The Ghana National Council of Metropolitan Chicago has announced the date for this year's Ghanafest as Saturday 31st July, in the city's Washington Park. This Cultural Exposition, featuring the Traditional Ghanaian Thanksgiving Celebration and music bands from the area, also embraces other cultures with a soccer tournament between 20 African and Caribbean Teams.

The African Union has continued to confound many Afropessimist critics both inside and outside Africa by making steady, even if very difficult and sometimes acrimonious progress, in the past two years since its formal inauguration in Durban, on July 9, 2002.

That progressive pull received a dynamic push with the election of former President of Mali, Prof Alpha Konare, as the Chairperson of the AU Commission and 9 other Commissioners (making a total of five men and five women each representing the 5 regions of Africa) at the Maputo Summit in July 2003.

Konare is a charismatic figure, convinced Pan Africanist and a man whose honesty of purpose and faith in Africa and her diaspora shows through easily. Despite being a former head of state, he does not appear to have lost his idealism. Many AU watchers are anxious that his idealism may not be shared by many of the heads of state and even those who do may not be willing to or are unable to put their money where their mouth is. The job of ensuring the union gets the proper political and financial support from our governments should not and cannot be left to Konare alone.

One fundamental difference between the old OAU and the new AU is that while the former was a Leaders' forum the latter envisages a people-driven Union with roles and various entry points for all sectors of our society. The potentially democratising institutions of the new Union have been taking shape in the past three years. They include elected Commissioners, the Pan African Parliament, the Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC), mainstreaming of Gender, etc.

Initially attention was devoted to the Executive bodies like the Permanent Representative Committee, Executive Committee, Assembly of Heads of State and Commissioners. Now the gear has shifted to the potentially democratic and democratising institutions such as the Pan African Parliament, which was inaugurated in March this year and the statute on ECOSOCC which is due for approval at the forthcoming summit and launching in November.

The Summit is also expected to approve the protocol on women. Further progress will be made as the African Court on Human and Peoples rights become a reality. The why and how questions will also be deliberated upon with the draft vision, mission and strategic plan of the AU being brought for approval at the Summit. The Summit will have to decide too on where the permanent site of the Pan African Parliament will be.

Initially the Libyan Jamahirriya wanted to host it and South Africa made its willingness to do so known. Eventually Libya dropped its bid and Egypt entered the race against South Africa. Cape Town, South Africa, is my favourite for many positive reasons. The country has a dynamic parliament which Egypt does not have.

In the past one-year Konare and his team have been busy consulting, brainstorming and building consensus around the various aspects of institutionalising and operationalising the noble ideals of the Union.
By no means has everything been smooth sailing but the pace has been most encouraging. There is a new optimism but more than that there is a developing critical mass of leaders both in government and Civil Society who want the Union to work regardless of what those who never wish Africa well or have given up on us in any case, may say. Others can give up on us but we should never give up on ourselves.

Initially many Africans were (rightly, in many cases) suspicious and cynical about the AU. The criticism was mainly based on previous experience of grandiose ideas that ended up in paper graveyards and also the legendary lack of political will by many of our leaders. However, one has seen a steady pool of Africans especially in organised sections of Civil Society including NGOs who have been engaging the process and expanding the frontiers of entry points offered through the Constitutive Act of the Union.

I was at a pre-summit meeting of the AU/Civil Society Forum in Addis last weekend. No AU summit is now complete without a Civil Society Forum. Once the Summit approves the ECOSOCC statute and it is launched later this year the informal linkages that began in 2001 (the first OAU/Civil Society Forum called by Dr Salim Ahmed SAlim) will be given autonomous legal and political framework. By no means are Civil Society linkages limited to the ECOSOCC. Every aspect of the work of the AU demands Civil Society engagement and the Commission is actively encouraging it. Civil Society in Africa does not have a monolithic outlook.

Indeed some are guilty of the various criticisms we daily make of our governments. Its diversity is its strength. There are dangers that some Civil Society individuals and organisations who have had privileged access to the old OAU may still use their influence with the rump of the old OAU bureaucracy to privilege themselves but I am optimistic that this will not last for too long.

