In July 1999, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi hurriedly petitioned an OAU heads of state and government summit meeting in Algiers that they convene again in two months, this time in his hometown of Sirte.

The stated purpose of the Extraordinary Summit was to amend the charter of the much-excoriated Organisation of African Unity to make it more adapted to “meeting the challenges of the new millennium.”

However, suspicions remain that it was meant to help usher Gaddafi back into the fold in the wake of his détente with the West.

The ensuing Sirte Summit holds a special place in annals as the birthplace of the modern-day African Union, but none of the 33 leaders travelling to the dusty remote town would have anticipated that they would in addition be asked to give up their respective sovereignties for the creation of a “United States of Africa,” and all in two days.

Unsurprisingly, the plan was given short shrift, but to his credit Gaddafi kept banging the unity drum until the day he died, ironically in Sirte.

Since then, the plan has flagged, with its latter-day disciples such as Robert Mugabe and Yoweri Museveni sounding forlorn and nostalgic.

But the basic idea of an African political federation was nothing new, having been fronted as early as the 1960s in the wake of colonial handovers to Independence regimes.

The most visible was what was known as the Casablanca Group, a bloc of states that had styled themselves as progressive and which roped in most of the Maghreb, but had the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah as its leader.

It was, however, opposed by the ‘Monrovia’ bloc led by Leopold Senghor of Senegal, which called for a gradual union through economic co-operation instead. Not surprisingly, the gradualists prevailed, mainly because many countries were unwilling to give up their newfound freedom.

The dispute was finally settled at the OAU Addis Ababa summit in 1963, which many say was actually the last nail in the coffin of a single Africa, by bringing in a new version that watered down the original dream.

A clutch of coups d’etat later removed most of the visionaries.

Then and now

Fifty years later, it would appear that the spirit of the Monrovia grouping is reawakened. This year the African Union is celebrating its Jubilee under the Pan-African and the African Renaissance theme.

The main change is that the bloc’s leadership has economic emancipation as its goal for the next half-century, arguing that political liberation has long since been achieved.

It will now be about all the freedom of movement, labour and capital, AU Commission chair Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma has argued.

Can it be achieved? Can Africa collapse its borders? Become a single market? Ms Dlamini-Zuma holds that the AU is up to the task of driving this agenda.

“We have reserves of arable land. We have natural resources that — if we are able to turn them into wealth — can make a very prosperous continent,” she said in an interview carried in the May issue of the Africa Report.

“But if you divide us into individual countries, we are not significant. So it’s very important that we integrate, and integration is an expression of pan-Africanism.”

She envisages, that by 2063, there should be free movement of people, goods and capital in Africa, which she says is “critical.”

Essentially, the new AU argues that economic unity will eventually lead to political unity, an admission of sorts that the continent’s differences in governance values are not going away soon.

But the 54-member body is looking to climb the tree from the top, observers say, warning that what killed the original pan-African dream could again be the scourge of the rebooted economic drive.

“For real emancipation, economic or otherwise, the leadership has to be there to drive the vision. We have no one African leader who can drive the idea of a single Africa, with most being corrupt and beset by domestic problems,” Professor Korwa Adar of the Department of International Relations at the United States International University in Kenya told the Africa Review.

Prof Adar said that things would only change if a new generation of leaders with a clear vision of Africa took over, and a culture of constitutionalism was made institutional, including respect for the rule of law.

“Until such a time, new drives are going to be mere rhetoric,” Prof Adar said.

In 2001, the OAU met in Lusaka to hammer out the basics of implementing the mooted African Union. Several speakers there hinted at modelling it along the lines of the European Union, arguing that there was no need “to reinvent the wheel,” though they eventually favoured setting up something with an African flavour.

House out of order

William Zartman, Professor Emeritus at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, also cautions that rushing to integrate economically without getting the political house in order would be ill-advised. The process just cannot be glossed over, he said.

“To have state integration, one must have functioning states with meaningful sovereignty, then have political values that see added value in unification and sell their message at home,” he told the Africa Review.

Mr Zartman, co-author of The OAU after Twenty Years, published in 1984, however conceded that the bloc is now more concentrated on its job of improving internal security and “developing continental norms,” but says that while the continent can still learn from the EU, it is still far from imitating it.

“Look and learn. But look and emulate, we are far from it,” Mr Zartman says.

So it looks as if, much as it would rather sweep the issue under the carpet as it seeks the economic kingdom, the AU will still have to get its political house in order first, a message many fear could get lost in the festivities.