Gadaffi's dream for African unity is all about thin vapour

By Peter Mayiga RECENTLY, John Nagenda, the Presidential Media Advisor, described Col. Kasirye Ggwanga, the Mubende District Chairman, as "an accident about to happen." This followed Kasirye's alleged assertion that President Yoweri Museveni's claims of modernising the army in his last term was an impossible task to accomplish. Nagenda's description of Kasirye would fit Libyan leader, Col. Muamar Gadaffi, very well. If he does not advise presidents to rule till they drop dead, he will award them or their sons high military ranks. In some other moment he will be the "humane" gentleman helping to rescue Western hostages from the hands of some Islamic fundamentalists in the Philipines. Never mind that his aides were at the same time being convicted of terrorism charges in the International court at the Hague, Netherlands. Some time back Gaddafi "conceived" the idea of the African Union. This arrangement is meant to replace the OAU with broad concepts to encompass the following common items amongst the members: a currency, foreign policy, defense structure, economic programmes among other issues. The Union is also supposed to have a Continental Assembly made up of Heads of State and an Executive Council of Ministers. Someone should inform Gadaffi that this nice preposition is not exactly novel. A similar vision having occurred to Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah decades ago did not materialise. But with all due respect to Africa's demised hero, I find all such ideas a total waste of time. As for Libya's gallant soldier who is pretending to have discovered the solution to the continent's afflictions 50 years after Nkrumah, well, the man has never been my kind of hero. Africa's biggest problem is a deficiency of democracy under which condition tyrants thrive to eventually ruin the economies of their countries. African countries need to, first, sort out the mess in their individual territories for any union to make sense. I do not share the optimism of Salim Ahmed Salim, the Secretary General of the OAU, when he said at the launch of the Union that will make it a difference to the life of Africans. Furthermore, Dr. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, head of the Pan-African Movement in Uganda, said that Pan-Africanism will liberate Africa without elaborating how this would happen. I feel that African minds should work in unison regarding the continent's liberation, but without a political or economic union. Take Uganda, for example. We do not have drugs in hospitals; education standards dropped considerably, unemployment is on the rise, insurgency is wide spread and our democratic credentials are suspicious. Uganda's case is nearly the scenario in much of Africa, and one wonders why some people should be so upbeat about bringing this sorry state under one umbrella of the Union. In my opinion, South Africa's Thabo Mbeki's Millennium African Plan which seeks to empower African economies to deal with their internal bottlenecks that impede growth is a more practical proposal. At a press conference at State House, Nakasero, Collin Powell, American Secretary of State was not so sure what the "African Union" was. President Museveni had to go ahead to educate Powell that it's something being pushed by Gadaffi. Museveni did not state that other African countries had ratified the treaty (perhaps for fear of upsetting the rich "revolutionary"). This situation only shows how this whole union issue is a farce. ends