What awaits Raila should he get AUC chairmanship

Former Prime Minister Raila Odinga AUC bid Launch at Statehouse Nairobi. [Emmanuel Wanson, Standard]

The idea of Africa as a singular geopolitical entity inspires many would be leaders to aspire to be recognised as ‘African leader’ who others should defer to either out of reverence or necessity.

Some seek recognition from powerful extra-continental forces with enough influence to dictate terms to African leaders.

Others get approval from fellow Africans as deserving recognition and respect as a leader in thought and action by appearing to give new direction to solving nagging problems. The two approaches appear to be in conflict, one serving external interests and the other asserting African interests, are the basis of continuing arguments about Pan-Africanism and who determines Africa’s interests.

Aspiration for that leadership currently manifests itself in a very narrow sense through competition for the regionally rotating chairmanship of the African Union Commission, AUC.

Largely ceremonial with airs of continental importance, the position is a mechanical one of coordination and subordinate to the will of individual presidents and heads of government.

Being the turn of Eastern Africa to produce the chair, Kenya is fronting Raila Amollo Odinga as candidate mostly for internal political reasons.

Being the proven political force that he is, opponents think that promoting him to the African Union will increase their electability in 2027. He reinforces the assumption, most likely erroneous, that he will leave the political field to them.

Win or lose the AUC job, however, Raila is politically going nowhere since, as he once quipped, Addis Ababa is only two hours flight to Nairobi.

To rule him out of political contestation, should he judge 2027 to be his year of ascendancy to the Kenyan presidency, would be naivety. He wants to be called ‘His Excellency, The President’ of a serious country that Kenya is.    

The AUC chairmanship is probably the next best thing to being ‘president’ for, despite lacking powers, the position is prestigious.

It enables the person holding the office to help shape the AU into a possible force of global influence on African matters within and outside the continent.

The lack of substantive power is partly because the African Union suffers two inter-connected geopolitical maladies and it knows of no cure.

First, it is heavily dependent on extra-continental powers in terms of financial resources and even strategies on how to conduct its affairs.

Second, it is replete with continental divisions along linguistic, religious, ideological, and political rivalries.

The forces behind these divisions, instead of the presumed collective interests of the African continent, repeatedly come up to affect the position allocations outcomes.

Raila’s candidacy, therefore, has to contend with those divisions bearing in mind Kenya’s standing in the eyes of African leaders as well as his political image in the continent. T

his image is one of a power hungry man which fluctuates from a ‘radical’ and ‘revolutionary’ on one side to an instrument of Western imperialism against African interests on the other. In between, Raila tries to project himself as a Pan-Africanist.

Aspirants to continental influence, especially when serving external interests, portray themselves as Pan-Africanists mainly to hoodwink potential victims. This is because the purpose of Pan-Africanism has, over a century, shifted from being a fighting concept to liberate Africans from racial and colonial oppression.

Like Ali Mazrui’s notion of dead heroes like Patrice Lumumba becoming popular with their killers such as Tshombe and Mobutu, the Pan-Africanist spirit went slumbering and became a slogan for anti-Africans to excuse neo-colonialist and post-modern colonialist exploitation.

Competing leaders, so argues Arikana Chihombori-Quao, fail to challenge exploitation, have betrayed Africa, and need mental and attitudinal overhaul.

The attitudinal overhaul, Eritrea’s Isaiah Afewerki thinks, calls for African leaders to listen to African thinkers. It would, by reducing Africa’s current subservience to imperial desires, help return Pan-Africanism to its original essence.

Pan-Africanism lost its original essence with the removal of racially based territorial colonialism. With race no longer an identifying and unifying factor against white rule, Pan Africanism lost its liberation focus. It replaced white faces with black ones and called it independence.

The fact that many of the new black faces in offices never wanted that independence made it easy for colonialist exploitation to continue with black faces facilitating the exploitation.

Subsequently, meetings of African leaders shifted from exploring new ways of liberation from new types of continental exploitation, to happy exploitation facilitators.

They were rewarded with praises as ‘African leader’ and with material wealth coupled with poverty in critical thinking. In this sense, independence destroyed the sense of Pan-Africanism that had led to that very independence.

The few who tried to warn of the looming threat to ‘independence’ also quarreled over how to safeguard interests.

Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, popularised the concept of neo-colonialism as continuity in external control through economic and mental stranglehold, disagreed with Tanganyika’s Julius Kabarange Nyerere who gained global notice with his Ujamaa experiments. Both wanted African political unity but differed on how to achieve it.

While Nkrumah felt rushed to do it immediately and appeared like a threat to such neighbours Togo and Ivory Coast, Nyerere was more realistic in calling for regional building blocks but also wanted immediate political unity in East Africa; it never happened partly because of political ambitions, suspicions, Cold War induced ideological feuds, and conflicting expectations.

The Nkrumah-Nyerere debate zeroed in on whether to reorganize colonial boundaries. Nyerere’s suggestion of no expansion or contraction of colonial boundaries was eventually accepted.

While Nkrumah’s direct confrontation with neo-colonialism was cut short in 1966, Nyerere saw his Ujamaa experiment fail.

Besides Nkrumah, Lumumba tried direct confrontation with neo-colonialism and was killed within months of Congo’s independence.

Events in Congo became warnings to places like ‘revolutionary’ Kenya where ‘leaders’ struggled to avoid being seen to threaten entrenched neo-colonial interests.

Regime survival concerns, rather than ideas of African unity in fighting continuing external exploitation became the dominant doctrine to be exercised through OAU/AU rituals.

Subsequently, regimes willingly became instruments of exploitation or played nyapara for external forces in containing those seeming to go outside the imperial line. Regimes then compete to align themselves with external forces.

The paradox of ‘independent’ regimes relying on departing colonial powers to survive against their own people blunted desires to overhaul anything including discussions on African unity.

Kenya’s example of considering the interests of the departing colonisers in fear of being seen as another Congo was decades later replicated in post-Apartheid South Africa.   

The actual power in the AUC, therefore, is not in the office of the Commission. It is in the hands of the extra-continental ‘donors’ through the heads of state and government who in turn make decisions based on the four factors of colonial heritage, religious affiliation, prevailing ideological inclinations, and personality or political dynamics.

The fate of an individual candidate like Kenya’s Raila will depend on many factors. It also hinges on three interlinked forces of pressure from the donors, trust for Kenya, and how other ‘leaders’ see Raila.

First, is what the AU extra-continental rent payers or donors think of him as a man who can enhance their resource acquisition projects in the name of Africa.

They will pressure their African leaders to reject him should he sound like a Nkrumah or a Lumumba. They will support him if he sounds ‘safe’.

Second, with its recent nyapara image, is whether individual heads of state and government can trust Kenya to advance or protect their particular interests.

Third, is what they think of and believe to be Raila’s past political record within and outside Kenya. If the continental presidential voters have serious reservations about Kenya or Raila, he will not get the job.