Any serious talk of building a United States of Africa must begin with the need to guarantee full citizenship rights to all Africans, and the complimentary freedoms to move, settle, work and participate in the political processes anywhere they may be, argues Tajudeen Abdul Raheem. This is the only thing that would convince us that our leaders are serious.

I want to begin this in a personal way because the issues we are dealing with are not theoretical or rhetorical. They are about our rights and dignity as a people. They are too important for us not to recognise them as validating ‘the personal is political’ dictum made famous by the women’s movement.

I am blessed with two daughters who are growing up in the United Kingdom. They became British citizens at birth, in spite of the fact that their mother and myself were only British residents when they were born. Both girls enjoy all the rights and entitlements of British children in terms of free and compulsory education from nursery through to secondary education and up to university, if they so choose. They are also entitled to prescription free medicine until they are 16. In some sense the sky may be their limit in terms of individual ambitions. Of course, like every other British child, they will have to deal with racial, religious, class and other prejudices as they grow up, and deal with them as and when necessary, especially racial discrimination.

If they had been born in a majority of our countries the fact of being children of residents does not automatically mean that they qualify for the citizenship of the country in which they were born. The circumstances of their birth, which they did not choose, becomes a disadvantage from which they will never be able to escape for all their lives. At the height of the state sponsored Anti Ban Yarwanda (in practice Anti Tutsi) during the Obote 2 regime in Uganda, one of his xenophobic ministers reportedly declared: 'does the fact that a Sheep was born in a Kraal make it a cow?', continuing that 'a Muyarwanda born in Uganda even if he or she dies and is buried in Uganda remains a Muyarwanda'. In this type of mindset and the legal and political regime constructed on it, identity becomes a prison, from which a person will never escape. There is nothing wrong in a Muyarwanda remaining a Muyarwanda all their lives, but if that identity is now used to justify discrimination against the person, marginalise them and deny the right to full participation in the economic, social and political affairs of the country then it is no longer a question of origin but politics and power.

This is the common practice across this continent. In order to disclaim and disempower people, we first deny them their right to citizenship. It is an affirmation of the negative: 'not belonging' or 'not one of us'. Even those to whom we can not deny those rights, because we cannot prove that their parents or grandparents come from another country, we proceed to the second default position: 'settlers' , i.e. not indigenous/ancestrally to that area, even if they are from other parts of the same country. So the same Ugandans will argue that a Muchiga from Kabale born and brought up in Kabarole or Hoima are settlers, because their ancestors do not originate from Toro or Bunyoro.

Nigerians have perfected this type of discrimination by requiring on official forms declaration of STATE OF RESIDENCE and STATE OF ORIGIN. The former may, given the decades, and in some cases, centuries, of internal migration, not reveal the ethnicity of the person, but the latter certainly will. Origin requires stating your ancestry where your parents or grandparents or even great grandparents come from. It means that third generation or more of Igbo, Kalabari, Hausa, Itsekiri and other non Yoruba Nigerians in Lagos may still be regarded as 'foreigners’, just as several generations of Yorubas or Igbos in northern Nigeria will be branded 'non indigenes' with serious implications for their citizenship rights, access to state resources and political participation.

There is no worse time for these denials of rights to come to the fore than during elections. All British residents from the Commonwealth, including temporary residents like students could vote in British elections, yet Africans born and brought up in different African countries, many of them with no knowledge or experience of the other country, can neither vote nor be voted for in many countries of birth. Elections are supposed to be exclusively 'for indigenes' but even among the so called 'indigenes' the right to participate is often limited to voting for those Nigerians called 'sons of the soil' (and they are always 'sons' because patriachy disempowers women in land and other property). So somebody of Igbo ancestry may vote in Lagos, but he or she will face enormous prejudice if he or she decides to stand for public office because, despite being a melting pot of all kinds of peoples including other West Africans and descendants of freed slaves from Brazil, somehow Lagos is still believed to be a Yoruba place, and has to be represented by 'proper Yoruba' . The ridiculous thing about this narrow indigeneity is that an overwhelming majority of the Yorubas who now claim Lagos as theirs were migrants from other parts of the Yoruba inter-land! Similarly if someone of Yoruba or Igbo origin, no matter how distant, decides to become governor or legislator in Kano (another city built out of free flow of peoples from all corners of the Sahel and Nigeria, and also Arabia due to the trans-Saharan trade), he or she will be reminded that he/she does not belong.

