By Sonnie Ekwowusi
The recently concluded Annual Conference of the African Bar Association at the University of South Africa in Pretoria, Republic of South Africa, presented an opportunity to forge a new African renaissance that guarantees human flourishing, a more egalitarian and equitable continental order. The theme of the conference was “Building the Legal Profession in Africa under the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA).”
The Special Guest of Honour was His Excellency, Dr. Cyril Ramaphosa, President of the Republic of South Africa. The conference was attended by lawyers and non-lawyers from across the 55 African countries. Current and former African Heads of State, members of the Diplomatic Corps, the military hierarchy in Africa, African judges including a Justice of the Nigerian Supreme Court, retired Justices of the International Criminal Court of Justice, and Presidents of Bar Associations in Africa were present.
L-R: Ekwowusi with President Hannibal Uwaifo and immediate past President of the Nigerian Bar Association Olumide Akpata shortly after the closing ceremony of the last African Bar Association conference held at the University of South Africa in Pretoria
The festive gathering urged African lawyers that, as officers in the temple of justice, they should fulfill their duties to their clients with a sense of responsibility without compromising professional ethics and the hallowed tradition of the Bar. The conference tasked African leaders to uphold probity, integrity, transparency, and the principles of the rule of law in governance. It also urged them to reject foreign loans with the strictest conditionalities capable of compromising African cultural heritage.
The common thread, in my humble view, that ran through the papers presented at the conference, including my paper, is that before the AfCFTA can lead to the much-vaunted economic prosperity and human flourishing in Africa, Africa must, first of all, be emancipated from various forms of hatred, pent-up ill feelings, xenophobic attacks, corruption, and profligacy among African leaders, as well as paternalistic, political, economic, and cultural imperialism that imperil Africa. First things first, the African people should first and foremost eschew bitterness, hatred, and rancor against one another. These are the most dangerous enemies to be feared in Africa because they have steadily and steadfastly been destroying the internal cohesion and esprit de corps that ought to act as the superstructures for building African ethos. It is pointless to fight external enemies when the enemies within Africa prowl around, looking for whom to devour.
To this day, Africans still cannot move freely within the continent. Now, how can continental free trade blossom in Africa without the free movement of African traders within the continent? For example, some of the lawyers and non-lawyers who wanted to attend the African Conference were denied visas by the South African Embassy for flimsy reasons. Those of us who eventually secured visas to attend the Conference were subjected to excruciating and degrading processes before being issued visas. In his speech on the eve of the 2023 BRICS Summit in South Africa, President Cyril Ramaphosa emphasized that South Africa supports BRICS expansion and partnering with other African nations, through which the continent can unlock opportunities for increased trade, investment, and infrastructure development. You may wonder how President Ramaphosa can be basking in the ego of unlocking business opportunities in Africa when there is no freedom of movement within African countries and in the absence of forged business interests and commitments among African countries.
Besides, xenophobic attacks across Africa have long been prevalent in post-independence Africa. Africans sojourning in African countries are increasingly becoming victims of xenophobic attacks unleashed on them by their fellow Africans. For example, we witnessed the expulsion of Ugandans of Asian origin from Uganda during Idi Amin’s reign of terror. Of course, we cannot forget the Ghana-must-Go expulsion of some Ghanaians from Nigeria. Post-apartheid South Africa has experienced continuous xenophobic attacks, the most pernicious being the xenophobic attacks against Nigerians. In Pretoria just three weeks ago, I inquired from a South African cab driver whether the xenophobic attacks against Nigerians in South Africa had ceased or were still going on. He told me that they had not stopped and that they were still ongoing in many subtle ways. A couple of years ago, some Nigerians who had established themselves in Senegal were attacked and expelled from Senegal on allegations that they had taken over the Senegalese market to the detriment of the Senegalese.