The very high transparency and democratic credentials as provided for in the Act of Union and emerging protocols will weed out usurpers as more organisations from an ever wider spectrum of both organised and unorganised CSOs and individuals claim their right to participation. More democracy is what we can look forward to not less of it. It is most disappointing that even at this late stage some ambassadors were still trying to prevent the ECOSOCC statute from being passed because their distrust of CSOs and NGOs and mortal fear of their capacity to advocate for accountability from governments.

However it is an indication of how far we have travelled that such ambassadors were an insignificant minority.

Many people including ambassadors sitting on the permanent representative committee have been anxious about the draft strategic plan of the AU, believing that it is too ambitious and costly. No doubt there are challenges ahead. How can a new organisation, whose predecessor was starved of its meagre annual budget of $45 million by reluctant member states and indifferent heads of government, hope to raise an annual $600 million to support its new institutions and mandate. I take the concerns seriously but I think they are misplaced. Lack of money should not prevent us from having dreams and working towards their realisation. Those who do not have dreams suffer nightmares. Has Africa not suffered enough nightmares?

I can neither believe nor accept a situation where our governments can fight unjust wars without going to donors or the IMF/World Bank but cannot find the resources when it comes to building a peaceful and united Africa. We all have a duty to help build and sustain the popular coalition and movement necessary to ensure that the Union fulfils its mandate. The AU should not and cannot be yet another donor-driven agenda. The responsibility is yours and mine.

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul Raheem is General Secretary of the Global Pan African Movement, Kampala, Uganda and Co-Director, Justice Africa (London) ([email protected] or [email][email protected])

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Hundreds of Africans and their organizations will gather on Saturday 3rd July 2004 at London's City Hall for African Diaspora and Development Day (ad3). The day has become the biggest gathering of Africans in the UK involved in supporting Africa's development. Featuring seminars, workshops, exhibitions, an African development market, and a keynote address by renowned West African gender activist, Yassine Fall, ad3 will also provide an opportunity for African diaspora organizations to meet with other development agencies - donors, policy-makers, pan-African development institutions and international NGOs - to share information and chart a way forward for the UK diaspora's role in Africa's development.

PEWA, the Swahili word for making an offering, also stands for People Earnestly Working for Africa. The PEWA awards acknowledge and reward `Africa's biggest aid donors' - Africans outside the continent and their organizations. The first PEWA awards will be presented at a special evening reception at this year's African Diaspora and Development Day (ad3) on July 3rd held in City Hall's London's Living Room.

Our Spring/Summer issue "Which Black Woman Inspired You?" celebrates the many talents that have come to us through black women, and it also paid tribute to all those who came before us, ensuring that today's black women would live longer and stronger. We are now welcoming submissions that further develop themes about the position, power and potential of the black individual in Africa and in America in particular. Topics should not be limited, however, to the two continents, as we welcome submissions from all around the world.

The African Leadership and Progress Network" [ALPN], a nonprofit organisation in Washington, DC, now features on its website at http://www.africanprogress.net. The website acts as a research and information portal and as a forum for events listings in the Washington DC area.

Pulp and paper production in Kenya is presently dominated by one firm, Pan African Paper Mills (Panpaper), which is a joint venture between the Kenyan Government, the World Bank's private investment arm International Finance Corporation (IFC), and Orient Paper Mills, part of the Birhla group from India. The pulp mill was established in 1974 and is based in Webuye town, with a population of some 60,000 people, on the banks of the Nzoia River which drains into Lake Victoria. From the start, despite the potential environmental impacts concerning plantation establishment, liquid effluents, air emissions, sludge and solid waste disposal, the project did not benefit from a full environmental assessment.

A Place called Home is a contemporary arts exhibition planned for South Africa audiences with artists from the South Asian Diaspora (artists of "Indian"/South Asian descent from all around the world). The project focuses on photography, video, prints, web based and installation work.

I was going to write this week’s postcard on the passing of Ronald Reagan. He has been described as many things: ‘the man who changed America and the World’ , ‘one of the greatest Presidents’, the ‘conqueror’ of the Soviet Union and the harbinger of the collapse of Socialism. Historical figures are often divisive and depending on where one stood on the issues ‘the Messiah’ may turn out to be ‘the villain’ and the ‘liberator’ becomes a ‘tyrant’. I do not share the effusions on Reagan because his Presidency did not mean anything positive for Africa.

