by AMA BINEY
Map of Africa Source/Indian Government’s “Focus Africa” Programme
The 25th May commemorates “Africa Liberation Day” on the African continent. This year marks 51 years since the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) was founded on 25 May 1963. It also marks 5 years since the passing of Dr. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, a regular Pambazuka News columnist and Pan-Africanist who ironically and tragically died in Nairobi on 25 May 2009. This special issue seeks to honour these important landmarks as well as reflect on the next 50 years of Africa’s development in the light of the recent African Development Bank’s 2014 annual meeting which was themed: “The Next 50 Years: the Africa We Want” and the African Union’s (AU) Agenda 2063. In terms of development, it should not just be conceived of in wholly economic and technological terms in the narrow Western-centric obsession with “economic growth” and “GDP” outcomes, but development must encompass the cultural, political, social, psychological, ecological, intellectual potentials of African people and her Diaspora, that must be integral to new definitions and achievements in a development that is entirely people-orientated and people-led.
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JOSH MYERS argues, “To begin to conceptualize an African future is to stipulate that there must be unity—the only source of actual power and the guarantor of the security of African interests.” Similarly, MOTSOKO PHEKO contends, “Africa gained her political liberation through African Unity. Africa will not regain her economic liberation and social emancipation of her people without African Unity.” The late Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem also conceptualised the future of Africa based on unity when he wrote, “The collective African experiences is that we can only be ourselves and we need each other to counter the threat of marginalisation, rapacious globalization and the consolidation of whatever little gains may have been accomplished in a number of African countries. No one [African] country can be a sustainable miracle if its neighbours are in hell.”[8]
In planning for Africa’s future, we must shy away from crystal ball gazing and recognise that imperialism plans decades ahead in think tanks and institutions such as “The Project for the New American Century.”[9] Imperialist nations also allocate significant financial resources to Research & Development, as CHRISTOPHER ZAMBAKARI observes in his piece. Whilst cognisance of future imperialist operations and reconfigurations, Africans must simultaneously address what are the external and internal constraints on Africa’s future development? According to the African Development Bank: “Many of the drivers of conflict in Africa are regional in nature and call for regional solutions.”[10] Other “drivers of conflict” that will undermine peace, stability, and development in all its facets are as THEOGENE RUDASWINGA argues , “Africa has a crisis of leadership. Many of Africa’s rulers have, by and large, betrayed African people for too long.”
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