Comment - OAU - Time To Face Reality
Elizabeth Ohene
From another angle, it could very well be that at heart most Africans are not very different from the traders on our roadsides; if you want one hundred dollars for your goods, ask for a thousand; some innocent might give you the thousand and if some others give you ten dollars, you might even come out even at the end of the day. Thus twenty-five years ago when the OAU came into being, it was considered a heresy to even think in realistic or down to earth terms.
For a continent whose people were and still are battling with the elements for their very existence and where hunger, poverty and disease constitute the daily problems of the majority; the very secretariat of the OAU was considered necessary to be fashioned along the lines of the United Nations - if that organisation is headed by a Secretary-General, the OAU had to have one - from the ridiculous to the pathetic.
It was not considered important that the basis and circumstance for the formation of the two organisations were totally different. The UN was born after the nations of the world had fought a long and bitter war and wanted a club where they could leisurely talk themselves out of future wars - the emphasis is necessarily on prolonging the speeches as long as possible.
The OAU was born out of an urgent desire to liberate those parts of the continent that were still under colonial domination and should necessarily be an organisation in a hurry, for while those nations that dreamt up the UN had finished with the basic problems of existence for their people, Africa had not even began to tackle them.
As things have turned out, not only do OAU officials see themselves as mini-world civil servants, they dress and act to suit the part. The African leaders have turned the organisation into a circus where they put their personal idiosyncrasies on display for the world every year. The speeches get longer and less meaningful every year.
The only unifying factor in the organisation throughout the years has been the liberation and decolonisation struggle, but once independence came the leaders could never overcome their petty and individual jealousies and ambitions to concentrate on improving the lots of their people.
As the freedom fighters of yesterday became the oppressors of today, African leaders routinely lose whatever moral authority they ever had making the unthinkable possible that in some circumstances, the people were better off under colonial domination!
The yearly summit meetings have produced more tragic and on occasions, comic drama than anything of substance. Each country tries to outdo the previous one in the opulent nature of the facilities that can be provided for their fellow petty dictators. Countries that can ill-afford food for their citizens compete for the opportunity to lay on the yearly one week extravaganza. In the name of a sanctified policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of member-states, everybody pretends not to notice the horrors that are taking place next door to them and they all concentrate on other matters. The problem being, of course, that very few African leaders can afford to criticise their neighbours, being invariably guilty of the same things that are taking place outside their own borders.
In the circumstance, it is not surprising that the long speeches and grandiose plans remain the only things to cling to. But then the day will have to come soon when the emptiness and meaningless rhetoric will have to be recognised for what they are. Pathetically it is the economic difficulties that face the continent that will bring that day earlier than any exhortations. The OAU secretariat is beginning to appreciate the fact that it does not head a rich man's club and the scramble to stage the yearly extravaganza is not as intense any more.
But we all, to a man, still speak about the absolute and immediate need for an African High Command, when no single African country has settled the question of the role of its own Armed Forces.
The East African Community (EAC) has disintegrated surprisingly without many mourners and the Economic Community of West Africa is yet to be anything more than a paper organisation, and yet everybody talks about the total political and economic unity of Africa.
Maybe after 25 years, it is time for the OAU to reassess its priorities and set realistic goals which can be achieved. It is time, maybe, to pay greater attention to the pitiful plight of the people and the everyday problems. It is time to work on the regional groupings with more determination to ensure that they work before the bigger prospect of continental unity is undertaken. But even more serious is the harm caused by the large-scale hypocrisy that makes it possible for an Idi Amin to become Chairman of the OAU for a whole year.
Last week on Africa Day, most African leaders issued the usual statements and resolutions. On the same day, the new Guinean Foreign Minister made official what has been known for some time, that Guinea will not be able to host this year's OAU summit as had been planned before fate intervened in the form of the sudden death of the late Sekou Toure, the Guinean leader for 25 years.
If that even had not occurred, doubtless, Africa's leaders would have assembled in Conakry to enjoy the sumptuous hospitality of an impoverished country. Speeches would have been made praising Africa's elder statesman Sekou Toure. Not one word would have been heard about the fact that Diallo Telli, the first Secretary General of the OAU had been murdered in the jails of the host, nor would any of the leaders have said anything to indicate that they were aware that other political prisoners were being tortured in jails while they toasted each other at cocktail parties after their speeches.
It is a refreshing change to have an African country admit to the reality and state that it cannot host the summit when most countries would have looked on such an admission as intolerable and proceeded to stage it even at the cost of totally bankrupting their nations. The only winners in all these rigmaroles are the racist South Africans. For the eventual freedom of Namibia and Azania becomes more remote every day that the independent African nations continue to front the ALL as a rich men's club
