Nkrumah questions Mazrui in After-Africa

He announced with elation that his plan to publish three books he had written to celebrate his reaching 80 had been achieved. He affirmed that Nkrumah’s ideas had anchored his doctoral thesis for Oxford University. He had never met Nkrumah in person but lived with his writings. While at 80 he could no longer play […]

He announced with elation that his plan to publish three books he had written to celebrate his reaching 80 had been achieved. He affirmed that Nkrumah’s ideas had anchored his doctoral thesis for Oxford University. He had never met Nkrumah in person but lived with his writings. While at 80 he could no longer play ‘’soccer’’, his mind was still sharp and he was continuing to write.
 His essay in Volume 8 of UNESCO-sponsored General History of Africa took off from a quotation of one of Nkrumah’s dictums, namely: ‘’Seek Ye first the political kingdom and all else will be added unto you’’.  When combined with another proclamation that: Ghana’s independence will not be complete until the whole of Africa was free from colonial rule and white racist oppression and humiliation, it hints at a much larger agenda for the Continent.
Mazrui put it this way: ‘’Only when the whole of Africa is decolonized will the political kingdom of the whole continent stand a chance of having ‘all else added unto it’’. The late Joe Garba as Nigeria’s foreign minister did come to Ahmadu Bello to pronounce that with the end of racist rule in South Africa (1994) and Namibia (1990), the new vision for Africa was economic decolonisation and development.  The arena would be the whole continent and not what emerged under the Babangida years as ‘’economic diplomacy’’ by Nigeria with each African country.
Joe Garba’s vision later stumbled.  Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Chad sent in armies either to liberate the Congolese from ‘rule-by-sustained-decay’ under Mobutu Sese Seko; or to prosecute dreams to be new imperial rulers of that vast country.  There was a new version here of the mission of the Liberation Committee of the Organisation of African Unity which sent forth liberation movements to fight wars of chasing out  Portuguese and European-settler oppressors out.
In West Africa, atavistic misrule in Liberia and Sierra Leone aroused military intervention from member states of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Nigeria bore the brunt of the bleeding and pouring oil wealth at it. There were echoes here of rising up to support war against whites in South Africa as they massacred children in Soweto after Sharpeville. Joe Garba had not envisaged ECOWAS rushing military cold water to help in putting out fire in Mali; and the African Union taking troops from Uganda, Kenya, Burundi and Sierra Leone to defeat home grown barbarism in Somalia.
At a London conference on 21st October, 2014, which focused on investments in infrastructures and power in Africa, a cabinet minister from Rwanda lauded the promise of a railway line that will run from Kenya to Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda and South Sudan and back to Kenya. As a land-locked country, haulage of imports on pot-holed roads from Mombasa on Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast to Kigali, inflates costs astronomically. Did Rwanda err gravely by waging war in the Democratic Republic of Congo instead of investing in agriculture or jointly building a railway line across vast DR Congo to the Atlantic coast?
Mazrui flipped Nkrumah’s dictum into: ‘’Seek ye first the political kingdom and all else will be SUBTRACTED from it’’. Was it a contemptuous jibe at Africa or an angry and disillusioned cry? In his YouTube interview he refused to settle for dismay and loss of hope about Africa. He asserted moments of success; his deepest lament being about Africa not giving enough attention to her children by giving them high quality education. Did Mazrui call on Africa to establish a ‘Development Liberation Committee’ to lead a collective safari to Nkrumah’s ‘’all else added unto’’ economic resurrection?
When in an interview in her office at Addis Ababa I raised to Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Chair of the African Union Commission, an initiative to get African countries to jointly invest in the economic reconstruction of the Democratic Republic of Congo, she seemed animated.  Africa has shown more interest in investing military power into an Africa in turmoil of civil wars (in Rwanda, Darfur, South Sudan, Mali, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Somalia, etc) than in investing capital in a war for economic development. Nkrumah gave Guinea money to replace equipment vandalized by French officials angry with her for choosing total independence in 1958. In 2010 the Nigerian High Commissioner in Kenya told me of the Obasanjo administration selling fuel to Kenya at a ‘’brotherly’’ price lower than the international market price. This offering of salt to a neighbour for cooking a meal is not of the needed level of Africa mobilizing her over 60 million unemployed youths to produce food in vast uncultivated lands of the Democratic Republic of Congo; to plant grass in Botswana’s Kalahari Desert; or in a project of industrializing Niger or South Sudan and Mauritania.
Nkrumah may well ask Mazrui if he told Africa to take the road to ‘’all economic else shall be added unto it’’.