AFRICA CAPTURED BY GIRL-PRESIDENTS

Africa Vision initiative re-orientates students on educational and cultural activities, and to appreciate their immediate surroundings, writes Okello Oculi

Africa Vision 525 Initiative learnt how to give public speeches on how to fight against corruption and how to improve our country’’. So wrote ‘President Muhammadu Buhari’ of Anglican Girls Grammar School (AGGS) in Abuja. On 19th November, 2021, her speech, during a simulation of an ASSEMBLY of the AFRICAN UNION, had received a rousing acclaim by an audience inside the Cathedral of the Anglican Communion at Life Camp. In attendance were also diplomats from Mali and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The event was a version of a Pan African annual ritual known as ‘’OAU MOCK SUMMIT’’ widely popular with the campus community at Ahmadu Bello University. NTA Kaduna telecast it. In 1988 it was on the NETWORK Service of the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA).

It was disrupted under Babangida Administration’s strategy of eroding social groups that might criticise the policy of ‘’Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), which Professor Adebayo Adedeji named as socio-economic and political warfare against African peoples. The Nigerian Medical Association and the Nigerian Law Society were also victims.

Dr. Rilwanu Lukman and Major-General Ike Nwachukwu, as Ministers of Foreign Affairs, gave a one-time limited funds to the OAU MOCK SUMMIT, while their predecessor, Professor Ishaya Audu, had expressed interest in presenting it for Cabinet consideration as a project financed by Nigeria within the United Nations Economic, Scientific, and Cultural Commission (UNESCO). The military coup of 1983 ended this momentum.

Dr. Sam Oyovbaire had sold the project to Professor Ishaya Audu as an initiative to link educational imagination to the country’s dictum that ‘’Africa is the Centrepiece of Nigeria’s Foreign Policy. Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa had said as much in his speech at the United Nations to mark Nigeria’s new membership of the world body. Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s party, the Action Group, had stated its opposition to ‘’apartheid’’ in South Africa.

In the academic realm, students at University College Ibadan had vigorously opposed Balewa’s military agreement with the British Government; and France’s genocidal plan to test atomic bombs in Africa’s Sahara Desert, Nigeria’s neighbourhood.

In 1975 Dr. Yusuf Bala Usman and Patrick Wilmot lobbied the Murtala Mohammed/ Obasanjo military government to support the socialist liberation movement in Angola despite opposition by the American government.

What was lacking had been angrily expressed by Dr. Diallo Telli, the first elected Secretary General of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in a speech he delivered in 1965 to students at MAKERERE University in Kampala, Uganda. Criticised for limiting his strenuous diplomatic efforts to appeals to Africa’s Heads of State and Foreign Ministers, Telli had hit back by asking what effort students themselves were making in the struggle for a United States of Africa.

Specifically, he hinted at lacking power to intervene into educational syllabuses and cultural activities and train orientation to, and creative measures for, building into Africa’s youth passions for building the unity of a post-colonial Africa. He was also combating very active agents of former colonial powers who preferred a balkanised Africa trapped behind high walls of isolation and powerless ‘’sovereign states’’.

He was also a lone ranger over a vast majority of small-scale farmers, livestock herders, fishermen denied the visibility of the drama of international activities including competition for vital minerals and agricultural resources.

British colonial governments had been careful not to repeat their error of allowing a rich capitalist class to emerge in North America’s colonies who rose up to fight for their political and economic freedom.

In East Africa Britain nurtured a commercial class imported from India, while in West Africa they were imported from Lebanon, Greece and India. The lack of Aliko Dangote’s ‘cement Pan-Africanism’ denied Diallo Telli strong capitalist allies to push politicians towards a united political, administrative and economic space. A business class with a vigorous demand for measures for using schools and colleges to train warriors for building Africa under a one government were not within reach of his elbows.

Colonial schools taught pupils to draw the ‘’Downs’’ on which London City sits; the location of Liverpool and Glasgow on the craggy map of Britain, but not how to draw maps of their village, country or Africa.

In a questionnaire filled by 2021 members of PAN-AFRICA Club at AGGS, delighted responses included: ‘I discovered some African countries’’; ‘’I can now become president of Botswana’’; ‘’I now know about Ethiopia and how to solve her problems’’, to ‘’With my fellow presidents we will rescue Africa’’.

In the simulation ASSEMBLY of the African Union (on 19th November, 2021), diplomats from D.R.Congo were delighted to hear the president of Cote D’Ivoire celebrate their country’s application to join the East African Community. Likewise, Mali’s diplomats were glad to hear their ‘President’ expose the tragic reality of sand dunes burying whole farmlands, water wells and communities around Timbuktu.