Apart from xenophobic attacks, there is lingering commodification of African children across Africa. In Benin Republic, for example, there are thousands of under-aged Nigerian girls forced into sexual slavery in that country. Apart from Benin Republic, young Nigerian prostitutes have successfully invaded Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Gambia, Senegal, Mauritius, Madagascar, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and other countries. I visited Cote d’Ivoire at the time when Mrs. Ifeoma Chinwuba-Akabuogu was Nigeria’s Ambassador to Cote d’Ivoire, and I heard her lament that there were so many young Nigerian girls trapped in the child prostitution dragnet in Cote d’Ivoire. She narrated how she had been literally apprehending these young Nigerian prostitutes on the streets and bundling them into a waiting aircraft for repatriation to Nigeria.
Prior to attaining political independence, most African nationalists, inspired by the Pan-Africanism of Nkrumah Ghana, closed ranks to forge a common ideological front aimed at wresting political independence from their erstwhile colonial overlords. By the 1960s, when most African countries secured political independence from their respective colonial overlords, the future looked bright for these independent African states. But six years down the line, it became increasingly clear that most of those independent African states could not, so to speak, sustain their respective political independence. But it seems as if what these independent Africans got from their erstwhile colonial masters was mere flag independence because these colonial masters are still shaping economic, political, and cultural policies of independent African states.
Nkrumah Ghana, who coined the term neo-colonialism, defines it as a type of colonialism in which the subject nation is, in theory, independent with all the outward trappings of international sovereignty, but in reality, their economic systems, and thus their political policies, are dictated by their former colonial masters. The most pernicious form of neo-colonialism is cultural neo-colonialism. The West does not stop at sponsoring military coups in Africa; it is also sponsoring anti-cultural concepts such as LGBTQ and transgenderism to deconstruct or destroy the religious, philosophical, and cultural convictions of the African people. Recall that the Obama administration plotted against the Jonathan government in Nigeria for enacting an anti-gay law.
The US is currently fighting against Uganda for enacting an anti-gay law. Through the corrupt mainstream media, LGBTQ+ advocates use psychological techniques to manipulate people and influence their behaviors and actions. In this regard, the US has positioned itself as the LGBTQ+ policeman of the world. As far as the US is concerned, any country that has not legalized LGBTQ+ rights cannot be in the good books of the US. Former President Obama plotted against former President Goodluck Jonathan for outlawing LGBTQ+ rights in Nigeria. US President Joe Biden has made LGBTQ+ the centerpiece of American foreign policy. As we speak, the European Union is mounting pressure on African leaders to sign the EU-ACP agreement aimed at legalizing LGBTQ+, transgenderism, and abortion in Africa, the Caribbean, and Pacific countries.
In his book, “Emerging Africa,” Professor Kingsley Chiedu Moghalu, former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria and a prominent politician, brilliantly elucidates why foreign aid is not the panacea to Africa’s myriad socioeconomic and political problems but rather a part of the problem itself. He questions why African leaders haven’t recognized that the billions of dollars given to many African countries by their Western development partners have failed to produce any significant developmental leaps on the continent. As a result, many aid-dependent African countries are poorer today than they were half a century ago. He laments that foreign aid comes with a slew of strings attached in Africa and explains that much of this aid involves giving with the right hand and taking with the left hand.
I wholeheartedly agree with Kingsley. Under the pretext of fighting poverty in Africa, our Western development partners are actually hindering Africa’s development. The West ensures that Africa does not produce its own food or utilize its raw materials to manufacture products for import. Additionally, the same Western powers often support power-hungry military juntas in corrupt African states to stage military coup d’états, thereby destabilizing the existing legal orders in those nations. For instance, between August 2020 and the present, military or constitutional coups have occurred in four out of the fifteen West African countries: Burkina Faso since January 2022, Guinea since September 2021, Mali since August 2020, and Niger since July 2023. Attempts in The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau were foiled. Looking at the recent coup d’état in Niger Republic, the intrusion of the military into politics is deeply concerning. Even more troubling is the hypocrisy of African leaders who claim to be striving to eliminate coups.
