Ademola AraoyeAdemola 

 Ademola Araoye

In the face of ongoing monumental social realignment at the global level, Africa is not roused into taking any constructive concrete action, no matter how small the potential impact, in response to these historic movements. The focus remains retaining the structural status quo with a view to preserving the personal interests of those who have cornered the various African states for themselves and their scions. The contentious logic that derailed the dream of a continental republic in 1963 remains as toxic as ever. The continent is thus studiously blind to the potential positive implications of the movements in strategic tectonic plates of global politics to shift its circumstances by an inch. All Africa seeks are continuous handouts from the West, by whatever name. This time in dubious demand for reparation! Africa has remained stuck in its past, deficient in all metrics of the civilization of the digital age and fixated in its convenient escapism, by whatever name. The escapes are rendered in the rhetoric of deflecting all blame of Africa’s incapacity to rouse itself from dependency on the colonial experience. It is in that context that the insalubrious reality of Africa can be appreciated as the outcome of the ruinous regimes of the founding but wounding fathers and their latter day inheritors of their curse.

The 37^th Ordinary Summit of the African Union of February 17 and 18 2024 in Addis Ababa underlined the antiquated character and the reality of the Union as an organization out of sync with the needs of the continent. Further, the outcome of the meeting reflected the abject lack of salience of the collectivity of continental leadership in the face of the critical challenges posed and opportunities offered to Africa by the turpitude in the global order. Rather than develop strategies to respond to emerging structural challenges in the global system with a view to seizing the moment to strengthen Africa’s place in the evolving system, as a few of the states anticipated, it is quite revealing that the planned thematic focus of the AU for the year 2025 is “Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations”. That planned embarrassing thematic engagement for 2025, a completely irrelevant subject to the future of the people of the continent given the prevailing more profound structural turpitude in the unstable global system, underscores the fixation of the AU on cheap, vacuous populism of a vast majority so-called leaders who may be called to account in real time. More problematic is that the ludicrous AU agenda reflects a flight of the continent from the urgent imperative to rigorously explore and exploit the challenging opportunities that serious statesmen across the globe are engaged in to improve their respective placements in the global pecking order. The contemporaneous volatility of the global order therefore presents opportunities of epochal implications to Africa that, unfortunately, the African Union has proven neither configured to perceive nor configured to spurn. Notwithstanding the sad reality, an axis of radical thinking leadership, largely youthful leaders motorized by a new radical pan-Africanism or activist Afrocentric orientation is emerging in unlikely spaces in the continent. This includes the regimes in the new Confederation of Sahel States.

It is a salutary irony that the revolutionary regimes in the Sahel states of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger that the sub-regional Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) had contemptuously rejected and threatened with war on the seizure of power in their respective states seem to be more adept at exploiting the instability in the global system to strengthen their struggle for both political emancipation and economic capacities. This is unlike the many status quo states in Africa. Toward this end, the revolutionary states in the Sahel have collectively achieved more economic integration in the less than five years and greater political consolidation in the formation of a Confederation of Sahel States in two years than in the fifty years of the existence of ECOWAS. ECOWAS, beyond its constant jaded rhetoric to reaffirm its mandate has been unable to overcome the contrived divisiveness of France-inspired internal saboteur state elements among its ranks. The idea of ECOWAS, though a mightily worthy vision, in practice has unfortunately been a mere reflection of the parlous internal circumstances of its constituent states. That precariousness begins with the pinnacles of leadership. The paradox is that the rejected revolutionaries in the Sahel have mobilized the required courage to match the needed strategies that they have formulated to break the stranglehold of France in West Africa. And, so far, they have proven to be men of moral astuteness and integrity, unlike the mostly compromised, morally bankrupt leadership of what is left of ECOWAS states. Meanwhile, in less than five years, beyond significantly whittling down the domineering influence of France in its presumed West Africa pre carre, including the removal of French forces in the sub-region, the revolutionaries have made impressive strides in other critical domains of managing their statehoods. Other major attainments have included the announcement of political consolidation of the three people with strong cultural affinity in the Confederation of Sahel States (CSS), launched a common currency and fused their states into a military alliance. At the level of the respective states, all the three regimes are visibly revitalizing economic infrastructures that range from aviation to agriculture to the management of mining of mineral resources, significant added value to raw materials in agriculture and minerals.  Burkina Faso, in the face of the retreat of USAID from the continent, has also launched a massive rice aid export initiative across Africa, as a step in breaking the dependency cycle. As the country strengthens its agricultural sector, it is now set to become a major rice supplier for the entire continent. The economy of Burkina Faso is projected to grow by leaps and bounds with higher export values in a more competitive economy. In Niger, an alliance of civil society groups known as M62 had called for the termination of mining licenses to French company Areva and other interests, which had exploited the country for so long under compromised and corrupt leadership. Niger’s economic stature is now recognized across Europe, given that, as Martina Schwikoski and Phillip Sender note, around two thirds of France’s electricity comes from nuclear power plants, and around twenty per cent of the uranium to power them is sourced from Niger. More critically France exports electricity to European countries that do not possess nuclear plants of the own. Some experts have described the initiatives of the states of the Sahel as the elements of a new strategic development model for Africa. In these radical moves, the regimes have also diversified relations within the global community. They have chosen to align relations toward the Sino-Russian bloc. In the evolved climate of instability in the global system, especially in the face of more pressing contentions of elite powers, the price of the radicalism in the Sahel, outside of the not unanticipated bad press in certain European media, has been negligible. That in itself is a good signal.

The instability in the global order is integral to historic cycles of realignments of major powers of the global system. Not unexpectedly in a continental body steeped in the stupor of a depressing conservatism, revolutionary forces in Africa responding to the historic deprecations of the status quo under which hegemonic forces subsumed the will of the people as well as the elite partisan interests equated as the national interest on the one hand and, on the other hand, the evolved turmoil in the international order with potential openings to advance the African Renaissance agenda were barred from the retrogressive continental gathering in Addis Ababa. Ironies thus abound, even as the crisis of legitimacy of the African Union is exacerbated by the drowning legitimacy of its constituent states across the board. The multitude of paradoxes is that the barred revolutionary forces themselves, with incredible political, social and economic breakthroughs and impact in the short span of leadership, squirm at the very idea of a presence in a club of mainly historically self-serving despots, untiring ancient egomaniac faux statesmen, and opportunistic washed out pretend pan-Africanists. Secondly, the barred revolutionary forces continue to display a better appreciation of how Africa can begin to navigate the evolved complexity of the global order for the benefit of its people and the global black humanity. Thirdly, they are more mentally fortified for the challenges ahead of Africa in renegotiating its place and role in the global firmament. Lastly, they reflect the zeitgeist of the restiveness of the youthful continent in their single minded determination to break the dependency syndrome and move away from the mentality of the search for handouts as continental policy. The outcome of the 37th summit as with others before it was thus a throwback to the odious legacy of the early wounding fathers of the continent.

*Professor Ademola Araoye is a retired official of the United Nations and former Director of Abuja Leadership Center, a TETFUND Center of Excellence in Public Governance and Leadership at the University of Abuja. He is author of Sources of Conflict in the Post- Colonial African State (AWP, 2012).