African leaders argued fiercely on Monday over whether to rapidly create a single state stretching from the Cape to Cairo, with one small group threatening to break away and forge ahead with the project.
Delegates said the atmosphere in an African Union (AU) summit was charged as a group of states led by Libya’s Moammar Gadaffi and Senegal’s Abdoulaye Wade argued with a more gradualist majority led by South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki.
”I think everybody is a little bit tense, because they know how serious this is,” Senegalese Foreign Minister Cheikh Tidiane Gadio said.
”It is getting heated between Gadaffi and the Southern Africans,” said one delegate, who did not want to be identified.
While almost all the 53 member nations agree with the goal of African integration and eventual unity, most of the summit leaders want this to be a gradual process.
Gadio held out the prospect that a small group of states committed to creating a United States of Africa could push forward without the others and sign up to federation, ironically splitting the AU over the idea of unity.
”If Senegal wants to build this union with two, three, four more countries, there is not a country in this room that has enough power to tell Senegal you cannot do it,” he said.
Kwamena Bartels, Information Minister of host nation Ghana, attacked such a strategy.
”It would be useful to all of us that there is no such breakaway group. Africa could do with a united front,” he said.
”Setting up breakaway groups is not really the answer,” Bartels added, saying only Libya and Senegal had so far openly backed an immediate federal government.
These two, apparently backed by about three or more states, want a unity government as the only way to fight poverty and other challenges facing Africa, including globalisation.
Matters of survival
”Some of us think that Africa’s unity has become a matter of survival … my president is here with his pen ready to sign,” Gadio told reporters.
”Some will start and the others will follow. … Now, who is ready to start? Senegal is ready.”
Gadaffi, known for his impassioned rhetoric, was more restrained on Monday despite a speech on the summit’s eve invoking the spirit of pan-African icon Kwame Nkrumah, who led Ghana to independence 50 years ago, to support his vision of a United States of Africa.
Asked by a crush of journalists during a summit recess whether he was optimistic about unity, Gadaffi, wearing dark glasses and a black cap, declared: ”I am always optimistic.”
The Libyan leader, describing himself as a soldier for Africa, is impatient with the slow pace of integration. He did not attend the summit’s opening session on Sunday and believes the decision over unity must be made by Africa’s masses and not leaders closeted in a conference hall.
The summit leaders have come under criticism for largely ignoring pressing issues such as Sudan, Somalia and Zimbabwe at this meeting to concentrate on unifying the continent.
Many Africans regard this as an unrealistic, if noble, dream. Sceptics point to decades of wars, coups and massacres that often sprang from ethnic and religious fault lines on a continent artificially carved up by former colonial rulers.
The summit continued into the evening on Monday and Bartels said the debate was unlikely to be ”crystallised” until midday on Tuesday, the meeting’s final day. – Reuters