BBI reforms and the quest for new pan-African intellectual leaders

In the evening of November 25, 2020, I was privileged to be a guest speaker at a dinner organised by the newly launched Kenyan Chapter of the Pan-African Congress – the ideological child and heir to the idea that peoples of African descent have common interests and should be unified. The event took place when Pan-Africanism in the 21st century is at a crossroads.

At the one extreme, it is at its most optimistic phase, punctuated by the mantra of ‘African Rising’ and ‘African Renaissance’.

Besides its fabled wealth of strategic natural resources, Africa is home to seven of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies and the world’s third-highest population, estimated at 1.35 billion, which is expected to reach about 2.5 billion by 2050. With a median age of 19.7 years, Africa has the youngest population globally, potentially the largest labour and market force in history.

At the other extreme, Pan-Africanism is facing the headwinds of surging micro-nationalisms in Africa, spawned by intense politicisation of ethnicity, religion, class, gender, age, colonial languages and identities.

Globally, it is on the tornado path of populism, isolationism and anti-globalisation trends, which have inspired xenophobia against black people. The public lynching of George Floyd is emblematic of the rising tide of global apartheid.

As the Pan-African Congress got under way, the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) signature collection was launched in Kenya, in a reform process that seeks to foster the Pan-African values of unity and inclusivity.

Demagogues

This calls to mind Kwame Nkrumah’s words: “We must find an African solution to our problems, (which) can only be found in African unity”.

However, reforming a political system is merely a strategy whose success depends on the calibre of leadership driving the process.

As acclaimed Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe rightly concluded, the trouble with Africa “is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.”

Without a high bar for leaders, elections are safe passages to state capture by transactional leaders, including populists, charlatans, demagogues, goons and outright thieves.

A lasting solution to the African dilemma lies in nurturing a new generation of Pan-African intellectual leaders with a capacity for critical analysis, strategic perspective, vision and imagination.

The bar on the calibre and integrity of past Pan-African intellectual leaders was set very high. Their innovative approach to slavery, colonialism, racism, apartheid and economic deprivation can only be contrasted to transactional leaders who work within existing systems and negotiate with others to attain transient truces and interests.

Vital lessons can be drawn from the ideas and intellectual leadership of earlier pan-Africanists. To that end, five generations of Pan-African intellectual leaders are discernible.

Economic development

The first generation (1850s-1900s) included Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, Alexander Crummel and Edward Blyden in the Western Hemisphere. These leaders popularised African nationalism, pan-Africanism and unity. They advocated “Africa for Africans” and stressed economic development as key to freedom and unity.

At the turn of the 20th century, one of the main figures of the second generation (1900-1930s), W. E. B. Du Bois, stressed the importance of African history and culture in the struggle against colonialism and racism, declaring that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the colour line”.

Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born pan-Africanist, rooted for economic empowerment and established the Black Star Line, a shipping company partly to transport Blacks back to Africa and to bolster African enterprenuers in global trade.

The third generation (1920s-1945) deepened the analysis of culture, history, philosophy and art as pillars of the African personality or ‘Negritude’. The main voices included C. L. R. James, George Padmore, Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire and Cheikh Anta Diop.

By the mid 1940s, the Pan-African leadership mantle had shifted to the continent. The fourth generation, comprising Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah and Haile Selassie, organised the 5th Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945. They established the Organisation of African Unity and continued battling colonialism and apartheid.

Lowest ebb

Pan-Africanism reached its lowest ebb in the “lost decades” of the 1970-1990s, when a whole generation of African leadership was lost to coups, despotism, assassinations, civil wars and genocides. But Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Kenneth Kaunda and Julius Nyerere rose above the storm to shed light on the African crisis.

The fifth generation rode on the crest of revolutionary struggles against post-colonial tyranny. Yoweri Museveni, Meles Zenawi, Thabo Mbeki and Paul Kagame, declared the ‘African Renaissance’, reformed the African Union and prioritised peace, security and good governance.

Upon coming to power in 2013, President Uhuru Kenyatta put Kenya on a steady Pan-African keel. Kenya has ratified the instruments of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), is now in the African Union Peace and Security Council, and is poised to champion Africa’s interests as a member of the United Nations Security Council.

The launch of the Kenya Chapter of the pan-African congress is the country’s seedbed for nurturing the Sixth Generation of Africa’s intellectual leadership.

But the BBI reform of the political system must set a high bar to ensure only visionary and quality leadership with integrity rises to power.