African union - forward ever, backward never: The African Union must not be the OAU with a different name, just as the EU is not the EEC by another name. (Continental Viewpoint).

The African Union is finally born. The Organisation of African Unity (OAU) is becoming history. Much has been written on the OAU's failure. Given the global context of a vicious Cold War, it has done well on the whole by staying alive and trying to bring about the complete formal political independence of the entire continent. There is no point of making a shopping list of the remaining tasks. What the OAU was able to do, it has done. What was beyond it has to pass on to the African Union (AU).

The AU must not be the OAU with a different name just as the EU is not the EEC by another name. There must be a qualitative difference in the tasks, aims, structures and directions. It must, at the minimum, bring the deepest possible integration of the continent socially, economically, militarily, culturally and politically.

Message of hope

The move from the OAU to the AU sends a symbolic historic message to the world. It says the arrow of African history is moving forward. This is perhaps one of the second most relevant and historic acts that African leaders as a collective body have done to date.

The best that the current leaders can do is to keep demonstrating and moving to make a real union of Africa. The ultimate goal should be to create a union of African peoples, states and regions by composing a single African nation.

The first was the formation of the OAU and the realisation of political independence. The present leaders deserve to be congratulated for continuing the pan-African work of the earlier leaders. They are making moves to use one of President Nkrumah's favourite slogans for Africa "Forward ever, backward never!"

There is, thus, a cardinal job waiting urgently to be done. And this involves/includes laying out a strategy for converting the heads of states into governors. The job of malting themselves redundant as heads of states by becoming governors of the states they are now running, is part of an investment to deepen Africa's integration.

A united and emancipated Africa is the only way Africa can relate with dignity, self-confidence and self-respect with the rest of the world -- as indeed with each other -- in order to remove the collective status of Africans as an oppressed people.

Africans need to integrate with the world on the basis of a status of an emancipated people and not as a forced and oppressed people, as they have been from time immemorial.

Emancipated or free, Africa is good for Africa and the world. The continent needs to build an African identity and emancipatory potential from both the positive experiences of Africa's ancient history of relative success and the negative history of oppression since 1500. To this day, Africans continue to flow to the rest of the world as slaves, conscripts, maids, servants, attendants, soldiers, labourers, refugees and unskilled workers. With a few exceptions, this pattern has not been broken.

When other people flow into Africa, they come as explorers, missionaries, slave traders, imperial civilisers, investors, aid workers, consultants, settlers and tourists. This flow into Africa and flow from Africa shows the continent's general status of humiliation and oppression today.

This situation must be changed by the concept of free Africa. Africa's integration must be a strategic weapon in the realisation of the vision and concept of free Africa.

Self-definition

The key is for Africa to capture the power of self-definition. Others' definitions and ideas of Africa must not inform the self-definition of Africans nor taint it.

The AU must be founded upon the principles and values that Africans are to define who they are now, what they have been and who they wish to become. It is the synthesis of African self-images/subjectivities with African histories, traditions, and values, thoughts and knowledge that the AU should incorporate and be a vehicle for spreading.

The concept of AU should embody the idea of eradicating Africa's humiliation by composing free Africa through wide-ranging integration. This means continued fragmentation is the same as continuing Africa's humiliation. African integration means a strategic move to reverse and finally eliminate Africa's humiliation.

Africa cannot solve its humiliation by more humiliation through continued fragmentation. Africa can only stand up and grow taller and taller by deepening the integration process.

What to do

First and foremost, the task is to establish an African metaphysics that embodies a shared African identity. Without developing an African identity, it is not easy to sustain the union project with any degree of stability and consistency.

A shared African value and vision worthy enough to shape, mediate and put in place effective mechanisms for resolving intractable conflicts and stimulate and inspire the capabilities of citizens and communities is necessary in order to achieve harmony consistent with a shared conception of an African identity.

Such a shared conception is necessary to develop and provide overriding expression to the African identity without giving offence to the numerous other identities Africans wish to express and have.

Such a metaphysics that guides the project for the expression of an African identity is essential in order to forge. the AU from the various states, racial groups, religions, language and ethnic groups.

This overriding identity can be framed from the historical and social experience of Africans. The first is positive and is anchored from historical achievements of Africans from Ancient Egypt to the colonial encounter of Africa in the 1500s.

The second is the negative history of humiliation that still continues in different guises from the time of Africa's degradation by enslavement. The metaphysics for anchoring the ontology of an African identity is framed by a renaissance of the positive history and firm rejection of the negative humiliation.

The most important task is to build in the young generation a strong and positive African identity by adding on any other identity they wish to express or profess. It should provide the focal imagination for building the African citizenship of all those living, working and constructing a future in Africa.

All the members of the Union need to generate common plans to carry out civic education to foster the African identity across the continent.

