AFRICAN DIPLOMACY COMING TO AFRICANS

Okello Oculi canvasses the need to invest the future of Pan-Africanism in the creative energies and imagination of Africa’s youth

On November 11, 2013, Dr Nkosazana DlaminiZuma (former Chair of the Africa Union Commission - the administrative arm of the African Union), was very excited by information that Nigeria’s youth and media had a rich history of promoting public awareness about African diplomatic affairs. She was told that from 1977 to date, students at Ahmadu Bello University sustained a tradition of presenting simulations of Summits of the African Union to campus crowds. At the high marks of its manifestation between 1978 and 1990, the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) Kaduna, boosted their reach with telecasts to wider audiences of highlights of three-hour presentations. In 1988, a nation-wide service 50-minute long telecast thrilled the nation.

From 2004, it was introduced to Day Secondary School of Lungi Military Barracks in Maitama District, Abuja. In 2005, Anglican Girls Grammar School (AGGS) in Abuja, and Makini Secondary School in Nairobi, Kenya welcomed it. On November 16, 2006, a joint team from both schools conducted a summit to an audience of 2000 student leaders assembled at the International Conference Centre in Abuja.

On January 29, 2014, Presidents of Zimbabwe and Senegal at AGGS presented a mini-summit to an Africa Youth Forum holding at Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Their travel was sponsored by the African Union Commission and the Olusegun Obasanjo Foundation (OOF). Dr. Dlamini-Zuma was fired by this narrative and created a new initiative titled ‘’Continental Model African Union’’. It will urge all member states of the African Union to adopt simulations of African Union summits in their educational programmes. An official organ of PanAfricanism had, in 2015, adopted a product sprouted from the bosom of African academia.

The year 1963 saw the flowering of visions and intellectual genius by many of Africa’s politicians and public officers in a drama of diplomacy which yielded the founding of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). From Nigeria two young officials in Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa’s office, Muhammadu Sanusi and Leslie Harriman, criss-crossed Africa to counter Kwame Nkrumah’s call for creating a United States of Africa (UNSA). Elderly Emperor Haile Selassie (Ethiopia), William Tubman (Liberia), Houphuet Boigny (Ivory Coast) and Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya) were joined by a younger Julius Nyerere (Tanganyika) to creating a tool for a mere aspiration towards union government in Africa.

The diplomatic jostling of the emerging Pan-Africanism was conducted outside the hearing of the masses of the public. The monopoly of teaching jobs in the few universities in Africa by expatriate academic staff from imperial countries blocked a local tradition of academics participating in making foreign policy. While an association by West African students studying in European colleges were active in calling for African unity, the politicians meeting in Addis Ababa on May 25, 1963 excluded them from the peppersoup.

Nigeria’s Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and their counterparts in Kenya and Uganda’s premier institution, Makerere University, have since the 1970s been

THE INTELLECTUAL DECAY FROM ECONOMIC OPPORTUNISM BY ACADEMIC STAFF GRABBING WAGES FROM THREE TO FOUR UNIVERSITIES EVERY MONTH RUINS CREATIVE INTEGRATION OF AFRICAN DIPLOMATIC ACTIVITIES INTO LECTURES AND PUBLICATIONS

fighting for ‘’Africanisation’’ of curricula; and quality ‘’infrastructure’’ for their work. They want equipped laboratories; and research treks across Africa. They are enraged by official priority for luxury vehicles and residences that feed inferiority complexes of multitudes of bureaucrats and parliamentarians.

Lacking power to discipline traditional ideologies hostile to seeing citizens as masters (to be served by government authorities), academics fume and scream in frustration. In Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda, government officials have reacted, at worst, with throwing at them violence, denial of salaries, and detention with torture. Visions for PanAfricanism remained blunted.

Collapse in incomes by academics in clusters of private and government-owned universities in Nairobi, Kampala and across Nigeria, have led to migratory teaching across campuses. This has killed use of tutorials to complement lectures. Staffers suffer exhaustion from racing to get to waiting students. Private universities pirate on staff in public institutions, thereby: depleting quality of performance inside both sites. The intellectual decay from economic opportunism by academic staff grabbing wages from three to four universities every month ruins creative integration of African diplomatic activities into lectures and publications.

Hostile governance has also denied Pan-African growth from stimulation by several intellectual giants. Death threats sent Kenya’s two stars: Micere Mugo and Ngugi wa Thiongo, into exile and productive years in American universities. Wole Soyinka slipped through General Sani Abacha’s hunt. Chinua Achebe was crippled into a wheelchair by potholes on a major road. Claude Ake’s death in a domestic plane crash terminated his support for Niger Delta’s growth. In Senegal, Professor Cheik Anta Diop was banned from lecturing in the local university, and Francophone countries. The film-maker Ousmane Sembene was required to apply for visas to travel out of Senegal.

Pre-occupation with protesting against venalities and inferiority complexes of rulers crippled constructing a theory of African society for development. Julius Nyerere’s theory of ‘’Ujamaa/Familyhood’’; the ‘’Lagos Plan of Action’’, and the novel ’’African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM)’’ remained without disciples. Lack of research on China, India, Japan and the former Soviet Union inhibits lessons for Africa from their geniuses.

Economic impoverishment resulting from repaying debts accumulated by profligate ruling elites gulp funds for research to promote African cross-border prosperity by local farmers and industrialists. In Nigeria universities decayed in the middle of the country’s highest earnings from oil revenues. Corrupt elites chose hiding looted funds outside Africa and away from promoting research on mutual peer review by African governments.

In the light of these handicaps, investing the future of Pan-Africanism in the creative energies and imagination of Africa’s youth is clearly urgent.