Sixty Years Of Gradualism

“Surely the African Union can do all this gradually, one careful step at a time, without the trouble.”

Last time I left my friend the skeptic with one more answer in his pocket. Here it is. Gradually. One careful step at a time. Without the trouble.

What gradualism is
Gradualism is the doctrine that union should arrive in stages, the economy first and the politics last. In May 1963, thirty-two African countries met in Addis Ababa to found the Organisation of African Unity. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana came with a plea and a warning: seek ye first the political kingdom, and all else shall be added unto you. Senegal’s Leopold Senghor and others wanted unity to arrive gradually, through economic cooperation. Nkrumah said build the house first. The gradualists began with the dining chairs. The compromise was a club of sovereign states. A club is not a union. The OAU was the moment Africa reached the door of greatness and did not only fail to break it down, it failed to even knock on it.

Gradualism was heralded as careful, deliberate steps in a journey of a thousand miles. No one tells you of the thousand knives hunting you over the thousand miles. Gradualism is what we say when we have decided to do nothing and would rather not say so plainly.

How it works
I guess the first step was to set grandiose goals you can’t achieve, and claim outcomes you did not achieve. And so our leaders did. The ridiculous claim was that the OAU liberated Africa from colonialism. It did not. You see, “independence” was largely a foregone conclusion after the Second World War. America did not fight fascism only to preserve European colonies, and Britain, exhausted and indebted, could not hold what it had. France was not even a country for much of  WWII. What was Vichy France but a Nazi colony? Yes, you and I see the irony. The French never did – the subjects became liberators of their master. For those whose independence was delayed, from Angola to South Africa, liberation owed more to the fall of Portugal’s dictatorship in 1974, to the Cold War and to their own long struggles than to the OAU, which gave little support.

If the OAU was truly looking out, how did its founders lose their own countries at the bargaining table? After 1945 no European country could hold a continent in revolt, so imperialism changed its methods. Why did the OAU not see it, and offer a clear, viable alternative as a bulwark against our genuflection for the next 100 years? Nkrumah gave it a name, neo-colonialism, and its playbook is plain. Divide first: France’s 1956 law gave power to each West African territory

instead of to its federation, and Senghor warned that it would produce many small, unviable states. Senghor, who had tried union with Mali and walked out of it, then lent gradualism the authority of a poet and a statesman. Monsieur Negritude taught a continent that union could wait. Keep the money: the CFA franc is pegged to the euro with France as its guarantor. Punish those who say no: Guinea voted No in 1958, and France withdrew completely (with all its stuff including light bulbs some say) and halted its aid. Remove the leaders who resist: Patrice Lumumba was killed in Katanga in 1961 in the presence of Belgian officers, and Belgium has since acknowledged an “irrefutable share of responsibility.” We got the flag, the anthem and the seat at the United Nations. The currency, the contracts and the terms of trade stayed behind. Nothing was meant to proceed beyond this stage. Ever.

The stall is so obvious, it cannot be sold as progress to yet another generation of Africans eager for change. So, as any good marketer would do: when the product fails, change the label. This is the second phase of gradualism. In 1991 the club signed the Abuja Treaty, which promised a continental economic community in six stages, all finished by 2034. In 2002 it took on a new name, “African Union”. Sounds promising … it is not. In 2018 the free trade agreement was signed. Regional blocs were due in 1999. A customs union for the whole continent was due in 2019. A common market was due in 2023. It is now October 2026. As far as I can find, neither the continental customs union nor the common market exists. Slow nonsense always sounds wiser.

The AU cannot yet pay for itself. Its 2025 budget was about $608 million, and outside partners were to supply 58.1% of it. A body that cannot fund its own meetings is not about to run a continent.

UNCTAD says African countries sold 12.1% of their goods exports to each other in 1995 and 16.9% in 2024. That is a gain of 4.8 points in twenty-nine years, or about 0.17 of a point a year. Asia trades about 55% among its own. At 0.17 of a point a year, closing the 38-point gap would take more than two hundred years (38.1 divided by 0.17 is 224). This is gradualism at full speed!

Why do the steps never arrive? Because every step toward the real thing takes something from the people who must vote for it. A customs union takes away the tariff a minister collects. A common market takes away the border post and the fee that goes with it. A single currency takes away the central bank. A federation takes away the throne. So the hard steps are always due later. Gradualism does not spread the cost. It delays the decision and hands it to the people with the most to lose. Nor is a union of the willing the answer, with some going now and the rest later. There is no such thing as half a union. It is just the border that moves.