He was a supporter of Apartheid South Africa. His ‘positive engagement’ was a comprehensive destabilization and destruction of many lives and property in the whole of the Frontline states. He showed his contempt for African lives when he compared that Judas of African Liberation, Dr Jonas Savimbi, of Angola, to Abraham Lincoln, who freed the African Slaves in America. He is the ideological father of the current US president who believes in bombing people to freedom. That's why Reagan bombed Tripoli in 1986 against all norms of international law and decency.

These are just to mention but a few things orchestrated by this original Cow Boy president who is now presented as some kind hero. It is not only in Africa that he supported atrocities; he ran amok in Latin America whether in Honduras, El Salvador or Nicaragua. In his war against the Sandinistas, who led a popular revolution against an American puppet governing class, Reagan ignored international law, mined international waters and refused to recognize the authority of the UN or the International Court of Justice. Do all these sound familiar today? So do forgive me if I am not wasting my mourning on Ronald Reagan.

But I am mourning for another former President . Even though he is not dead yet his largely ignored trials and tribulations deserve our sympathies. He is the former President, Pasteur Bizmungu, of Rwanda. He was reportedly sentenced (on Monday) to 15 years imprisonment on a three-count charge of ‘embezzlement’, ‘associating with criminals’ and ‘incitement to civil disobedience’. He got five years for each count to run concurrently.

Human rights organisations have pointed out some of the grave flaws in the trial itself, since the man was first arrested in 2002. There are grounds for criticizing the legality of the process itself and how the charges evolved.
But the legality of the matter aside - even the veracity or otherwise of the case can be put aside - the politics of it is what most people see. Whatever the prosecutors say this has been and will remain a political trial. The initial charges were of threatening national security, but the court has now acquitted him. The other charges of which he was now been found guilty came later.

Would he have faced trial if he was still President? Certainly not! Could he have faced any trials if after resigning he kept his mouth shut and was not trying to organize an opposition party against his former RPF comrades?
These questions beg more questions. His persecutors want the world to believe that his trial is a demonstration of the rule of law and independence of the Rwandese Judiciary. However it is said that ‘it is not enough for Justice to be done it must be seen to have been done’. There is nothing in the circumstances that led to the former President's arrest in 2002 and the various twists and turns and the deliberate humiliation of the man that will persuade any independent observer that he could ever get justice from his former colleagues.

Rwanda is not a ‘normal’ state or society but it has confounded critics by the giant strides it has made in trying to confront its painful history and build a better society since the end of genocide. No doubt the RPF has been the major player in this but it could not have succeeded without the good will of most Rwandese.

The outstanding challenges it faces cannot be surmounted if this cooperation cannot be received voluntarily from its citizens. As an RPF person and its first post genocide president, Bizmungu has certainly been a partner in these struggles. When he felt that he had no more room for contributing through the ruling party and government he resigned and tried to form his own party.

It should not be a crime to form political parties to contest public opinion and canvass for support. Even Uganda - that has continued to dither on this matter - knows that it is tilting against the force of history. While parties are allowed in Rwanda it is obvious that the ruling elite do not want effective parties that can be credible to the populace. That is why they are criminalizing political disagreement. By all means any political party that promotes disaffection between the populations or supports genocide should not be allowed. But the temptation to treat any opposition to the RPF as ‘ethnicity’, ‘divisive’, ‘interahamwe sympathisers’ or a threat to national security must be resisted.

President Paul Kagame and RPF won a decisive victory in the last general election. That mandate does not mean that anybody that did not or does not support the government is an ‘adui’. The mandate should have made the government feel more secure and confident but it seems that they do not trust themselves or the electorate that gave them the mandate. Otherwise why turn a man who was for many years popularly seen as an ineffectual stooge into a martyr?

I know that this line of thinking will not go down well with many of my friends in Kigali but what are friends for if one cannot speak truth to power?

