MWENDELEZO 2:African Unity After 50 Years of OAU/AU - a Dream Deferred? | Gossip Wire
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Friday, May 24, 2013

MWENDELEZO 2:African Unity After 50 Years of OAU/AU - a Dream Deferred?

analysis
Whatever unity that emerged within the OAU was a unity in dictatorship, corruption and misery.
As the post-independence political class used its hold on power to accumulate personal wealth, indulge in excessive abuse of power and perfect despotic and violent rule as powerfully mirrored in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow, the promise and hope of the liberation struggle including the dream of unity soon turned into nightmare in many of the newly independent countries.
Most, if not all, independent countries became not only poor economies but also economies dependent on their former colonial countries. As Frantz Fanon in his celebrated book The Wretched of the Earth aptly summed up,
'the national economy of the period of independence [was] not set on a new footing. It is still concerned with the ground-nut harvest, with the cocoa crop, the olive yield.
In the same way there is no change in the marketing of basic products, and not a single industry is set up in the country. We go on sending out our raw materials, we go on being Europe's small farmers, who specializes in unfinished products'.
This economics (mainly interested in accumulation of private wealth for the political class rather than serving the interests of the masses of the population and concerned with only export of raw materials) offered no motivation to build communication and transport infrastructure that connects the countries of the continent.
Similarly, the logic of this economics also ensured that there could be no chance of intra-African trade and hence possibility of economic integration.
Second, the OAU served as a framework for entrenching the juridical sovereignty of its member states, which more often than not was used to shield the corrupt and violent system of governance perfected in many of its member states.
First, shackled by its dogmatic adherence to the principle of non-intervention, the OAU became witness to the rampant miss rule and the many violations that took place in many countries including Central African Republic, Uganda, Equatorial Guinea, and former Zaire. Second, in the Cairo meeting in 1964 OAU member states adopted the principle of Uti Possidetis thereby affirming the deeply arbitrary colonial division of the continent.
Third, OAU members adopted legal regimes relating to tariff and customs as well as entry and exist requirements.
CONTINUE.....................

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