What other unions teach
Has any union been planned to take this long? None that I know of. The more well-known federations of history emerged from confederation to federation because someone called a convention and wrote a constitution, usually under the pressure of a crisis (America in 1787, Switzerland in 1848), and sometimes with none (Australia in 1901). Abuja planned thirty-four years of careful steps, forty at the outside. And yet, sixty-three years after the OAU began in Addis Ababa, we are still on the first steps. Here is the record of confederations.

Confederation (how long it lasted)	How it ended
US Articles of Confederation, 1781 (8 years)	The states met in Philadelphia after a war of independence and replaced it with the Constitution.
Swiss Confederation, 1815 (33 years)	A short civil war in 1847, then the constitution of 1848.
German Confederation, 1815 (51 years)	War in 1866, then a new union and the Empire of 1871.
Senegambia Confederation, 1982 (7 years)	Dissolved in 1989. Nothing replaced it.

The pattern is plain. A confederation does not grow into a federation. It is replaced by one, or it dies. But history shows two roads to a federation: a catastrophe that forces it, or a decision that does not wait for one. Gradualism offers neither. Unless the people choose union before a crisis chooses it for us, the African Union will remain a club, and in that weakened state Africa will remain the last, and not the first.

What it costs us
Who benefits while Africa stays as fifty-four separate negotiating tables? Not us. It is the buyer of our cobalt, our bauxite, our timber, our oil and our fish. A buyer who deals with fifty-four sellers one at a time can play one against another, and does.

Then there is the money that simply leaves. UNCTAD estimated in 2020 that about $88.6 billion a year flows out of Africa illicitly, against about $102 billion a year coming in as aid and investment (48 plus 54). Divide 88.6 by 102 and you get 0.87: for every dollar that arrives, about 87 cents leaves by the back door. It is an estimate, and not every cent is presidential theft; companies move money too. But that is exactly my point. Fifty-four small tax offices, each afraid the investor will take his factory next door, could never audit a multinational with the world’s best lawyers.

The Faustian bargain
Faust sold his soul for riches and thought he had struck a bargain. There is a bargain in all this too, and the devil does not even bother to hide. Those who profit from our division go on profiting from it. In return, those who hold our presidencies go on holding them. No paper was signed. None was needed. The incentives did the signing.

Fifty-four thrones are fifty-four reasons never to build one house, and the people who sit on them are not stupid. In too many of our countries the presidency is not an office. It is a throne, and it is the fastest road to a fortune. A man who has found the fastest road to a fortune does not leave it. That is why they stay – twenty years, thirty years, until a ballot, a bullet, or a graveyard recalls them. Truth or legend, it is said that the first foreign visitor a new African president receives is a Swiss banker. I cannot prove the story, but it has lasted because we believe it, and what we believe tells you what we think about the presidency.

And the people? They pay for both sides of the bargain. We are kept poor. The poor can be set against each other by the same men who need our quarrels to stay in office. And when the quarrels become wars, it is the poor who carry the machetes. The last installment of the bargain is making the people the fodder and boy are our “leaders” fabulous at that.

And I understand why the presidents never speak even in the face of these unspeakable horrors of gradualism. They get overthrown – by the standard academic count (Powell and Thyne), more than 220 coup attempts in Africa since 1950, and about half succeeding. I think that count is low. A second database, from the Cline Centre at the University of Illinois, also counts foiled plots and lists 451 coup events in Africa since 1950, including 119 plots. If our leaders are so busy plotting against the plotters to save themselves, how can they plot for our security – economic, social and political? Their worry is the next upstart colonel, not the neo-colonialist, as long as they abide by the rules of neo-colonialism: gradualism. Kwame Nkrumah asked for union in 1963, and in 1966 he was overthrown. Muammar Qaddafi pressed for an immediate union government in Accra in July 2007. The AU summit turned him down and chose to continue the gradual road. Four years later the long knives along the thousand mile journey got him. France and Britain led the campaign that toppled him. Rebels killed him. Deeply flawed as he was, he made the one choice that could work. I for one do not judge this message by the messenger. If Satan confirms that God exists, the believer does not doubt it. The safe speech is the careful one. That is what gradualism really means: not government policy, but life insurance for presidents. I do not ask our presidents to be heroes. I ask the rest of us to stop waiting for them. They are 54 men and women in command of other men and women who can refuse, if we refuse.

The verdict
Gradualism has had its trial, in the only court that matters, the court of results. The timetable has been missed. The club that is meant to lead us cannot pay its own way. And the people who gain from our waiting are fine to keep us waiting.

We were commanded to be patient. Yet what wisdom is gained in bearing a yoke beneath which a select few grow fat? Patience that fattens the ruler and starves the rest becomes the bread upon which injustice feeds. Let us learn the lesson and be done with this now.

But my friend the skeptic is not finished. He thinks taking away fifty-four thrones leaves one big throne that every colonel will want. That is next …

By Morro Ceesay