Bizmungu's treatment in the hands of his own former comrades is most appalling and will do the RPF and the government of President Kagame and the people of Rwanda more harm than good. One is not advocating that because he was a former president he should be above the law but this is not about finer points of law because the politics of the trials has compromised the morality of the matter.

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General Secretary of the Global Pan African Movement, based in Kampala, Uganda and also Director of Justice Africa, based in London.

* Please send comments to

Last Tuesday was Africa Day. Unfortunately this will be news to many Africans, including leading newspapers, politicians, political parties, media establishments and even many governments across this continent that passed through that day without any sense of its historical significance.
It was May 25 1963 that the Organisation for African Unity was formed. In recognition of that historical date May 25 became Africa Day across Africa and in the Diaspora. A time was when the day used to be remembered and celebrated as Africa Liberation Day in solidarity with the struggles for the liberation of African countries (mostly in Southern Africa) that were still under settler colonialism and apartheid.

With the liberation of South Africa there seemed to be a feeling of 'victory at last'. It appears there are no great battles to unite our efforts and build solidarity both on the continent and in the Diaspora. The whole of Africa may now be under African rule but the agenda of liberating our peoples from poverty, ignorance and underdevelopment is as real today as it was in the 1960s and even more urgent.

The official decline in the status of Africa Day in many African countries dates back to the 70s/ 80s when many of them became fortresses to all manner of despotic regimes that did not even represent the people of that country let alone Africa. There were also a number of countries, aided and deluded by the opportunistic politics of the cold war who thought they could 'make it on their own' without their neighbours as long as they remained loyal servants of the West or the East. A few also tried to maintain Non alignment without credibility because in practice they were aligned to one power or the other but also courted the rival power as and when necessary. So Non Alignment became political and ideological promiscuity deployed by leaders to shore up their regimes.

It all seems so long ago now that being pro-this or pro that foreign power, was the biggest issue for our leaders while being pro-Africa was regarded with ideological suspicion.

For instance the Western powers and their ideological surrogates among our founding fathers regarded Nkrumah, because of his Pan Africanist commitment, as an ambitious 'communist' who wanted to be president of Africa! Lumumba was a 'dangerous communist' who had to be eliminated even though his own people popularly elected him. So was Nasser, in Egypt and Ahmed Ben Bella in Algeria. Even Pan Africanists like Oginga Odinga who did not become President were also targeted . I have just been rereading William Atwood's ‘The Reds and the Blacks in Africa’ and anyone who wants to know how the cold war heated up and burnt Africa should get that book.

The good thing today is that after several decades of trying to be like other people and dancing to their tunes, regardless of ideological leaning, the collective experience is that we can only be ourselves and we need each other to counter the threat of marginalization, rapacious globalisation and the consolidation of whatever little gains may have been accomplished in a number of countries. No one country can be a sustainable miracle if its neighbours are in hell.

This is what has motivated renewed enthusiasm in regional and continental integration in the past few years. The best expression of this is the African Union, which was inaugurated in 2002 in Durban, South Africa; consequent to the transformation of the old OAU, which began, with the extra ordinary Summit called in Sirte, Libya, in 1999.

The new Union, in spite of sniggers and jeers from internal and external Afro pessimists, has continued to make steady progress. The AU Commission is now in place and has worked at break neck speed since the assumption of office of the Chairman, former Malian President, Alpha Konare and his fellow commissioners last year. In March, the Pan African Parliament was inaugurated with 5 representatives each from all the 53 member states of the AU and the indefatigable Beatrice Mongela from Tanzania elected its speaker.
Last Tuesday, the Peace and Security Council was formally inaugurated.

The CSOs, NGOs, Pan Africanist groups and Diaspora organisations have been active in the process and final protocol of the Economic and Social Council of the AU through which all kinds of non governmental, civil society, professional and any interested groups across Africa and the African Diaspora can have institutional engagement with the African Union.

The African Union provides a new opportunity for re-engaging with the wider Pan Africanist agenda of uniting Africans. But why do so many of our peoples remain indifferent?

A lot has to do with the distrust and suspicion about any initiative that comes from African leaders. There are just too many painful scars on our physical bodies and body politic inflicted by trusting our leaders that people now generally want to err on the side of caution.

