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

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.

Several ideas crop up, in and out of the conference room, and remain conceptually puzzling. The young lawyers showed they had been keeping up by prodding the visitors informally on what each had written or stated in the past. Among those puzzles is the possibility of a ‘law’ being ‘illegal, not simply being unjust. It is possible, commented retired judge Mengesteab Negash who had also taught law to most of the Eritrea lawyers, if that law is unconstitutional. Does an oppressive law cease to be ‘unjust’ simply because it is declared constitutional?

With PLO wondering what was ‘international’ in international law, discussions moved to the relativity of international law. Given that the origins of international law was agreement on how to loot and exploit peoples and resources outside Europe, should it bind Africans who are the victims of that international law? Similar European agreements at Berlin in 1884-85 justified colonial exploitation that tried to obliterate everything African and shifted sense of legitimacy to European capitals. If international law is relative, its legitimacy is probably relative to the victim who is mostly African.

National interests

The issue of the relativity of international law brings up what amounts to the ‘primacy of national interest’ doctrine. Each country, it emerged, has an obligation to safeguard its national interests against the ravages and mischief of supposed international law. Thus, when a country faces conflicting international obligations, national interests should be its guiding principle rather than the letter of international law. It should not seek advice from the likely enemy.

The intellectual exchanges amongst the lawyers, judges, and related intellectuals in Asmara were, however, symptomatic of a big continental anguish that Afwerki appeared to try to grapple with. He mused about Pan-Africanism and various continental organs such as the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), African Union (AU), Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS), and considers them ineffective or failures. The purported failure of Pan-Africanism, however, was in application but not in the concept.

Pan-Africanism can be conceptualised in two historical periods of roughly 60 years, colonial and post-colonial. The first period was one of reaction to racial exploitation in the imposed colonial structures; the second period is about post-colonial Pan-Africanism in which Afwerki is actually a post-colonial player. In the colonial period, the first phase was one of raising global consciousness about the commonality of black oppression which gave prominence to such people as Marcus Garvey, W.E.B DuBois, Harry Thuku, H. Sylvester William, George Padmore, which was boosted in the 1930s by Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia.

The second phase was to translate that consciousness into action of eliminating territorial political colonialism which was racial in nature because colonialism was racial exploitation. There was thus a lot of African cooperation in overthrowing racially based colonialism which became the basis of independence in which black people replaced white people in government houses with little interest in changing the colonial structure. The first period in Pan-Africanism, raising consciousness and ending territorial colonial control, was therefore successful.

In the second post-colonial period, Afwerki’s disappointment and sense of failure in Pan-Africanism is justified. Starting with the triumphalism associated with Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Ben Bella, Sekou Toure, Jomo Kenyatta, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Julius Nyerere, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Leopold Sengoh, Kamuzu Banda, Houphey Boigny, and even Haile Selassie, the existing spirit of Pan-Africanism created the OAU, to implement the various dreams of uniting the Africans. Since it did not, even after 40 years of existence, OAU became the AU, part of whose problem was Muammar Qaddafi’s seeming obsession with copying Europe rather than coming up with basic structures and thoughts on how to address the challenges confronting the Africans. The failures in both the OAU and the AU, the inability to implement dreams of unity or self-reliance, give Afwerki reason to be concerned.

Need for compromise

The reasons for that inability to actualise the Pan-Africanist dreams range from the willingness of African leaders to compromise themselves to forceful imposition of neo-colonial superstructures as it happened with Patrice Lumumba in 1960. The compromise may be evidence of the success of the colonial project to control the minds continuously so much that some African governments prefer to ignore African experts and outsource thinking outside the continent. Having surrendered the right to interpret African interests to extra-continental forces, countries are then treated to development discourses that are what Berket insists is ‘development shehe’ that essentially create poverty instead of alleviating it.

Pan-Africanism has had its successes, mostly in the colonial period when it roused consciousness and strategised on the ending of racialised territorial colonialism. It also experienced setbacks in the post-colonial period which disappoints Afwerki so much that he worries about failures in Pan-Africanism. Whether in success or failure, the issue in Pan-Africanism is mostly attitudinal, one of the mind.  As a result, there is the irony of some African leaders believing and repeating ‘shehe’ and remaining oblivious to the created misery in their countries. 

The challenge for Afwerki and others who might be thinking of dumping ‘shehe’, therefore, is in convincing fellow leaders to invest in African experts and stop outsourcing thinking and policy making. He is optimistic that it can be done.