So silent an orphan parliament

Its conception was probably by African Ancestral Spirits visiting Kwame Nkrumah as he slept and blowing it into his brain through his ears; either while Nkrumah slept in his mother’s womb, or as he addressed a jubilant crowd on Ghana’s 1957 Independence Day in Accra. His call for a United States of Africa rang from […]

Its conception was probably by African Ancestral Spirits visiting Kwame Nkrumah as he slept and blowing it into his brain through his ears; either while Nkrumah slept in his mother’s womb, or as he addressed a jubilant crowd on Ghana’s 1957 Independence Day in Accra. His call for a United States of Africa rang from the top of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and the Drakensberg Mountains in Southern Africa. It floated on rain clouds and harmattan dust to enter hearts and minds all across the Continent and beyond.
With the departure of Nkrumah, the African Parliament walks the continent with the uncertain gait of an adopted orphan child. And an infant it is, considering that Tunisia and Sudan had earlier on become free in 1956;  Ethiopia’s Amhara dynasty  doubted their being part of what Professor Ali Mazrui would express as: ‘’We are All African’’.
Like an orphan PAP makes claims with much caution; evading boldness and assertiveness about its ambitions. It states, for example that: ’’The establishment of PAP was inspired by a vision to provide a common platform for African peoples and their grass-roots organizations to be more involved in discussions and decision-making on the problems and challenges facing the continent’’. Nkrumah’s bold slogan of: ‘’Africa must Unite’’ is only hinted at.
Its foster parents have hidden teeth in their imagination behind a seeming imitation of the European Union’s parliament. That parliament winced at barred angry fangs of guardians of ‘’national sovereignty’’ held in representative national parliaments; and settled for having its members elected from among themselves by elected members national parliaments; barely thriving on crumbs from electoral mandates resident in national legitimacies. This ‘’beggar’s gowns’’ won by members of the European Parliament during its infancy always meant that members who became advocates of a united Europe would have their mandate withdrawn in future elections.
 Members of European Parliament always had hands of parents sitting in shadows, notably: steel barons and bankers, to push their campaign for achieving legitimacy through being voted for by ordinary voters in the same way as members of national parliaments. The steel barons and big banks (now expressed in the European Central Bank) always wished for free movement of people’s talents across national borders; the freedom of finance to make money across borders, and uniform policies for the education and health of human resources. These objectives would be advocated, legislated, and watched over by directly elected members of the European Parliament. With the power of these financial and industrial powers pushing the media, the flexing of wings by Europe-wide legislators and bureaucratic dreamers of suitable policies, was kept alive in the public’s imagination.
The Pan African Parliament lacks industrial and banking godfathers. Its loneliness can be heard in the tentative hopes of Amadi. When on 26 June, 2013, he addressed the 3rd Ordinary Session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, his host talked patronisingly of supporting his parliament ‘’in promoting and exercising oversight over NEPAD and the processes of its implementation’’. He was forced to boast that PAP had ‘’played a crucial role in the ratification of the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Good Governance’’ by influencing national parliaments all across Africa.
The Pan-African Parliament lives on silence. It is silent to the people. It does not seek to hear voices of Africa’s peoples. It has failed to either join in, or borrow, the creative initiative by which the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) insists on ‘civil society’’ (bankers, professionals, trade unions, academics, religious bodies, NGOs, the media and public intellectuals), review conditions in their country before conducting intensive dialogue with a team of experts drawn from other African countries towards drafting a common report for guiding government’s future reform and develop-ment programme.
While it has, commen-dably, held workshops which allow its members to learn about development activities in other regions of Africa must, there is what novelist Mariama Ba would call ‘’So long a Silence’’ between its members and Ebola victims in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone; Boko Haram victims in Nigeria; Masai cattle rearers left behind by development; Wolof fishermen in Senegal losing their fish to Korean and Polish ships, and land-robbed ethnic groups in Ethiopia and Uganda. If they are talking with Africa’s pool of architects or musicians and other artists or biochemists, or inventors of traditional sports, or juju gurus, there is so long a silence over them all.
Kwame Nkrumah and Diallo Telli and Miriam Makeba, Bob Marley and Fela Kuti look at this dense cloud of silence, and like History, they wait for a coming sunshine of a United States of Africa. Those voices are re-echoed by members of PAP. Thabo Mbeki and Mo Ibrahim are struggling to talk for Africa in their heritage.
In the face of local politicians rushing to Dubai to host birthday parties with monies not derived from their own industrial plants that give jobs to Africa’s 60 million unemployed youths, members of Pan African Parliament offer no windows of fresh air against a crushing cynicism and kleptocracy. It was well that is an end to roars of vision-starved silence.