Yes, we are Dreamers!
Pan-Africanism 101 for Dummies
Note: This article was expanded from a conversation I had with a friend
As usual, I begin with a Big Thank You to my paid subscribers. I am immensely grateful for your not only reading my articles but also for offering me your financial support!
And to the readers who give me their feedback, I truly appreciate you all.
As we say in Yoruba: Mó dúpẹ̀.
To those who keep on deriding Pan-Africanism as a hopeless dream, I say:
The future, they say, belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Stop confusing Pan-Africanism with African-Romanticism.
Pan-Africanism is not about falling in love with your fellow African; it has never been.
In its simplest, uncomplicated, form, Pan-Africanism is about combining your strength with your fellow Africans to face a very hostile, dog-eat-dog, man-eat-shit, Social-Darwinistic world where might is right and the weak are swallowed whole.
Pan-Africanism is about the survival of the Africans, not only as a race but as a Civilization that will face and contest other civilizations on its own terms and strength.
To the deriders, I say: it is your business if you refuse to interrogate your brains and try to ask simple questions like the differences between a country, a nation, and a state, and ask yourself if the one in which colonial cartographers penned you qualified as a nation.
Sorry to distress you, but the failure to appreciate and understand these basic things underpins the failure of experiments to build successful nation-states in much of Africa.
Post-independence, we, of course, as in whatever we do, choose the easiest way to address our problem.
We erroneously believed that copying and pasting parts of other people’s constitutions and slapping them into a Ghana Constitution would, pronto, transform the entity called Ghana into a viable nation-state.
Contemptuously brushing aside centuries of finely-tuned ethnic sensibilities we think that we can coerce ourselves in a modern nation without the willingness to employ the brutal physical force the colonialists employed to create a la carte countries by fiat.
Sorry, it does not work that way. Nkrumah, with his vigorous socialism and efforts at rapid industrialization, could have succeeded as people’s attention would be focused on partaking in sharing from a larger bowl. This is what the Chinese succeeded in doing, but it is an impossible task in a liberal dispensation with its emphasis on property-owning “democracy,” and with the IMF and the World Bank breathing down the necks of the local comprador to ensure compliance with the World Order.
The truth is that should it succeed India will become the first country to develop its economy via the Western-democracy route. Forget all the bs they teach you in your PolSci classes, neither the US nor Europe could, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as democracies when they were building their economies.
I can imagine your falling in love with the geographic expression of the colonial garrison you choose to call a country. I can even understand your need to beat your chest, wave flags, and belch anthems as you feel giddy with excitement and awe at the display of the appurtenances of your ostensible independent country.
What I cannot understand is why it is beyond you to see how puny and pathetically insignificant your beloved country actually is in the global scheme of things.
Apart from Nigeria, South Africa, Ethiopia, and Egypt none of the other countries in Africa packed enough punch to rate high in geo-strategic calculations.
So, Mr Patriot, try to imagine yourself the president of say, Benin Republic, going to negotiate a trade deal with, say, Germany.
What exactly will you bring to the table?
Your economy, all of US$14:39 billion, is significantly less than that of any of the states that made up the Bundesrepublik - North Rhine Westphalia tops the list at US$711.4 billion, the lowest Bremen stands at US$33.6 billion.
At US $ 3.9 trillion, the German economy makes your national economy look very tiny in comparison. The Germans will simply roll over you.
That’s just the teaser.
I know that, for many of us, thinking deeply is an encumbrance, but try not to forget that Germany, being part of the EU, no longer negotiates bilateral trade deals with other countries. The EU does that on its behalf.
If the German economy makes your national economy look tiny, the behemoth of the combined EU economy at US$ 18.8 trillion reduces your national economy to virtual invisibility.
Since we are still imagining things, now try to imagine if, instead of you going alone to Bonn ( actually Brussels) to negotiate a trade deal as the Beninois Minister for Trade and whatever, you are part of an ECOWAS negotiating team.
By the sheer scale of the combined population of the ECOWAS (340+ million people plus a GDP of US$400+ billion), your prospects have dramatically improved. Your chances of being considered a serious player have increased exponentially.
For those of us who keep on beating the drums of African Unity, the most distressing thing is the concerted efforts of the so-called educated people to keep on fanning the embers of stupid patriotic jingoism.
Why is the elementary logic of strength in unity escaping those who claimed to be educated?
Why do our scholars, intellectuals, and media people think that the Europeans created their EU because they wanted the Dutch to fall in love with the Spaniards (with whom they fought countless wars, including one that lasted 100 years), or because they expected the Italians to gyrate to Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles?
Why is it impossible for our leaders (political, economic, and opinion) leaders to think of the very obvious benefits such unity will bring to their personal as well as national economies?
Like?
For a starter, Harmonised Economic Policies in ECOWAS will lower the prices of goods and services.
Why do people not ask why is cheaper to call the US or Europe from, say, Ghana than to call Nigeria, Liberia, or even Togo?
Why can a Beninoise Fashion Designer not dream of a 340 million market instead of that of just 14 million people?
Why is it that instead of focusing on the small Ghanaian market of 34 or so million people, the Kasapreko Distillers in Ghana cannot plan to satisfy to satisfy the thirst of of the over 340 million ECOWAS citizens?
These are just some ideas. Try to think about them even if the efforts will render you comatose!
Have a wonderful day.
Fẹ́mi Akọ́mọláfẹ́
Farmer, Writer, Published Author, and Social Commentator
My latest book, “Africa: A Continent on Bended Knees” is available on:
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• Africa: it shall be well (Get a FREE Chapter Here)
• Africa: Destroyed by the gods (Get a FREE Chapter Here)
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