Gaddafi’s United States of Africa: Would you buy a used camel from this son of the desert?

At some point, things became such that Pan-Africanism was Pan-African only if its central business were conducted from Accra.

Nkrumah — who felt arrogant enough to allow his acolytes to call him Osagyefo, the Messiah) — apparently came to think of himself as the saviour of the entire continent and the rightful first president of the United States of Africa.

It was to this end that he instigated the first of the continent’s regional blocs, a left-wing West African “union” composed of his Ghana, Ahmed Sekou Toure’s Guineas and Modibo Keita’s Mali, with himself in the front seat — a union reminiscent of the United Arab Republic that Egypt’s Abdel Gamal Nasser forged with Syria in the 1950s.

The problem was that Nkrumah was always wary of these local initiatives unless he was their instigator.

That was why he was never happy about the East African Community, an outfit acquired and reshaped from the colonial regime by Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

The Ghanaian leader was reported greatly agitated when, just before Kenya’s Independence at the end of 1963, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere and Milton Obote signed a treaty committing them to an East African federation as soon all the three countries were independent.

In the early 1970s, when I worked in Dar es Salaam, the story was all over the place – especially on the campus of the University of Salaam at Ubungo: Nkrumah was using the Kampala government to scuttle the treaty.

Gaddafi’s activities uncannily resemble those of Nkrumah, although the leader of the Jamahariya falls far short of the intellectual qualities of the great West African leader.

Whereas Nkrumah belonged to the category of Amilcar Cabral, Lopo do Nascimento, Julius Nyerere, Samora Machel — middle class radicals who could advance cogent political and philosophical theories — Gaddafi is unequalled as a populist and rabble-rouser.

The Western media are wrong to depict him as a man who clings to power out of fear. I think most of his people genuinely love him, and that he owes this to a rare gift of the gab.

He shares this with the original Nkrumah.

With the later Nkrumah, he also shares the habit of calling for a continental government but only in his own terms and only as long as he is the unchallenged leader on the path to the realisation of such a government.

He has attempted many regional alliances, including one with Tunisia, which resembled Col Nasser’s United Arab Republic but which was bound to come a cropper because of his insistence that he knew better than the Tunisian leaders what was good for a such a union.

His swagger and self-congratulation are what makes it so difficult for his colleagues in continental and world councils to trust him, to move close to him or support any of his proposals, however, idealistic they may be.

This, I think, was why the African Union leaders were so suspicious about Gaddafi’s proposal to be allowed a second term as AU Chair so as to pursue his ideals for the continent.