AFRICA UNITY IN 2017 INDEED!

Fellow Africans,

Right from the SHS level to my tertiary days, I have always believed in the need for African countries to be united under a common umbrella that will shelter prosperity, well-resourced citizens, and well cultured and despot free leadership.

Painful though that, the unity project commenced by illustrious sons birthed by this continent like, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Nasser of Egypt, Emperor Haelle Selassie of Ethiopia and the like has not been realized in our times, I am more confident for a better day today. Though the current leadership of the continent cannot totally be chided for the slow pace at which the unity project is being executed, the forerunners to the formation of the Organization of African Union (OAU) and now

African Union (AU) need to get their fair share of the blame cake.

This is a continent blessed with the best of the world resources, talk of gold, diamond, chromium, bauxite, timber, and even rich acreage of lands yet it is imbued with people dying of commonly curable diseases like malaria, where the source of drinking water for tens and millions of the people is a guinea worm infested streams, rivers, and lakes, and where many people in Africa go to bed each night with the pangs of hunger biting at their intestines. These are some of the horrors that the people of Africa have to live with in the midst of plenty.

Though part of the predicaments of present day African society could be attributed to bad leadership, with people like Omar Bongo of Gabon who invest in high heels in order to look elegant and tall while the mass of the people had to scratch their butt in order to make ends meat. Mobutu Sese Sekou who built a nice edifice for himself at the expense of the people.

This does not mean that Africa is the incubator of dictators; characters like Adolf Hitler and George W. Bush junior, Tony Blair among others of the West, are more than dictators if there be any other word to describe their insensitive and dehumanizing demeanor for humanity.

In the midst of despair, I pray our leadership will invest concern, love, care, faithfulness, loyalty, and the common good of the people in their chiefly endeavor of leading us in this millennium.

More promising is the fact the East African states are uniting in terms common market, free movement of people across borders and to Paul Kagame of Rwanda, the borders are mere ‘superstition’. This is refreshing if our current leaders will elevate themselves from the sudden pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our political institutions and fight for the common weal of the people.

I am an old student of Abuakwa State College at Kyebi in the Eastern Region whose motto is ‘Susu Biribi’, literally meaning ‘dream or think of something’. It is in this light that I see the frantic and the triumphantic declaration of African Union (AU) of it’s preparation to unite by the year 2017 as a welcoming news of magnitude excitement.

Like Kwame Nkrumah, “What is your problem, Africa?”