The Power of United Africa

[RWalker]

In the African Union document, "African Common Position on The Review of the Millennium Declaration and The Millennium Development Goals," the AU makes the following assertions:


2.1 Summary of Africa’s Progress towards Meeting the MDGs
28. On balance, Africa has recorded insufficient progress toward meeting the
MDGs by 2015. According to the latest data available, the proportion of people living
in extreme poverty in Africa actually increased from 44.6 percent in 1990 to 46.5 in
2001; while developing countries as a group registered a significant reduction in extreme
poverty, from 27.9 percent in 1990 to 21.3 in 2001

...
2.2.8.1 Official development assistance
49. The idea that rich countries should give 0.7% of their GNP for global
development was first proposed in 1969 in the Report on International Development,
led by former Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson. This figure has been widely
accepted as a reference target for official development assistance (ODA). Endorsed by
the UN General Assembly in 1970, it became part of the international development
strategy for the 1970s. ...
...

51. If members of the OECD donor countries actually delivered ODA equal to
0.7% of their GNP, aid would be $165 billion a year, which is three times the current
level and well above current estimates of what is needed to achieve the MDGs.
52. At current levels, there is a large gap between the development ambitions of the
international community, that is, MDGs and the resources provided. It was estimated
earlier by the U.N. that meeting the MDGs would cost an additional $50 billion in
annual aid. At the Monterrey Conference on Financing for Development, the United
States pledged to increase aid spending by 50%, or $5 billion a year, and the European
Union promised an additional $7 billion a year, as its first step toward meeting the
target of 0.7 percent of Gross National Income (GNI) for development assistance.
While these commitments are surely encouraging, since the Monterrey Consensus to
date, progress in several key policy areas, including trade and ODA, has been very weak
or non-existent, in some cases there have been backward steps. Therefore, progress is
needed toward a more effective ODA. Specifically:
• Increased ODA is needed to meet the resource requirements of the MDGs;
and donors need to respond adequately to African countries’ effort to
improve their policies and capacities for effective utilization of aid.
• Concerted donor efforts are also needed to increase the quality of aid, through
improved aid allocation across countries, closer strategic alignment with
national development priorities within country programs and harmonization
In particular, support should be given to infrastructure and sectoral programs of development.
• The PRSP process provides an appropriate framework for identifying
effective channels for official assistance and for donor coordination as well as for strengthening the growth and poverty reduction efforts in recipient countries.
• The aid effort should include adequate support to debt relief for the heavy indebted poor countries, and to critical global programs on HIV/AIDS, education and water.
2.2.8.2 Trade (Market access)
53. Trade has great potential for African countries in poverty reduction and in meeting the MDGs. However, these will not materialize if the rules are biased and developing countries are unable to compete because of developed countries’ subsidies and barriers to trade on the one hand, and developing countries are forced to open their own goods and services markets to corporations based in developed countries ...

African Common Position on
The Review of the Millennium Declaration and
The Millennium Development Goals


http://www.africa-union.org/root/AU/..._no_hypen1.pdf



To get out of our economic mess we must take the prescribed political remedy.

"History has shown that where the Great Powers cannot colonize, they balkanize. This is what they did to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and this is what they have done and are doing in Africa. If we allow ourselves to be balkanized, we shall be re-colonized and be picked off one after the other...."

"By far the greatest wrong which the departing colonialists inflicted on us, and which we now continue to inflict on ourselves in our present state of disunity, was to leave us divided into economically unviable States which bear no possibility of real development...."

"...We must unite for economic viability, first of all, and then to recover our mineral wealth in Southern Africa, so that our vast resources and capacity for development will bring prosperity for us and additional benefits for the rest of the world. That is why I have written elsewhere that the emancipation of Africa could be the emancipation of Man."

Kwame Nkrumah,
Speech OAU Summit Conference Cairo 7/19/64 can be found on pages 282-4 of Revolutionary Path
...
"Common territory, language and culture may in fact be present in a nation, but the existence of a nation does not necessarily imply the presence of all three. Common territory and language alone may form the basis of a nation. Similarly, common territory plus common culture may be the basis. In some cases, only one of the three applies. A state may exist on a multi-national basis. The community of economic life is the major feature within a nation, and it is the economy which holds together the people living in a territory. It is on this basis that the new Africans recognise themselves as potentially one nation, whose domination is the entire African continent."

