By Goz Anyadiegwu*
The African Union is a great start to a Pan-African dream that Kwame Nkrumah was envisioning in the 1960’s. He wanted Africans to wake up and unite politically and economically. Africa is easier to manipulate when it is divided. When there are over 50 states then it is easier to do divide and conquer. Africa is a lot stronger when united. This is why the African Union is around, they want to unite Africa and the Diaspora. This is why they allowed Haiti to join the African Union.
It succeeded by trying to promote African unity. It is providing jobs for people as well. But it does have some failures as well. It fails to handle situations by itself. It has to go to America for supplies and support when they went to Somalia. It also took them too long to go into Mali. This is why the French had to come. It fails to be independent and still relies on foreigners for help. It also did a bad job in the Ivory Coast when the French took away Laurent Gbagbo who was fighting for African liberation. There are conflicts in DRC where the African Union troops should have been there to help save people. The African Union needs to build a more military power so Africans don’t have to go to the west for help.
It needs to be more self dependent because right now the African Union relies on foreign donors to fund their engagements. As Thomas Sankara said “He who funds you controls you.” Even the building was built by Chinese engineers. This is bad because we are too dependant on other people. We need to be self reliant in order to fix our problems by ourselves. We have many engineers, why couldn’t they get the contract? The AU needs to help Africa industrialize and become self-reliant. The African Union must revive the Pan-African dream with the African Monetary Fund, African Central Bank, and African currency. Leaders in the past have tried this but ended up dying trying. The African Union also needs to do an economic trading block and including the CaribbeanIslands and people of African descent in the west. This will make it easier to move goods and services from place to place. The Pan-African passport will help the movement of people as well. It needs to finance projects that are working for the benefit of Africa instead of going to the International Monetary Fund which gives African bad loans which keeps us enslaved by debt. The African Monetary Fund would do this. This will be a true Pan-African economic dream that Marcus Garvey would be proud of.
So the African union has to build military, economic and political power of Africans and the Diaspora. This will bring Africa back to its past great power.
*Information about the writer:
Hello this is Goz Anyadiegwu the Founder of African Economic Development Plan. Goz is a student at DePaul University in Chicago studying Global Economics with a minor in management at the College of Commerce. He will be studying Global Economics at Howard University in the fall of 2013. He is the founder of the African Economic Development Plan It was an idea started in 2012 with the Nigerian Economic Development Plan (www.nigerianedp.com). But the site wasn’t the best looking and I wanted to give it a more Pan-African approach so I created the African Economic Development Plan (www.africanedp.com). I started it because I realized that Africa doesn’t create finished goods, we export raw materials and import finished goods which are just like colonialism. SO I decided to start to promote African finished goods, fashion, art, tourism an investing. All of these things will stimulate economic development. The long term goal is to add African American, Caribbean Islands, Afro-Brazilians, and other people of African descent around the world. If millions of people of African descent around the world buy these goods then jobs and wealth will be generated. This will make us more independent of other people’s businesses.
