NIGERIAN President Olusegun Obasanjo announced on Tuesday that the African Union, an economic community that will succeed the Organisation for African Unity (OAU), will be established later this month. Nigeria ratified the African Union’s constitutive act on April 26, bringing the number of OAU member states supporting the union up to the necessary two thirds. The union will come into being on May 26, a month after its ratification. ”For the past five decades, generations of African leaders and other committed pan-Africanists have dreamed, planned and even taken up arms to fight for the day when our beloved, but colonially divided, continent would be free and united,” Obasanjo said in a speech at a two-day African Union forum in the Nigerian capital.