From 26 to 30 July 2009, the Cheikh Anta Diop University and Senegal's Ministry of Foreign Affairs combined efforts to host a conference of scholars drawn from the African diasporas and the continent. From Australia came the Zimbabwean economist Ndhlovu; from Brazil came the engineer Diallo; from Temple University, USA, came the prolific writer on African affairs Molefi Kete Asante; from Germany came Fofana and Godwin Onuora; and from South Africa, Matlou.

The organisers, probably driven by a desire to invoke echoes of a collective village palaver, held all proceedings in plenary sessions seated in one amphitheatre. Flanked by several large portraits of Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah atop those of Muammar al-Gadaffi, Abdoulaye Wade, Marcus Garvey, Haile Sellassie and Samora Machel – all on the main stage – key speakers and presenters spoke on a common theme: the urgent need to establish a United States of Africa. With chairpersons of sessions calling out by name those who were to make comments about papers presented, the community spirit was to be rudely shattered by the protests of those shut out. Long since the conference ended, these protests have spilled out onto the internet. Murmurings had started about Senegalese participants jostling for an opportunity to make comments that would curry favour with President Abdoulaye Wade. The fact that such interventionists were, during the opening session, called up to get hand shakes from Wade himself, fed an atmosphere of job-seeking speeches.

The fact that 200 presenters could not be accommodated during four days (without night sessions) of discourses should have been obvious to the organisers. With Dakar's long legacy of being a conference bazaar since the days of Leopold Senghor it was clear that it would be difficult to find accommodation. There was a fly in the milk. The organisers were sluggish in handling their self-inflicted handicap. Furthermore, there seemed to be a secret pact to shut out papers whose contents were unlikely to appeal to the funders of the conference. As Dambisa Moyo would have put it, they threw sand into a trust, owed to participants who had travelled far to get to the pan-African watering hole. There was also a lack of simple symbolic vents, like a volume of abstracts with names of authors – a measure that would have assuaged some egos a little, but more importantly, which would have encouraged dialogue outside open sessions and during the collective meal sessions.

Such shortcomings became more irritating as simultaneous translators appeared sluggish. It is as if the cancer of rigging elections and ideas by Africa's politicians has, like Harmattan dust, entered the ears and brains of their academic hangers-on. The failures in the matter of proceedings must not, however, overshadow larger shortcomings and successes. Among the successes was President Abdoulaye Wade's open and vigorous participation in critiquing papers. In one session he complained about the legalistic focus on challenges of building a United States of Africa while ignoring economic issues. Since copies of the papers had not, earlier on, been distributed to participants, it was Wade's verbal protestations against those of the scholars in question. The fact that Wade had gone beyond the mundane ritual by which Africa's leaders read hollow plastic texts recycled by cynical and contemptuous civil servants in ministries of foreign affairs, and instead thought aloud, was commendable. However, as one of the apparatchiki had revealed at breakfast, the organisers had shut out members of opposing political parties because they had trounced Wade in parliamentary elections held prior to the conference. This was a disgrace to the legacy of Cheikh Anta Diop, the intellectual giant who had made his name by daring to challenge the racist French and Euro-American history of ideas by bashing down walls of intellectual silence and prejudice. President Wade and his collaborators had returned to the likes of Leopold Senghor's vicious and satanic legacy of preventing Cheikh Anta Diop from lecturing at the university for the twenty years he ruled over Senegal. Coming from the tragic and destructive intolerance of rulers who reigned and ruined lives of Africa's peoples under narrow walls of ‘sovereign African states’, it was silly to invite Africa's intellectuals into a union project under Wade's leadership.

The late Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem had always lamented incidences in which Africa's leaders who have overstayed their welcome continue to torture captive private and public audiences with the same 'scratched-gramophone’ speeches and exhortations, sometimes first presented over 20 years earlier. He also despised the rampant fear among Africa's rulers of being contradicted and criticised. One incidence of this in Dakar occurred when President Wade intervened and talked and talked with the clear aim of ensuring that one of his most eloquent and caustic critics, Aminata Sow, was not given a chance to make an intervention. Bayo Olukoshi had called out her name as one of those to talk from the floor, but President Wade won his silence and Africa won a decay.

A second positive element of the Dakar conference was the intensive effort made by Jean Ping, chair of the Africa Commission (the boss of the bureaucrats that run the African Union (AU)), to render an account about the AU. The value of his effort was in showing his hunger to talk to a public outside the sterile walls of a heads of state meeting. The African Union's bureaucrats lack the African people to banter with. Dakar did not throw any grenades at Ping. The scholars themselves appeared so starved of debating and discoursing about the nitty-gritty elements of the administration of their continent that they looked as numb as audiences at America's satellite launch sites. With Senegal's intellectuals like Professor Abdoulaye Bathily locked out, Ping left attired in praises from President Wade for ‘doing a difficult job’. Ping forgot about the US$10 billion that is annually stolen and deported out of Africa's economies to encourage Europe's unification and inhibit Africa's drive to unity. His mentor and family relation, the late President Omar Bongo, was accused on the eve of his death of giving European banks deposits of over US$5 billion. Ping obviously does not lose sleep over the corruption that has Nigeria's new governor of the central bank, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, forcing Nigeria's media to name and shame executives of the Intercontinental Bank and the Oceanic Bank into awarding loans of Naria 45 billion and Naria 32.3 billion, respectively, to one Henry Imasekha. The man did not even have to put down any collateral. Ping must be rather bored by Sanusi's ‘schoolboy zeal’. He probably does not see that thousands of Imasekhas known to bank-vault attendants in Switzerland do not care for access to raw materials and industrial production across Africa's country borders. Their wealth does not need a united production chain across Africa.

Holding large conferences is expensive. The hunger for talking about Africa outside the confines of donor-funded NGO talks about ‘synergies, templates, and development partners’ – with death resulting from ‘exploitation and domination’ in Africa's relations with the outside world – is enormous. That was what Dakar revealed and instantly wasted. But as Tajudeen would say: 'We must organise more conferences and talk and act loudly and boldly about a United States of Africa.' We must campaign against time-wasting ploys like postponing a union government until 2017. These deadlines are becoming death knells for the ambushing and beheading of a surging political dream. Do not agonise, organise to arouse Africa's peoples to push African rulers to establish the United States of Africa before 2017.

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* Okello Oculi is the executive director of the Africa Vision 525 Initiative.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.