This credibility deficit means that African leaders have to show that they are really committed and they mean it this time. One thing they can all do to convince our peoples that they are serious is to remove all the bureaucratic anti -people rules and procedures that govern intra-African movement of peoples. It is simply ridiculous that most Africans find it difficult to enter another African country with their African passports.

And shamelessly it is easier if you are American or European to visit, work, and settle in African countries than it is for Africans!

If May 25 no longer has any historical resonance what about July 9 2002 which was the date of the formal inauguration of the AU? What better way to bring it to the popular consciousness of All Africans especially our young people in schools, colleges and universities and popular forces in general by officially declaring the day as, African Union Day in all our countries?
At present there are less than a dozen African countries that continue to honour Africa Day.

The leaders of Africa need to re-engage Africans directly and practically by freeing us to be free to move and settle, without let or hindrance, from Cape Town to Cairo and also grant the same freedom to our peoples in the Diaspora who choose to exercise the right. Otherwise Africa day or African Union will not have any meaning for our peoples. It will just be another day, in the plantation, as we wait for 'Uhuru'.

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General Secretary of the Global Pan African Movement, based in Kampala, Uganda and also Director of Justice Africa, based in London.

* Please send comments to

This paper provides a useful, if brief, overview of remittance-related issues

African Privatisation Network (APN), the continental body for privatization agencies in Africa has launched a plan to woo wealthy Africans in the diaspora to come home and invest in the continent through the various national privatization programmes. As a first step towards achieving this, APN has invited international businessmen and industrialists of African descent to an APN Privatisation Summit opening on June 1, in Abuja.

Hundreds of Africans and their organisations will gather on Saturday 3rd July 2004 at London's City Hall, for African Diaspora and Development Day (ad3). The day has become the biggest gathering of Africans in the UK involved in supporting Africa ’s development. Featuring seminars, workshops, exhibitions, an African development market, and a keynote address by renowned West African gender activist, Yassine Fall, ad3 will also provide an opportunity for African diaspora organisations to meet with other development agencies - donors, policy-makers, pan-African development institutions and international NGOs - to share information and chart a way forward for the UK diaspora’s role in Africa ’s development.

Economic experts, private sector leaders and others who converged at the Pan-African University, Lekki, Lagos, recently, concurred that Nigerians in the diaspora are a critical factor in the federal government's efforts towards seeking foreign direct investments (FDI) into the country.

Transnational migration means a loss of human resources for many developing countries. However, migrants in the diaspora contribute to the economic development of their country of origin. They set up new business relations, investments and know-how transfer. Sometimes thus the "brain drain" is followed by a "brain gain".

A two-day workshop designed to create a framework for exploring ways of promoting the contributions of Ghanaians in the Diaspora for sustainable national development took place in Accra on May 14 and 15. Organised by the Social Enterprise Development Foundation (SEND) in collaboration with the African Foundation for Development (AFFORD), the forum examined ways through which to maximise resource mobilization from Ghanaians abroad for execution of projects back home.

This project is about harnessing the enormous potential that exists within Africa and the African diaspora to create a core of developers of free software who are able, through software development activities, to create educational and business opportunities that contribute to development on the continent.

The African Diaspora Foundation (ADF), a non-profit organisation, has announced the launch of their new website at http://www.theadf.com, designed by Chita Obasi, an ADF program director.

The deputy minister of information, Mr. Stephen Asamaoh -Boateng has said the government has worked towards greater constitutional recognition to Ghanaians in the Diaspora so they can take part in the process of electing the government of their country. He added that some diplomatic missions had initiated various innovative programmes to assist and facilitate the mobilization of resources from Ghanaians living in other countries to support development programmes in Ghana.

Surprising as it may be for many of us who remember the picture, face and voice of a very young man, the late El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, better known to us as Malcolm X, would have been 79 on May 19, 2004. As years went by, Malcolm was all but expunged from US history, particularly after the decimation and annihilation of many of the Black radical groups that attempted to uphold his views. It was only in the 1980s that a reawakening took place, largely among African-American youth, where Malcolm was reintroduced not only to African Americans, but as well to the larger society.