Garissa and Africa’s vision

….Shocked yes but not cowed’’. Africa listens to, and hears Africa.When in January 1971 Idi Amin overthrew Uganda’s President Milton Obote, the virus reached neighbouring Rwanda. On July 5, 1973, General Juvenal Habyarimana overthrew President Gregory Kayibanda – the man bred by the Catholic Church to ensure that the Hutu majority won elections over the […]

….Shocked yes but not cowed’’. Africa listens to, and hears Africa.
When in January 1971 Idi Amin overthrew Uganda’s President Milton Obote, the virus reached neighbouring Rwanda. On July 5, 1973, General Juvenal Habyarimana overthrew President Gregory Kayibanda – the man bred by the Catholic Church to ensure that the Hutu majority won elections over the Tutsi minority. Amin’s slaughter of military officers likely to mount a counter-coup was adapted as Habyarimana stationing soldiers to ensure that ‘’Kayibanda and his wife starved to death inside their house’’.
President  Sekou Toure’s killed Diallo Telli, the brilliant Secretary General of the Organisation of African Unity, OAU, with the  use of ‘’black death’’ or starvation from being denied food and water in the notorious Camp Boro in Guinea Conakry. A British journalist claimed that Mengistu Haile Mariame built a latrine over Emperor Haile Selassie’s grave after suffocating him to death. In Liberia Samuel Doe would be carved with knives for the benefit of television cameras.  It is a macabre face of pan-Africanism which also swallowed Thomas Sankara.
The example of a law graduate from Garissa bringing terror to the only university in his underdeveloped northeast region must not become an epidemic in Africa.
In 1973 Mwalimu Nyerere moved a motion which was adopted at the OAU summit in Cairo enthroning the principle that borders inherited from colonial rule must remain sacred if African is to avoid chronic border wars. Nyerere had seen President Jomo Kenyatta have a hot war with ‘’Shiftas’’ or armed groups of Somalis demanding to join the ‘’Greater Somalia’’ country made up of Somalis living in Kenya; the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, and former Italian Somaliland.  Four decades later, clan-based anarchy in failed Somalia, spawned Al Shabaab’s export of terror into Kenya as revenge for Kenya’s troops fighting them inside Somalia in support of the newly elected government.
The notion of Africa sharing benefits and troubles has strong roots. Nyerere’s government proclaimed the motto of ‘’Uhuru na Umoja’’/ Freedom and Unity.  In Nigeria, the Action Group party had in 1960 called for unity to conquer ‘’multi-tribalism and multi-lingualism in Nigeria and Africa’’. Invoking wars of tribalism among Europeans in 1914-1918 and 1938-1945, Action Group urged Africans to give world civilization the benefit of the black man’s assumed genius for unity. Kwame Nkrumah and Tafawa Balewa announced that the independence of Ghana and Nigeria, respectively, were not complete until they had ended colonialism and racial dictatorships in Southern Africa.
At its birth in 1963, the  OAU set up a Liberation Committee which committed member to lend diplomatic, material and military support to struggles to end racial dictatorship in South Africa, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South West Africa (now Namibia).
Al Shabaab, Boko Haram in Nigeria and armed groups in Libya, Mali and Egypt are challenging the principle of ‘’national sovereignty’’. Africa has reacted by making the African Union Mission in Somalia an evolving phenomenon. In recalling the African Liberation Committee, Cameroun, Chad and Nigeria have pooled military power to defeat Boko Haram. Just as Europe had called on a superior American military and economic power to pull them away from destructive national sovereignty towards the formation of the European Union, terrorism may well deepen the notion that when your neighbour’s hut is on fire, it is wise to join in putting out the fire to protect your own.
Ambassador Salim Ahmed Salim, the last Secretary General of the OAU before it became the African Union (AU) has urged governments, the media and non-governmental organisations to vigorously promote commitment of Africa’s youths to the pursuit of the project and vision of a Union of African States.  Companies like the Dangote Group; Zenith Bank and EcoBank, Ethiopian Airlines and Kenya Airways operating across Africa must support this call with appropriate imaginativeness. They could sponsor an ‘All-Africa Youth Service Corps’ which sends youths from African countries to serve in countries across African Union’s five regions. The African Union Commission’s staff would operate it.
They must note that the appeal of ISIS across Euro-America and in Africa from Tunisia to Kenya is a vital signal that when the imagination of youths is repulsed by unemployment, poverty in the face of rampant cynical criminality and corruption, they long for higher calls. Building a Union Government of Africa is a frontier of gold waiting to be grabbed by the genius of youths across her vast geography.