It is always difficult to talk about Ghana's March 6 independence day without talking about Dr.Kwame Nkrumah--quintessential Pan-Africanist. I cannot wait to see what the African Union has in store to commemorate his birthday.
Even before then, I am keen to see how minds will be sensitized the necessity of whipping up support for Pan-Africanism. Many of my contemporaries who have had the opportunity to travel outside Ghana and the continent and come back regrettably are hooked onto the capitalist ideology of free-markets. So imbued are they to that and the concept of foreign investment that I suspect the mere mention of Pan-Africanism is sufficient to send most of them to a catatonic state.
But let me be more clear about my point: the AFrican Union, in my humble view, would have to be invented did Nkrumah not invest energies into it. Despite how far it has come--to the extent that we can now talk of a "Peace and Security Architecture" or APSA (http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/where/acp/regional-cooperation/peace/capacity_building/apsa_en.htm)--I sincerely believe that the communication of it remains so execrable that most Africans are unable to appreciate the quality of the experience known as the AU experience.
Not to mention how the youth have been excluded from participating in discussions and events that seek to promote, and reduce the level of abstraction that issues on the AU seems to hover around.
An understanding of the AU will never happen quickly without interested Pan-Africanists choosing to make more noise than necessary about where the AU is and where it's going!
