“The future will have no pity for those men who, possessing the exceptional privilege of being able to speak words of truth to their oppressors, have taken refuge in an attitude of passivity, of mute indifference, and sometimes of cold complicity.” -Frantz Fanon

Last July, African heads of state meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, decided to “conduct a study on the institutional reform of the African Union”. They mandated Rwandan ruler Paul Kagame to undertake the study “with a view to submitting a report on the proposed reforms and thus put in place a system of governance capable of addressing the challenges facing the Union.” Kagame embarked on this mission with gusto, picking a team of experts to help him with the task. His report, dated 27 January 2017, is titled The Imperative To Strengthen Our Union: Report on the Proposed Recommendations for the Institutional Reform of the African Union.

One would have expected that a comprehensive introduction or background to a study of institutional reform of the African Union in the 21st century would, among other things, locate the need for reform within the spirit of Pan-Africanism, or the Union’s Constitutive Act, or even its latest blueprint, Agenda 2063. None of that features in the Kagame Report. Instead, the first two paragraphs tellingly read as follows:

“As unprecedented challenges multiply and spread across the globe at a dizzying pace, new vulnerabilities are increasingly laid bare, in rich and poor nations alike.

“Every country must adapt, but the distinctive feature of recent developments is that even the wealthiest and most technologically advanced nations cannot hope to deal with the changes alone.”

This is deliberately misleading. What is being said here, exactly? That Africa is caught up in a whirlwind of problems, which, however, are not unique to the continent but are of a global nature. Both rich and poor (meaning African) countries face the same problems and no one is really to blame for this. Or everyone is equally to blame. Africans, like everyone else in the world, must be part of the solutions, etc.

Is that really the case? Who controls the largest share of the world’s resources and how did that come to be? What accounts for the mass poverty among African people here on the continent and elsewhere? Who is largely responsible for the climate crisis, African nations? Who dominates and manipulates the much vaunted institutions of global governance to the detriment of Africa? Who actually wields global power and to what ends? Who is responsible for the wars in Africa?

The case put forward by the Kagame Report on these and related issues constitutes a most disgusting and shameful denial of everything that the African Union should stand for. It is denial of Pan-Africanism, the ideology that should undergird the Union. Of course Africa faces a lot of problems. But we know that these are not “global” problems as such. The problems faced by Africans are brought about primarily by imperialism, by a global political economy deliberately rigged against Africa and the South. Africa’s problems are a question of social justice, not merely of management. That is the Pan-Africanist position.

“As unprecedented challenges multiply and spread across the globe at a dizzying pace…” Multiply and spread across the globe on their own? The language of the Kagame Report is not the language of Pan-Africanism. It is the language of neoliberalism. It is the totalizing language of globalization. It is not the language Julius Nyerere would use. Or Kwame Nkrumah. Or Thomas Sankara. Or Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem.

This Report frames the African Union as an example of “multilateral cooperation”, facing similar challenges with other such organisations around the globe. Well, here is some news for Kagame and his team: Pan-Africanists have never ever envisaged African unity as a multilateral project. Africans wherever they may live on this Planet are one people with one destiny. There is nothing multilateral about their quest for total liberation, unity and prosperity. That is called Pan-Africanism.

The challenges of “multilateral cooperation” are worse in Africa where, the Kagame Report claims, “arbitrary internal divisions imposed on us by history, have left us relatively more isolated, both from each other and the world as a whole.”

Please read that again: Africa’s internal divisions were “imposed on us by history”. Oh, really? Which history? Whose history? Like the unprecedented challenges multiplying and spreading virally across the globe apparently on their own, some impersonal thing called history imposed divisions on Africa. Not the European colonialists. No, it is history that is guilty. Could there possibly be a more brazen attempt by a group of Africans to absolve European colonialists of one of the most egregious crimes against humanity, as that great son of Africa Samora Machel described it? If this is the thinking within the African Union, will this organization ever raise the issue of reparations for colonialism and the Slave Trade (which, by the way, was also imposed on us by history)?

Having thus repudiated African claims against imperialism, Kagame and his team then proceed to throw in a few words in Pan-Africanist language purely for decoration: “To overcome that legacy, we had to come together in shared purpose and action, first to liberate ourselves from foreign domination, and then to set our people on a path to dignity and prosperity.” Decoration because the past tense implies that these goals – at least liberation from foreign domination - have been accomplished.

In the language of the market, the Kagame Report re-conceptualizes the role of the African Union in the lives of African peoples as service delivery. The African peoples emerge as the AU’s clients. “Without an African Union that delivers, the continent cannot progress, and we face the likelihood of yet another decade of lost opportunity…”

Consequently, a review of the literature on the AU’s challenges produces nine findings upon which the Kagame group base their recommendations. The findings are: CONTINUES