African Union and Nigeria 2003
By
Stephen Ellis, the Oxford-trained historian and academic, dismissed the idea of the Africa Union a couple of months ago as 'our new white elephant.' According to Ellis, the economic, political, and social hurdles in the way of African integration were so enormous that it made sense to put the idea aside 'for now' and focus on the more realistic objective of getting individual countries to fulfil their social and economic obligations to their citizenry.
Dr Ellis' position is commonplace, heir to an intellectual tradition that draws on a Euro-imperial view of Africa as a place where nothing of global
significance ever happens, and history is what others did or said in or about Africa, and not what Africans have been able to do and say for themselves in their
own home. This view is not only ahistorical, it is anti-history, to the
extent that is seeks to wipe clean from the global canvass the enormous contributions of Africa and Africans since the advent of humans as social beings.
But some of us are tired of restating the obvious. For there must be something profoundly wrong when the intellectual elite of a continent spend precious time
trying to prove that their history was not one long stretch of darkness and meaningless cacophony until the first Europeans ventured to the African coast in the
fifteenth century. Intellectual battles are all very well. But the dead do not fight battles. Only the living and the healthy do. And if the grim statistics
coming out of Africa is anything to go by, if the number of people infected with HIV/AIDS, the millions dying of Malaria and sundry diseases, the
millions starving to death in southern Africa - if these figures say anything to us, it is that Africa is dying.
The urgent task facing African intellectuals of my generation is how to reverse this head-long plunge to extinction. Action ought to be taken. Action need to be
taken. Action must be taken, guided by thought. So, yes, even as we remind Dr Ellis and his fellow travellers that the idea of African Union is not new, that it
was given practical institutional expression by Kwame Nkrumah who created the Organisation of African Unity in 1963, and that indeed the OAU has its true
mother in the work of Marcus Garvey and his vision of a united African world spanning all the continents wherever Africans are to be found, we need to be asking
ourselves the urgent question: What is to be done now to use this living idea of African unity to defend the continent and her people from those who have raped
her for so long?
The deliberations in Durban, South Africa, last week, of African civil society groups and heads of states has given birth to the African Union (AU). The AU is a
baby, and yet it will be confronted with a task that can overawe even the most redoubtable of adults next year. The matter is the Nigerian elections in 2003.
Nigeria is a key player on the African political and economic turf, perhaps the pre-eminent player. Take away Nigeria and you have a continent of brave,
resourceful, but puny players incapable of making their presence felt on the global stage. Indeed, there is a sense in which it can be argued that the social
and economic disasters that have been inflicted on Africa these past two decades
by the IMF and its fellow ideological warriors in the West could only have been
possible because Nigeria was targeted first, brought to the ground, and bound hands and feet. With the giant of the house down, the rest was easy.
Nigeria may be down but she is not yet out. In May 1999, after a long terrible night of gratuitous rape, the people of Nigeria shook off their molesters and
made yet another bid for self-rule. It was a courageous, noble, and enobling act. It needs to be stated that unlike Eastern Europe where the United States,
Great Britain, and the other western countries poured in billions of dollars to not only support democracy activists and civil society groups working to bring
down the Soviet empire but also strengthen the emergent democracies that took
the latter's place, Nigeria was left to its own fate. Democracy activists who
asked the British and American government for help to set up proper institutions and organisations to take on the Abacha junta were fended off with soothing
words and empty promises. But these activists, buoyed up by the active support of the overwhelming majority of Nigerians who desperately desired to be free,
soldiered on. There were costs, terrible costs. Moshood Abiola, the symbol of this great struggle for freedom, was murdered in his prison cell in Abuja. Ken
Saro-Wiwa, writer and a grassroots political leader of incomparable talent, was
strung up a pole in Port Harcourt Prison like a common criminal. Countless others were jailed, tortured, machine-gunned to death. But the song of freedom did
not expire.
With their bare hands, Nigerian clawed back their freedom from the death-dispensing talons of Sani Abacha. They did this while those who were best placed to
help them were either looking the other way, or were indeed collaborating with Abacha to hold them even more firmly to the floor. Olusegun
Obasanjo is President today because there were millions of Nigerians who were
willing to pay the ultimate sacrifice for their freedom, even in the face of
indifference, and in some cases, profound hostility, from the West. Come next
year and Nigerians will be called on again to safeguard their newly won freedom,
deepen its roots, and indeed seek for ways to translate it into concrete social
and economic dividends. For freedom is meaningless if it does not enrich social
existence and make it more meaningful.
And in this gargantuan task Nigerians will be alone again. There will be no concrete and meaningful assistance from the West. I have never doubted the
resilience of ordinary Nigerians, their ability to confront impossible odds and emerge smiling and victorious. This courage, resilience, and generosity of heart
will be called forth again next year, but I fear that the odds are enormous, and the stakes too high, to be lightly taken upon. President Obasanjo has scored
fairly well in certain respects these past three years, but he has singularly failed to endow the Nigerian state and the government he leads with the
all-important aura of dignity, legitimacy, and moral authority that nations in a stage of democratic transition desperately need to take the next step and join
the club of mature democracies. As I write Obasanjo and key leaders of the National Assembly are exchanging insults like the under-performing school boys they,
in truth, really are. There are serious allegations of financial misdemeanour in the very centre of government. New political parties have emerged led by
retired generals with absolutely no civic or democratic credentials and for whom violence and thuggery are natural substitutes for the ballot box. Obasanjo's
party, the PDP, has unravelled as I predicted early last year that it would, when the internal contradictions within it had ripened. The state is still an arena
of vicious contest for the oil of the people of the Niger Delta, between grasping and politically illiterate elites. It is still, dear reader, a war of all
against all.
Should the African Union stand by and watch this elite, representing the worst in Africa that has worked with outsiders these past five hundred years to rape
their own people, devour themselves and the Nigerian people? No. It must intervene in Nigeria, and provide a neutral institutional framework in which the 2003
elections will be conducted. INEC alone is incapable of discharging this important function. Indeed, that institution, welded to the Obasanjo government's apron
strings, is compromised.
October 2002