Next week's African Union summit in Abuja is a reminder to the continent's leaders of unfinished business, writes Gamal Nkrumah Barely a decade ago Africa lacked either free speech or open politics. Civil war threatened to sink the continent deeper into the quick sands of poverty and underdevelopment. A decade ago, the continent was ruled by Western-backed autocrats. But amid the inky darkness of Africa's moonless nights a few stars began to shine -- faintly at first and then much more brightly. Today the picture is less bleak. Rumbling conflicts in the Great Lakes region of Africa and in Somalia have been contained. Weeks ago it was Sudan's turn to be signing peace agreements. The political map of Africa may have seen radical shifts and realignments in recent years. The one factor that looms large, however, is the increasingly hegemonic role the United States has come to play in the continent's politics. It is as if Washington has become indispensable to Africa's conflict resolution mechanisms. Over the past few years the US has become the guarantor of peace in Sudan, in the Great Lakes region and other trouble spots. The flagships of Washington's intervention in Africa have flown several standards and democracy, human rights and good governance have been invariably accompanied by demands for economic deregulation and privatisation. African leaders have on the whole acquiesced to the new world order. Western hegemony is like having a surveyor continually crawling over your house. The US, and to a lesser degree other Western nations, especially the two most influential former colonial powers France and Britain, call the shots and even set the pace of political and economic reform. Multi-party democracy and a greater role for the private sector is much in evidence throughout Africa south of the Sahara. But democracy has failed to feed the vast majority of African people, to raise standards of living or foster transparency and accountability in democratically-elected governments. The UN's role in Africa has often appeared to be little more than a fig leaf to cover up naked Western intervention in the continent and to lend legitimacy to Western-led operations. Next summer the G8 countries, the world's eight wealthiest nations, will convene a summit with the express aim of addressing Africa's problems. The G8 has developed its so-called eight Millennium Development Goals with Africa especially in mind. Britain hosts the G8 summit and British Prime Minister Tony Blair has repeatedly said that African development concerns will top the agenda. The wealthy donor nations and poor recipients will put their heads together to draw up solutions to the continent's many problems. But Blair stated that Africa's problems were man-made and that they were exacerbated "through the failure of man" and not "through the force of nature", as in Asia's tsunami cataclysm. This kind of doom-mongering will do nothing to engender the empowerment of poor nations. The distasteful aspect of such propaganda, however, is not its effect on public debate in Africa -- policy analysts ought, after all, to be able to distinguish substance from puffery and reality from misinformation -- but the fact that it reinforces the belief that Africans cannot sort out their own problems. Blame can hardly be placed exclusively on the shoulders of Africa's poor for their predicament. What about the writing off of the continent's debts? Africa's debt burden, after all, is the major cause of its poverty and underdevelopment. As smooth as any politician on the campaign trail Blair conveniently forgot to mention that he hopes British companies will be the main beneficiaries of his overtures to Africa. Meanwhile nothing is being said about how to make world trade fairer for those poorer countries that depend mainly on exports of primary commodities and raw materials. Nor about the fact that Africa spent all but the last few decades of the last half millennium firmly under Europe's thumb. The G8 initiative also raises broader questions, not least when the age-old unequal relationship between the West and Africa is going to be overturned. Why must Africa be put through a grueling inquest and apportioned all the blame for its misery? The budget of the 53-member state AU is a mere $158 million, a paltry sum that cannot solve the continent's ills. Yet any organisation must examine itself and the way it works from time to time. It would be surprising if African leaders were not thinking very carefully about what they should be doing. That has to be the starting point for any vision of the future.