For example, the leader of ECOWAS, Tinubu, threatening military juntas in Niger Republic for staging a coup, himself came to power through fraudulent means. The principle of fairness should apply here – those who seek equity must come with clean hands. Many ECOWAS leaders gained power through questionable methods. President Tinubu, for instance, ascended through a Presidential election manipulated through fraud. On February 25, 2023, Nigeria’s electoral body rigged the Presidential election in favor of Tinubu. While Nigerians were challenging this fraud, the chairman of the Electoral body, Prof. Mahmoud Yakubu, fraudulently announced Bola Tinubu as the winner during the night. If President Tinubu plotted a constitutional coup to secure the presidency, what moral ground does he stand on to champion the restoration of constitutional government in Niger Republic? Although this matter is still under legal consideration, the overwhelming evidence presented in court against Tinubu indicates that he did not meet the constitutional requirements before Prof. Yakubu hastily declared him the winner of the February 25 presidential election.
Moreover, the new Tinubu government is currently grappling with challenges, including a soaring inflation rate of up to 25%, along with unstable value of the Naira, Nigeria’s currency. Nigerians are facing their worst living conditions in years, with high levels of profligacy among those in power. Numerous companies and offices have shut down due to inability to sustain operations at a loss. Nigeria has unfortunately become a subject of ridicule, relegated to a remote corner of Africa, eliciting sympathy from other African nations. Nelson Mandela poignantly captured Nigeria’s tragedy in his 2007 interview, stating, “You know I am not very happy with Nigeria. I have made that very clear on many occasions. Yes, Nigeria stood by us more than any nation, but you let yourselves down, and Africa and the black race very badly. Your leaders have no respect for their people. They believe that their personal interests are the interests of the people. They take people’s resources and turn them into personal wealth. There is a level of poverty that should be unacceptable. I cannot understand why Nigerians are not angrier than we are.”
The lingering questions today are: Will Africa ever rise? When will the new African renaissance begin? While some assert that Africa is littered with unrepentant despotic leaders and, consequently, cannot rise again, others believe that since Africa is the cradle of civilization, the continent will sooner or later rediscover itself and rise above the present challenges that are clipping its wings. Despite the seemingly irreversible cataclysm that trails Africa, it will rise again to occupy its rightful position in the world. In response to a question posed by a local journalist at a joint press conference in Accra with the visiting French President Emmanuel Macron in 2017 regarding whether France was going to strengthen its “support” for other African countries with majority French aid, Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo said: “We can no longer continue to make policy for ourselves, in our country, in our region, on our continent, based on whatever support the Western world or France or the European Union can give us. It will not work. It has not worked, and it will not work,” he stressed. “We have to get away from this mindset of dependency.
This mindset about ‘What can France do for us?’ France will do whatever it wants to do for its own sake, and when those coincide with ours, ‘tant mieux’ [so much better], as the French people say… Our concern should be: What do we need to do in this 21st century to move Africa away from being cap in hand and begging for aid, for charity, for handouts? The African continent, when you look at its resources, should be giving money to other places… We need to have a mindset that says we can do it, and once we have that mindset, we’ll see there’s a liberating factor for ourselves,”
President Akufo-Addo’s warning is heartwarming. A few years ago, I met Kabasu Babu Katulondi, a former Governor of Kasai Occidental Province in Congo and a die-hard Pan-Africanist at the Leadership Institute in Arlington, Virginia, United States. Answering questions posed to him relating to the future of Africa, he optimistically predicted that despite its inadequacies and failings, Africa shall one day rise to rule the world. Kabasu tipped Nigeria as the giant that would rescue Africa from its numerous miseries. Upon learning I was Nigerian, he took an interest in me, obviously for one reason—the Boko Haram tragedy. After consoling me about the tragedy, he quickly pointed out that he was optimistically looking forward to the day when Nigeria would reclaim its leadership position in Africa. I agree with Kabasu. A United States of Africa, in the fashion of the United States of America, shall come to fruition someday. Now is the time for Africa to redeem itself. This is the acceptable time. This is the day of African salvation. Africans have come of age. African leaders should stop compromising African ideals. African leaders should stop selling Africa to the highest bidder. We are no longer under the control of our erstwhile colonial masters. Euro-centrism should give way to Afro-centrism. And Afro-pessimism should give way to Afro-optimism.
Sonnie Ekwowusi is the Chairman, Human & Constitutional Rights Committee of the African Bar Association.