The state of Africa imposes the dire necessity of a strenuous policy to consolidate the motley collection of dysfunctional pretend sovereignties that serves only the interest of its kleptomaniac leadership. A token seat on the Security Council is not the most pressing matter facing Africa today. Even the importance given to the United Nations is misplaced. Our real need is a strong African platform as the institutional driver of the vision of our humanity. The United Nations should simply be a notional engagement to seek moral validation of policies designed to advance our interests and to be implemented through our own means. For now, the African geo-political landscape is configured to ensure that the continent remains out of relevance in the global scheme of things. In fact, many of these political non entities that pretend to be states are condemned to perpetual dependency thriving on residues of value disbursement from powerful states to retain their fictive sovereignty. Against the entrenched sober realities of a powerless Africa,these facts take on a deeply troubling character.

Africa.
“The challenge of would be serious countries in Africa today is to seize the opportunity of the relative openings of the continent space by elite forces for the expression of the autonomous African will following the end of the Cold War and the evolution of the global strategic landscape to institute long term policy frameworks and blueprints to ensure that the current fractious continent’s micro spacesand non-entities are consolidated into three or four viable sovereign entities. It is the logical next step since the complete removal of formal colonial contraptions and the end of apartheid.”

The misplaced attention to an elusive seat on the Security Council is consistent with Africa’s constant search for vainglorious titles that bring no tangible dividends to its peoples. That is why the cooptation of Africa by various external forces, some of them rather inconsequential in their own continents, has been relatively cost-free but with unlimited dividends for the intruding aggressor. The United States and France played South Africa and Nigeria against each other using the Security Council seat as baits. This was very prominent during the Ivorian crisis as Nigeria infamously committed its worst foreign policy error in its entire history by supporting a stooge of France, who in any case did not win the elections. Africa is the best field in the world to gain optimal strategic dividend for the smallest investment. In Africa, the responses to the incursion of the external order span the formal and institutionalized subservience associated with most post-colonial francophone African states, benign complicity as in most Anglophone Africa states, to radical repudiation of the status quo expressed mainly through African liberation movements such as in Algeria in the 1960s, the African National Congress( ANC) of South Africa, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the Pan African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) of Amilcar Cabral.

The range of responses from tepid to outright complicity and collaboration with the invader by most African states remains a critical factor in entrenching Africa’s current unenviable situation in the world. Outside Africa, reactions have been more robust against the intrusion of foreign forces. These have included institutional defiance of the unjust global order witnessed in Latin America, Iran, North Korea and admittedly Gaddafi’s Libya. By and large, African response to the global structure and the systemic injustices has been benign complicity and outright subservience of francophone Africa. It is this deleterious attitude of establishment Africa that has been responsible for the ossification of Africa’s near irrelevance in the global scheme of things. It is the mindset that has precluded raising uncomfortable fundamental queries in the current conversation on the Security Council seat.

Meanwhile, interactions among states through liberal institutions in the system, including the United Nations, and particularly in the Security Council, are largely governed by the soft protocols of the system. But these soft protocols, that are the basis of the expansion of the Security Council, are applied against the universal understanding that power or institutionalized coercion remains the ultimate currency in these transactions. To John Mearsheimer, for instance, institutions are basically a reflection of the distribution of power in the world and they are based on self-interested calculations of the great powers. Unfortunately, power is still the single most determinant factor in the role that nations play or are assigned in the system. The hard protocols informally guide the emerged diverse, and almost specialized, roles of the different constituent units in this universe of diverse states and evolved groups of states consolidated on the basis of commonly defined interests.

The elite states formulate the rules of the governing order that they dominate. By this they self-assign roles and impose rules that they enforce. They have the power to back their self-allotted aggrandizing role. These evolved alliances may be largely based on strong political affinities as in the European Union (EU). The political arrangements may be complemented by such military behemoths to protect ideological, economic and socio-political interests as in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This is the hard reality that Africa must come to grips with. In this context, a token seat on the Security Council changes nothing.

In the critical sphere of security, Africa is hardly neither able nor allowed by vested external interests to take responsibility to protect itself outside the framework of direct interventions of these external forces, especially France. The African security landscape has been characterized by the contrapuntal interventions of extra African forces before and since the emergence of the post-colonial African states as sovereign entities in the international states system. The trajectory and outcomes of the process of decolonization, including liberation struggles, were impacted by the overarching ideological polarity that defined the six decades of the Cold War era. In this larger global canvass, dominated by international forces advancing ideological goals, security challenges in Africa were mere footnotes of the larger ideological struggle. The end of the Cold War and the defeat of Apartheid in South Africa instigated a post-Cold War evolution with tectonic shifts in global security landscape.

Despite these transformations, Africa’s much altered post-Cold War strategic landscape is still dominated by extra African forces. In 2015 the major players in the continental security landscape continue to be external forces; France, the United States, Great Britain, Portugal and suspected late entrants, China. Islamic fundamentalism has also posed significant threats to the integrity of the post-colonial African state

The challenge of would be serious countries in Africa today is to seize the opportunity of the relative openings of the continent space by elite forces for the expression of the autonomous African will following the end of the Cold War and the evolution of the global strategic landscape to institute long term policy frameworks and blueprints to ensure that the current fractious continent’s micro spaces and non-entities are consolidated into three or four viable sovereign entities. It is the logical next step since the complete removal of formal colonial contraptions and the end of apartheid. In that connection, the challenge of such a emancipatory holistic frameworks as with all the other strategic frameworks of the past, lies in building into the calculus of its execution radical or even revolutionary interventions to remove the stubborn resilience of African states system as currently configured. This is that critical first step that has consistently been missing since 1963. It is singularly the most decisive test of the political will of Africa to achieve a historic emancipation from its current strictures.

Yet, as daunting as this would appear to be, it is not insurmountable. That is the lesson that the evolution of China to a major power status teaches. China today has defied the conventional trajectory to world leadership. Observers note that never in history-not before World War I, during the interwar years, or after World War II-has there been a globally dominant or rising economic power whose standard of living has been substantially lower than that of the status quo power and lower than that of many countries. Arvind Subramanian observes that today’s world also has a plurality of dominant actors even when compared with the post 1945 period. In effect, there is room for more centres of power among global actors. It is a legitimate aspiration for Africa to reconstitute itself into one of the multiple centres of global power. The imperative is for Africa to pool together its many tiny dysfunctional sovereignties, formulate and articulate unified rational African interests and develop clear narratives within the context of its inevitable holistic reconfiguration. In effect, the critical motor is to develop modalities to transcend its devastating realities. This long term challenge has nothing to do with a permanent seat on 42nd and First Avenue in New York.

The mere thought of the magnitude, ramifications and implications of a credible emancipatory project is a nightmare. So the most sane, just s in our domestic politics, would probably stay away from it. But the nightmare is the dream of bold and visionary leadership in Africa. There is no better time in all the past centuries of Africa’s rendezvous with its external nemesis than now to initiate a serious entanglement with its future. This calls for sober reasoning among key policy formulators in significant African capitals on how best to wrest the control of its destiny from extra-African forces and their local proxies determined to freeze the African status quo. In the context of the advancement of this project, all that noise and razzmatazz about an elusive Security Council seat is ultimately a useless distraction and of no consequence to the struggle of Africa for revolutionary transformations of its debilitating realities early in this millennium. Africa should have no time for this. It should focus on its real challenges.