In Kenya, where I now reside, there is by far greater excitement, speculation and confidence among Kenyans about the chances of Barrack Obama winning the Democratic nomination and proceeding to becoming the first Black President of the USA than you will find among American voters themselves. All because his late father was a Kenyan. But ask the same Kenyans about the chances of Raila Odinga, a frontrunner for the presidential candidature of the opposition ODM-Kenya, many of them will declare bluntly: no way, he can't make it, he is Luo. But so was Obama's father, therefore Barrack is, by our immutable patriarchal genealogy, a Luo. Why are we enthusiastic about a Luo man becoming the president of the USA, but give no chance to a fellow Luo who wants to be president of Kenya where majority Luo people reside? It is alright in America, but somehow not kosher here in Kenya. If Obama does not get the nomination many Africans will put it down to racism. So what is it when we discriminate against fellow Africans in countries where the bulk of the population are Africans?

Part of the excuses (not explanations, mark you) you get when discussing the Raila presidential ambitions is that he comes from a minority ethnic group and that there was no way the majority Kikuyu will allow it. In the same breath you will be assured that whoever Raila supports may win. So you get this contradictory position of Raila (and Luos) forever playing the role of kingmakers, never to be kings themselves.

A situation whereby whole groups of fellow citizens are reduced to playing second class roles cannot lead to a viable democratic society. If you ask many Nigerians about the chances of someone from the oil-producing Niger Delta becoming president of the country they will give you all kinds of evasive answers. But behind it all is the unwritten law that the presidency of the country belongs to a certain dominant group, almost in perpetuity, despite the fact that these majority groups are parasites on resources that come predominantly from minority areas.

It is only when talking about oil that many Nigerians become very nationalistic, and accuse anyone who asks for sensitivity towards the people, from whose shores the Black Gold flows, of wanting to break up Nigeria. Some Nigerians even argue that the oil producing states already get more than enough share of the oil resources from the central government and challenged them to show what they have done with it.

The wider question is: what have the governments of Nigeria done with the resources of the country? If the leaders hah used the resources for the benefit of the great majority of the citizens, the issue will not have become as politicised and polarised as it has become. Of what value is being a Nigerian to most of the peoples in the Niger Delta who have continued to harvest death and destruction from the oil resources in their areas. It is dodging the question to accuse them of separatism. No country should be a catholic marriage, in which there cannot be the possibility of divorce.

The possibility of divorce does not mean that all marriages will end in one. What will make people voluntarily show their loyalty and commitment to any political community is their level of security, confidence and identification with it as stakeholders who know that the state will be there for them to protect them and defend their interests.

It is the absence of these that has made many of our states illegitimate in the eyes and practice of many Africans. And that is why every little thing threatens these states.

What can be done? We can not run away from the problems of citizenship on this continent anymore. As we discussed during the launch of the Citizenship Rights in Africa Initiative (CRAI) in Kampala recently, millions of Africans are today victims of the arbitrary denial of citizenship and consequent statelessness.

A situation in which Africans with non-African citizenship can feel more secure and exercise full rights of political participation in their adopted countries than in many of our countries has to be reversed immediately.

To return to the case of my daughters, the prejudices and discrimination they will face In many African countries may not just be because their parents were residents, or settlers. The fact of both of their parents coming from different countries will not be a bonus, but another disadvantage. They may not have automatic right to their mother's citizenship. In fact in some countries their mum may not take them to her home country without their father's 'permission' because the father 'owns' the children!

Many African women married to other Africans from different countries suffer discrimination both ways: punished for not marrying wisely! At home they will foreignise them, and in the country of their husbands, they remain foreigners. Show me any country in Africa where a Sonia Ghandi could be leading even a minor political party, no matter who her husband may have been.

The first thing we need to do is to reconcile our states to the diversity of our peoples by giving African citizenship to all Africans wherever they may be.

I know that a number of questions will be posed, the principal one being 'who is an African?' A simple answer will be any citizen of any African country no matter how that citizenship was acquired including ancestry, indigeneity, settlement, marriage, naturalisation and any other legally recognised means. Another question will be 'where does the African diaspora come in?' They will qualify under ancestry but also voluntary naturalisation.

