Afwerki right on why Africa needs to rediscover itself to fulfill its dreams

President William Ruto hosted his Eritrean counterpart Isaias Afwerki at State House Nairobi during his official visit to Kenya. [PCS]

Eritrea is territorially a small country strategically located on the Red Sea, bordering Sudan to the northwest, Ethiopia on the South and West, and Djibouti on the East. The creation of an agreement between Ethiopia's Menelik II and Italian imperialists at the 1889 Treaty of Wuchale, the Italians named their colonial claim Eritrea and it stuck. It has three 'working languages' namely Arabic, Tigray, and English but no official language. It has been independent since 1990 with the eventual ouster of Mengistu Haile Merriam from Addis Ababa by Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea and Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia. The country, a rugged hardship area, struggles to be self-sufficient and is seemingly suffering from externally imposed economic sanctions. More than 30 years since independence, Eritrea appears to be in a self-assessment mood both internal and external.

At the heart of that assessment is Aferwaki, operating on a hill surrounded by a man-made dam to harvest rainwater; it is what Foreign Affairs Minister Osman Salah calls peninsular. He is frugal and has a brick building without luxuries for an office. It has simple office regulars like a writing table, shelves for books, and seats for visitors. With his way of letting visitors feel at ease, he is pensive, deliberative, and worried that things have not gone right in Eritrea, the region, the continent, and the world. There is, he believes, need to reconfigure almost everything and there is no need to blame other forces for failures in Africa. He wants countries in Africa to engage African experts in analysing and recommending implementable ways of getting out of where Africa is. Relying on extra-continental 'experts', irrespective of how good they might be, he believes, would be a disaster.

The admission of things not going well is itself a reason for a reassessment of policy in thought and practice. He probably receives intellectual prodding from Milena Berket who wants to 'decolonise' what she calls "development shehe or juju" in Africa. He seems to have started with the Judiciary where Minister for Justice Fawzia Hashim tried to figure out how to inculcate Eritrean values into the practice of law. Having served that office since 1993, she knows it needs sprucing and she invited a few people like Ethiopia's Mohammed Hassan who knows 'revolutions', Senegal's Makane Moise Mbenegue, Kenya's PLO Lumumba and Abdiwahab Shiekh Abdisamad to help Eritrean lawyers and judges to think through values in the application of law. And Ambassador Percy Kumsha of South Africa added his voice to the discussion on Ubuntu and Utu as values. Like Aferwaki, Fawzia is deceptively simple, has an air of intensity, and is open to ideas.