Afrophobic notions bequeathed from the years of humiliation must be rejected. An Afrophone identity or Afro-philia should replace hyphenations such as Anglophone and Francophone! Without adding such an African consciousness, the moral, intellectual, cultural and political minimum to forge a strong African Union will not obtain.

An African consciousness and identity provide the necessary condition to build the Union on a sure foundation to sustain it. Thus Africa's metaphysics embodies the collective and shared will to found the AU on Africa's liberation and renaissance.

Dependency

As soon as the African Union was announced, Western commentators demurred. They either said, it is a means for extending the begging bowls of Africa or something that will flop like the OAU.

When some of our leaders went to the recent G8 meeting in Genoa, Italy, to ask for assistance, this may have confirmed the snipe remarks made by some newspaper pundits.

I think what will make the Union genuinely African is if Africans try creative ways of raising funds to finance the continent's integration. It is in the interest of Africans to make their own history. They should not allow others to make history for them.

No one except Africans should colonise Africa's liberation. That is boring -- neither interesting nor necessary -- to let others distort the African agenda through power over Africa by the money they loan or grant.

Africa must beware of gifts from others. They have only helped to fatten the elite and impoverish the poor.

I, therefore, suggest that the main resources for the African Union must come from Africans themselves. External assistance can be accepted only if it comes with no strings attached and on the basis of solidarity.

Africa should, therefore, set up an African Union Fund where all can contribute -- governments, businesses, citizens and others.

There should also be lottery and other fund raising activities wherever Africans are. Africa is rich. It will be even richer if it invests honestly and purposefully to build the AU. There is hardly any reason to go asking for help.

If Africans themselves do what they can and show concrete results, others will come to Africa to support. The AU must be an African project through and through, and it is neither necessary nor desirable to involve donors at the early stage. Unless the donors provide funds on the basis of pure solidarity, there is no value in receiving finance from them.

The Union must not be dependent at the outset or shackled by onerous conditions. That would be a real shame and a disservice to Africa's aspirations to be free, strong and proud.

In particular, each African state should put in its budget an African integration fund. This should be equal to the percentage of national income that each state spends on its own state security apparatus. This money should be invested in stock markets and made to grow in order to yield income to finance the complete integration of the continent.

The Libyan leader, Col Gaddafi, has generously given $lm to fund the transformation of the OAU into the AU. This is a one-off payment and may or may not continue. His offer should form the first investment to open an independent financial structure for building an integrated free African nation.

African leaders must try to embrace African integration as a strategic priority for bringing about the rapid transformation of their own societies. The contribution they make to the continent's institutions will make it possible to build new institutions and strengthen pan-African institutions.

Security

The AU has selected for implementation part of the 11-point programme enunciated by Kwame Nkrumah in 1963 in Addis Ababa.

First, the Union will have an assembly of heads of states, a council of foreign ministers, a secretariat and a permanent committee of ambassadors.

Second, it will establish an African parliament, an African central bank, a common African currency and a court of justice.

While these aims are laudable, the initiative is entirely top down. There should be an institutional approach to citizen engagement in the formation of the AU. This is crucial to make sure that the Union is for the common African person, not just the elites and foreign corporate power.

There is a problem in the priority of the institutions that need to come first. More than any other issue that affects Africa today, is the difficult problem of establishing stability and security. One of the mistakes of the European Union is to forgo setting up a security structure along with other developments from shallow to deep integration of the EU.

Africa has more reasons than Europe to make a security system as part of an early development of the formation of the Union. Violence is daily disrupting life for most Africans. The violence market has been privatised and security firms, arms dealers, "blood-diamonds" and "blood-oil" are allowing companies to rake in millions over African death. This must be stopped. Only Africans at a union level can do this.

The security system for organising the eradication of violence and freeing Africa is one of the sacred challenges confronting African leadership. This is an area that cannot be postponed or left in the hands of others.

Innovation

Innovation, learning and imagination have to be embedded in the construction of the AU, as a culture, philosophy and ethics. Deception, force, borrowed ideologies for purposes of imposing social control and for promoting sectional advantage have to give way to a new union of Africa rooted in a moral sense and identity, persuasion, consent, public policy and public service.

The AU must increase African independence of thought and action. It must make Africa self-reliant. Africa was forced to experience a public policy vacuum for two decades owing to the policies of structural adjustment from the multilateral financial institutions. The AU should insulate African states from experiencing such embarrassment ever again.

It must allow them to stand free and independent to pursue any policy trajectory they deem necessary to build their own society. Unless the AU can resist the invasive policy ideas from the external world, they will turn out to be part of Africa's problem rather than the solution.

The AU must be anchored on the concept of free Africa, to unite Africa and make it strong, prosperous and a real player in world affairs.

Let the debate begin to make the new union effective and Africa's new beacon for a de-colonised and non-fractured future.

(Mammo Muchie is a guest professor at Aalborg University, Denmark, and Middlesex University, London, UK)