Some countries have adjusted to granting dual or multiple citizenship, but only for remittance purposes in most cases. Because of the growing role that remittances from Africans abroad play in holding families and communities together, many countries now recognise the right of their citizens to have other citizenship, therefore abandoning the previous ‘either’ ‘or’ exclusion. But even here, there is a catch: dual citizenship is often assumed to be one of African citizenship and a European or north American one. For someone like me who was born Nigerian and have had a Ugandan passport for more than ten years, there were always suspicions among immigration and security officials. Somehow it is alright for an African to hold Western passports but deemed 'odd' to be a dual African citizen. This further goes to prove that we continue to treat ourselves as foreigners.

The granting of African citizenship will not automatically solve all the problems of ethnicity, racism, exclusionism and intolerance. What it will set is a new and more inclusive legal and political framework for us to deal with these problems as equal members of a shared political community without anyone of us feeling superior or inferior, or at the mercy of other citizens. It will be like being members of the same family. No matter how much you may dislike your brother or sister, cousin or uncle, when it comes to family affairs you all have equal right of participation. There is an African saying that no matter how close a friend may be, the day we want to worship our ancestors he or she has to excuse himself or herself.

Whatever problems there may be, we can then resolve them among ourselves. And if we cannot, we will learn to understand and manage them without the threat of opponents being foreignised and declared stateless.

Any serious talk of building a United States of Africa that does not begin from this fundamental reconfiguration of our legal and political status within such a state will be doomed from the start. The continuing challenges to regional and continental integration for the past 50 years since independence from colonialism largely stem from the anomaly of seeking to unite our artificial states while keeping our peoples apart.

In West Africa, which has had free movement for three decades, it is still common to find citizens of other West African countries 'deported' and routinely harassed and victims of extortions by various security, intelligence and immigration officials at various border points and inside West African countries.

The problem is not with the right to move freely but the lack of political will to take further complementary steps to make regional citizenship real for the peoples of the region. These will include faster progress on regional liberalisation and harmonisation of trade, financial and commercial transactions within the region. In spite of free movement market traders, the famous West African market women, who keep their families, communities and the whole region going through their micro enterprises are still subjected to all kinds of extortion at border points in a way that criminalises intra-regional trade. Instead of saluting and encouraging these 'cross border' traders as the Pan Africanist entrepreneurs that they are, we criminalise them as 'smugglers' and euphemistically call their exchanges 'informal sector' , 'second sector' or 'parallel market'.

Yet the truth is that the majority of our peoples survive directly or indirectly in these sectors. Any Pan Africanist economist who is not allowing theory to confuse him or her can easily see that this is the real African economy. It is the state sector that needs to give way to the real thing and find ways of collecting the taxes that are currently going into private pockets at our various corruption extortion posts called borders.

The East Africa Community in its steady march towards the creation of a federation seem to be unlearning some of its own previous effort and learning well from the challenges in the ECOWAS region. It is merging freedom of movement with complimentary whittling down of barriers to trade, finance and commerce and removing all kinds of unnecessary bureaucratic bottle necks. For instance, a visa for non community citizens and residents to one of the countries is now valid for re-entry from all the three countries and very soon Rwanda and Burundi too. It also has a legislative Assembly and regional court that are potentially more powerful than what is available in the ECOWAS and also the Pan African Parliament.

If the leaders of Africa want to be taken seriously and silence the cynicism that has continued to dominate any discussion about the African Union, they need to demonstrate they have the required political will and are ready to use them to deliver a truly people-driven union.

One major area that will affect everybody immediately and transform people's perception is guaranteeing full citizenship rights to all Africans with its complimentary freedom to move, settle, work and participate in the political processes anywhere they may be. This will mean that we cease to require dehumanising visa regimes that make it almost impossible to travel legally across the continent. Pan African trade will no longer be criminalised as 'smuggling'.

It means the Pan African Parliament should be given full legislative powers and its elections can be held on a Pan African adult suffrage. Pan African Affairs will no longer be in Foreign Affairs but become part of the domestic political contestations. Africans will no longer be undesirable 'aliens' across Africa. The humiliation of beings 'others' in Europe and treated as 'others' at home will be ended. And we can all arrive at border posts with pride at the welcoming notices proclaiming 'Africans this way' and 'Others...this way'!

This will put African people at the centre of the 'Grand Debate', instead of them being cynical observers, as many are at the moment, or, worse still, completely unconcerned.

*Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the deputy director of the UN Millennium Campaign in Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He is also General Secretary of the Global Pan African Movement, based in Kampala, Uganda. He writes this article in his personal capacity as a concerned pan-Africanist.

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