Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi is an impatient man, with the attention span of a four-year-old. No wonder he was sidelined by the Arabs and became an overnight Pan-African in 2002.
Gadaffi now wants to be king of a United States of Africa and is doling out fistfuls of oil-dollars to persuade the continent’s leaders that his big-bang approach is the way to go.
In Tripoli last week he sought to win the support of the Maghreb and Francophone African countries ahead of this weekend’s African Union summit, where a USA is on the agenda. He wants a common currency, the Afro; political union; a continental army; and a super-African president — himself.
Typically, he is driving from Sirte to Accra, Ghana, for the summit. Eish! At least he’s good for a headline.
Gadaffi’s loony ideas deserve no support. African unity is an ideal to strive for … but slowly. Without strengthening regional community structures, it cannot succeed.
The existing unions for Southern, Eastern, Central and West Africa have a chequered record, and are a long way from economic and political integration.
In the Horn and in Central Africa the principles of the African Union are still a dream. Ongoing abuse in Darfur and a stuttering peace in post-Âelectoral Democratic Republic of Congo are urgent concerns for the AU.
The regional bodies should be able to ensure that the African peer review system works properly to sustain democracy and they should be moving towards trading and labour pacts to cut the costs of intra-African commerce. Ideally, passport and visa controls should be curbed so that people and goods can move more easily. But this is hard slog because visa and customs revenues are still crucial for most states.
The World Bank’s competitiveness report shows that growth in Africa is surging, helped by high commodity prices and debt relief. Once the regional bodies are working, a phased union can be planned, bearing in mind that it took the Europeans more than 50 years to achieve their current union. Rules of accession must be worked out painstakingly.
We support the call for an audit of the AU. Five years after its launch it is time to assess its effectiveness — before beginning to consider a United States of Africa. This should not restrict itself to a technocratic assessment of whether reports have been filed on time and meetings have been held.
At the centre of any assessment must be the vitally important issues of human wellbeing and peace.
Dangerous name droppers
“Call no man happy until he is dead,” said the ancient Greeks. In the context of the battles over the renaming of streets in various cities, one could recast this as “Call no man a role-model until he is dead”.
To prevent personality cults, ensure that only well-lived lives are honoured and naming does not become a sycophantic practice, the first principle governing name-change has been that only the names of the dead should be used. This has already been flouted widely in South Africa: the Port Elizabeth council has renamed itself after Nelson Mandela, for example, while the Rustenburg council has renamed streets after both Mandela and Thabo Mbeki.
This is symptomatic of a wider problem in the management of name-changes — they are being driven by politically immature municipal politicians who, in many instances, use them to score points and advance narrow party and personal agendas. The renaming of what was originally the King Senzangakhona Stadium in Durban after communist icon Moses Mabhida was a calculated slap in the face for the Inkatha Freedom Party and a ploy by the council’s ANC leaders to raise the profile of Jacob Zuma, Mabhida’s former close associate. This and similar manoeuvres have served merely to heighten sectarian tension in Durban, culminating in violent protest.
Party rivalries, particularly over Rhoda Kadalie’s leadership of the renaming panel, have also bedevilled Cape Town’s name-change process. And in Potchefstroom, there has been a fierce backlash from local right-wingers. The vandalising of signs is obviously unacceptable. But, in a platteland town, it was not a smart idea to name a street after Peter Mokaba, given his association with the chant “Kill the boer! Kill the farmer!”.
The Durban hardliners have breached another key principle — upheld by the South African National Geographical Names Council (SANGC) — that, in general, new names should have local resonance.
Whites will have to accept that many names are going to change, particularly those associated with apartheid and colonial rule. Indeed, it is a testament to the patience of black people that more than a decade after South Africa’s “independence” election so many urban landmarks still commemorate the likes of HF Verwoerd and BJ Vorster.
But SANGC member Mpume Mbatha is surely right to suggest that municipalities are mishandling this delicate issue. There is merit in his call for new legislation to strengthen the powers of the SANGC, which is Âmandated to promote reconciliation and nation-building.