By Oumarou Sanou
Pan-Africanism is once again in vogue. But what is being marketed today, particularly by military-led regimes across the Sahel and their ideological enablers, is not Pan-Africanism. It is a distortion of it, seductive in its language and dangerous in its implications.
A new orthodoxy has taken hold. To gain admission into the growing club of self-appointed Pan-Africanists, one needs only to perform two rituals: express fierce hatred for the West, then faithfully echo the talking points of Moscow or Beijing. The louder the anti-Western rhetoric, the purer the credentials. Across social media and in certain political circles, an active disinformation architecture, both overt and covert, markets to African youths the idea that genuine liberation means substituting Washington for Moscow, Paris for Beijing, and Brussels for Ankara. These are false choices. This is not independence of thought. It is the outsourcing of African destiny to a different set of foreign masters, like a servitude dressed in Kente cloth.
At its core, Pan-Africanism has always stood for one fundamental principle: the right of African peoples to determine their own destiny. Not to rebrand dependency. Not to outsource it. To own it, fully and unapologetically. What we are witnessing today is its precise opposite.
Unfortunately, the Pan-Africanism being peddled by certain juntas is, at its core, a grand jail ruled by dictators who have traded democratic legitimacy for foreign patronage. When leaders in the Sahel invoke African sovereignty even as their political survival depends on the Wagner Group mercenaries and Kremlin goodwill, the contradiction is breathtaking. A country’s sovereignty is impossible without the sovereignty of its people, which means the rule of law, democratic governance, and the protection of individual rights.
A regime that silences its own citizens while railing against foreign imperialism is not an emancipator. It is an oppressor with a better publicist.
There is a further symptom of this counterfeit Pan-Africanism: the curious hierarchy of suffering it enforces. Passionate debates rage across the continent about the Middle East, with Africans taking heated sides over Gaza and Tel Aviv. Yet the carnage in Sudan, the horror in eastern Congo, the catastrophe in Ethiopia attract a fraction of the same outrage. Why should the Russia-Ukraine war command more African attention than the conflicts consuming the Great Lakes or the Sahel? Pan-Africanism that ignores African suffering in favour of globally fashionable causes is not Pan-Africanism. It is geopolitical ventriloquism.
We are living in the age of artificial intelligence, robotics, and commercial space exploration. The global economy is being reorganised by technologies that did not exist a generation ago. Against this backdrop, a handful of military dictators are attempting to justify their regimes by recycling the legitimate but exhausted struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. The anti-colonial struggle was necessary and noble. But the world has moved on, and Africa cannot afford to remain imprisoned by historical resentments while the future is being built without it.
The lesson from post-war Europe is instructive. France and Germany, nations that twice in a single century sent millions of each other’s sons to die, chose to build a common future rather than nurse their wounds. That decision produced the most ambitious peace project in modern history and made both nations more prosperous than they had ever been through conflict. Africa’s historical grievances are real. But fixating on past resentments is not a development strategy. It is an abdication of leadership.
Authentic Pan-Africanism is not an ideology of grievance. It is a programme of action. Half a century ago, South Korea and Singapore were poorer than many African countries. Today, they rank among the world’s most dynamic economies. The difference was not the absence of foreign interference; both nations had plenty of that. The difference was deliberate, coordinated, long-term investment in people, institutions, and infrastructure. Africa must absorb this lesson.
Real Pan-Africanism means building world-class infrastructure that drives intra-African trade. Nigeria’s development of the Lekki Deep Sea Port is a model of what ambition looks like in practice. It means moving Africa beyond the export of raw materials into value-added production, as the Dangote Oil Refinery is beginning to demonstrate at a continental scale, and as Benin is quietly pursuing through its industrial diversification. It means attracting international capital on Africa’s own terms, as Côte d’Ivoire has demonstrated with consistent success. And it means building world-class financial hubs that anchor African wealth within the continent, the Eko Atlantic development in Lagos, positioned to rival Dubai as a commercial gateway for West Africa, is precisely the kind of transformative vision that genuine
Pan-Africanism should champion.
It means investing in education and building connected middle classes, linked by common interests, shared values, and mutual prosperity, much as European integration was underpinned not only by treaties between governments but by the growing entanglement of peoples. It means coordinating African nations to engage the world from a position of collective strength, balancing the influence of competing great powers rather than becoming the instrument of any one of them.
Pan-Africanism must also defend what is distinctly African. This continent has values worth preserving and projecting: the centrality of family, the ethic of communal responsibility, and the dignity inherent in every human life. These are not remnants of underdevelopment to be overcome on the road to modernity. They are civilisational assets. As parts of the Western world grapple with social fragmentation, declining birth rates, and the erosion of intergenerational bonds, Africa has a genuine contribution to make to global civilisation, not as a supplicant, but as a peer.
None of this requires hostility to the international rules-based order. Pan-Africanism is not anti-Western; it is pro-African. When the international community insists that rules must be respected, African leaders can and should agree, because a rules-based world is one in which a stronger Africa can compete and thrive. What Africa rightly resists is not engagement with the world, but subordination to it. The continent must work with all partners, East and West, while remaining firmly anchored in its own interests.
The measure of Pan-Africanism is not the fervour of its anti-Western sentiment. It is the quality of life it delivers to the man in Kano or Bamako, the woman in Kinshasa or Harare, the child in Kampala or Khartoum. It is a continent where every person has a genuine chance at a better life, governed by law, empowered by education, and surrounded by family.
The future of Pan-Africanism lies not in slogans, but in systems. Not in anger, but in ambition. Not in rejecting the world, but in engaging it on Africa’s own terms. Africa’s destiny cannot be outsourced. It must be built, deliberately, collectively, and intelligently. That is the Pan-Africanism worth defending. Everything else is noise.
Sanou is a social critic, Pan-African observer and researcher focusing on governance, security, and political transitions in the Sahel. He writes on geopolitics, regional stability, and African leadership dynamics. Contact: [email protected]
