, to brace up in taking our struggle to the next level, and as frequently asserted by the late Dr. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, we need to stop agonizing and step-up our organizing.  May I conclude with an instructive excerpt from the moving citation read by the Chair of the Daily Trust African of the Year International Advisory Board, Dr. Salim Ahmed Salim, former

Prime Minister of Tanzania and former Secretary General of the OAU, when Taju was given the post-humous award of 'African of the Year':

"we are aware that the next generation will not grow up to see Tajudeen, therefore, we must work together to create a better society such that we could say to the next generation: this is the world Tajudeen helped to build".

 

Ladies and gentlemen thank you for listening; I wish us all a successful symposium.

Thank you.

Governor Kayode Fayemi

Abuja, Nigeria

Friday, May 24, 2013

 

 

Via: Ekiti State Government - Official Press Release