Kwame Nkrumah,
Class Struggle in Africa

We need to be a little more self reliant in building our economy. We need to be innovation-centered planned society. A society imbued with the confidence of ancient Africa's great civilization and driven by an innovation spirit that emerges from within our culture, the content and container of our peoples collectively and individually, and our history of fighting for justice for and equality of human beings.

Ii is this innovation spirit that will fulfill the function of creating marketable value from our immense natural and human wealth. This innovation spirit will be the source of the new technologies and new products we need to deal with our general cultural, nutrition, health, education, ecological, housing, commercial, fiscal and other common needs.

To employ this spirit properly we need systems to organize, administer, coordinate, supervise, control, guide and monitor the process of producing goods, delivering needed services, create meaningful, real employment suited for human beings and generally speaking, casting the kind of society consistent with our cultural roots, memory and identity.

These combined cultural constructs can safeguard our system because it reinforces our biological and class homology at both the sub conscious and conscious levels.

Hence as long as we have ourselves together at that level the rest will fall in place. The state we will build will be a force to reckon with in all matters and Africans will never suffer have to put up with the kinds of indignations and hardships that we experience all to frequently today..

That's is provided we reclaim our wealth and apply our culturally grounded innovation techniques to the wealth.

Provided that we set up governmental administration which can apply fiscal and general policies designed for the optimal funding of R&D and facilitate the overall monitoring of the interaction of manufacturers, service industry and others which consume the public research product

An administration that can insure that innovation is translated into new products and techniques that can help africa's global society meet the global challenges of the 21st century: proliferation of wars of plunder; nucelar sabre rattling, renditions and waterboarding, the expansion of the already bloated, massive, network of private paramilitary and espionage agencies that operate above any and all law, international or otherwise. the global dangerous socio economic consequences and impact of the speculative global financial system ...recently pounded by speculation on mortgages leading to mass foreclosures and a general hit on small investors; the rise of fascism and the resurgence of organized racism at virtually all levels of global society and generally speaking, the growing risk of world war over inter-related economic and political struggles.

Since we recognize that the overall risk factor is never going completely away we are obliged to do the intelligent thing and systematically anticipate the proper systemic responses and develop sound pre-positioning strategies; which in turn requires organization at these superstructure infrastructure and structure levels. The standard definition of each is given in the Appendix...so that we all know have a consistent interpretation of the subject.

However, we all have a solid enough grip on the meaning of the terms to see that they are critical to our construction of Pan-Africanism particularly as the ideological and philosophical engine of Pan-Africanism its most important type of superstructure is absolutely essential to our winning the phases of the struggle we face. And of course nothing can get down without proper structure in things such as buildings, in organizations, in forms of communication, in art, science and technology, all require structure of one kind or another

And without infrastructure, without trains, planes, highways, communication and information systems, marketing systems consistent with our wishes and needs, and all the rest of the fundamental things such as waste handling and management, health maintenance, education and what not, we would be an immobile, blind, speechless, desensitized, insensitive, uninformed, backward clump of human beings...human beings without power. And thus human beings who, en masse, will continue to have no human rights whatsoever

APPENDIX:



superstructure
n.

1. A physical or conceptual structure extended or developed from a basic form.
2. The part of a building or other structure above the foundation.
3. The parts of a ship's structure above the main deck.
4. The rails, sleepers, and other parts of a railway.
5. In Marxist theory, the ideologies or institutions of a society as distinct from the basic processes and direct social relations of material production and economics.



structure

n.

1. Something made up of a number of parts that are held or put together in a particular way: hierarchical social structure.
2. The way in which parts are arranged or put together to form a whole; makeup: triangular in structure.
3. The interrelation or arrangement of parts in a complex entity: political structure; plot structure.
4. Something constructed, such as a building.
5. Biology.
1. The arrangement or formation of the tissues, organs, or other parts of an organism.
2. An organ or other part of an organism.

infrastructure
n.

1. An underlying base or foundation especially for an organization or system.
2. The basic facilities, services, and installations needed for the functioning of a community or society, such as transportation and communications systems, water and power lines, and public institutions including schools, post offices, and prisons.