African Diaspora: The missing link in Africa’s quest for total liberation
The 250 million Africans in the Diaspora can still not participate meaningfully to the realisation of African unity, as espoused by the pan African body, African Union ( AU).
Jamaican Pan Africanist Marcus Garvey ( 1887 – 1840) imagined that the people of African ancestry in the Western Hemisphere would one day make a conscious decision to repatriate to Africa. That is how the Universal Negro Improvement Association ( UNIA) was conceptualised replete with its Black Star Shipping line and its rallying slogans – ‘ Back to Africa’ or, ‘ Africa for the Africans at home and abroad’.
But although Garvey, unlike his intellectual contemporary Edward Burghant Du Bois of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured Peoples ( NAACP), died without having set foot on the African continent, he fired the imaginations of future African liberation leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and Amandi Azikiwe. However, post-independent Africa has plunged into an abyss of degeneration, a condition that participants of a weekend webinar discussing ‘ Pan Africanism and the pursuit of political independence’, described as neo- imperialism. Chairperson of the Marcus Mosiah Garvey Foundation and Executive Member of the Ghana Caribbean Association Wadasi Mariam shed light on the constraints that African Diaspora endure even as it tries to participate in Africa’s development. For starters, the African Union has six regions – North Africa, West Africa, Central Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa plus the region which constitutes the African Diaspora. Mariam explained that at the 2011 Global African Diaspora Summit a Declaration was released reiterating the relevance of the six regions. It called on African Diaspora
representatives of the six regions to galvanise and organise themselves in regional networks and establish an appropriate mechanism that will enable their increased participation in the affairs of the African Union as observers and eventually in the future as the sixth region of the continent that “will contribute substantially to the implementation of policies and programmes”. Nine years later Mariam lamented that the African Diaspora are still observers because “we are not contributing substantively as yet to any African policies or programmes – so we are still on the observation regime”.
Declarations of inclusion notwithstanding, the six regions of the African Union are yet to gain traction and relevance, according to Mariam.
She observed that the practicalities of involving the Diaspora in the affairs of the AU have proven more problematic than was originally envisaged.
In an effort to include the Diaspora the AU created the AU Department of
Citizens and Diaspora Organisations and offered a seat in the Economic, Social and Cultural Council ( ECCOSOC) as well as created regional entities in North Africa, Europe and Latin America. Yet significant barrier for the sixth region is the state of the African Diaspora to participate in the affairs of the African Union to create African unity still persists.
The ECCOSOC is the only permanent AU organ with Diaspora representation. But despite the enthusiasm of the African Diaspora, as reflected in the establishment of various Diaspora networks, Mariam congtends that the actualisation of their representation in this organisation still remains evasive.
She says that the five geographical regions under which the AU is operating are only practical during the AU organ sessions in which the African Diaspora is not represented. She attributes this primarily to Article 29 par 1 of the 2000 Constitutive Act of the African Union, which limits membership of African
countries.“So, in actual fact membership of African countries are involved in those forums but the African Diaspora are not involved because they are not classed as African countries”.
Because of these restrictions the state of the African Diaspora continues to be observers rather than significant and active participants of the African Union.
Mariam laments that at present there is “little or no open discussions” about African unity that includes the sixth African Union region.
The MMGF head- honcho observed that all attempts at African unity have either, been delayed, compromised or watered down.
For example she mentioned that in Ghana, Africa Day was celebrated on 25th May as a public holiday but now the holiday has been abolished.
Again she noted that Ghana was recently awarded the headquarters of the AcFTA Area, but said the general feeling is that this was done for “historical emotional reasons” based around the legacy of Dr Kwame Nkrumah and the political stability of Ghana.
Mariam is aggrieved that there is no enthusiasm or discussion about regional free trade integration. She demonstrated this by citing the recent demands by Ghanaian traders for Nigerian traders to be banned from trading in local markets.
She asked rhetorically, “How can African free trade be successful when there continues to be border constraints, language constraints and currency constraints”?
Mariam noted that the African Union does not have a macroeconomic plan to unite Africa industrially but relies on planning influenced by foreign powers and western institutions. She said the challenges for Africa are among others, how to rekindle interest in pan Africanism and Black unity; how to reignite the flames that burnt in the hearts of our forefathers; how do we get Africans at home and abroad to realise and acknowledge how dependent we are on each other.
Aware that Africans know very little about themselves and undervalue what they have, MMGF recommends that the African Union and Pan African organisations embark on a campaign to sell Africa to Africans, particularly to the youths.
“We propose that there should be Pan African organisations in every African country and tasked with selling Africa to Africans. Ideally this should be sanctioned and coordinated by the African Union”.
The webinar was co- organised by the PLO Lumumba African Union Youth Club and the embassy of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic in Botswana. Other panellists included Prof. PLO Lumumba in Kenya; Prof. Tiro Sebina, African Literature lecturer at University of Botswana; Editorial Consultant, Douglas Tsiako and Ambassador Malainin Mohammed.