Africa Day 2025: Independence without justice is a fallacy

ON this year’s May 25th, Africa stands at a crossroads. As we mark Africa Day, we honour the historic formation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1963, now the African Union (AU). We must be earnest, however, in reflecting not only on the past, but also the present and future of Africa.

It has been 35 years since Namibia, the final African nation to gain independence, became sovereign. Yet decades after the end of colonial rule, Africa continues to bear the weight of foreign-imposed borders, extractive economies, and systemic underdevelopment.

This Africa Day, we must confront a painful truth: Independence without justice is a broken promise. It is time to interrogate — and actively address — why countless African nations that have been independent for decades still arduously struggle to enact development and stability, and why meaningful justice continues to slip through the cracks.

Africa doesn’t need another empty celebration — it needs radical change, action, and a return to the bold, uncompromising spirit of Pan-African unity.

Africa Day and the AU have not only been revolutionarily symbolic to the continental agenda of Africa, but they have also been transformational in their existence alone. To this day, they are marked by the commemoration of formidable leaders across the entire continent, such as Kwame Nkrumah, Haile Selassie, Julius Nyerere, Sekou Toure, Leopold Senghor, Kenneth Kaunda, and so many more.

These leaders’ commonalities were many, but none as important as the fact that they all understood that the freedom of one African nation meant nothing without the liberation of all.

The formation of the OAU and the establishment of the first meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, was a bold declaration of unity, resistance, and solidarity against colonial domination, apartheid, and foreign exploitation overall. The OAU gave voice to the oppressed, shelter to revolutionaries, and support to anti-colonial movements. From Cape to Cairo, Morocco to Madagascar, the OAU stood not just as a diplomatic body but as a symbol of African defiance and collective will.

Today, as the OAU’s successor, the African Union, the mission remains just as urgent. The chains of colonialism may have changed form, but they certainly have not been broken. The AU, at its core, speaks to the social justice of Africa. Social justice itself, across the continent, is highly intersectional with issues of economic inequality, Western imperialism, foreign military presence, extractive trade practices, and so many more. The challenges that are faced by modern Africans are highly complex and orchestrated, but they highlight a fundamental fact: the value of Africa remains immeasurable.

The AU has the potential to be more than a bureaucratic institution; it can be a force for radical Pan-African cooperation, self-determination, and justice. In a world that continues to undervalue African lives, labour, and land, the AU must reclaim the spirit of its founding, one rooted in liberation, unity, and unapologetic resistance to global inequality.

Pan-Africanism is not a relic of a romanticised past. It is a living, breathing vision for the future — one that demands a radical reordering of power, rooted in solidarity, equity, justice, and dignity for all African people. It calls for us to imagine an Africa that belongs to Africans. Not to multinational corporations, foreign creditors, or puppet regimes, but to its people, its workers, its youth, and its communities.

From public service delivery to rampant corruption in leadership, to debilitated healthcare systems, to extreme rates of illness and disease, amongst others, Africa’s people continue to endure the consequences of broken systems and global inequality.

The reality is that people across Africa are stuck in a loop of generational impoverishment, despite their excruciating sacrifices to obliterate colonial and imperial rule in their nations. By all ethical and legal standards, this is injustice in its purest form.

To answer today’s challenges, the AU must scale a mountain riddled with discriminatory histories and hardships. This is certainly no time for complacency. The AU has a mountain of resistance, reform, and reckoning ahead.

The AU cannot afford to remain a symbolic gathering of heads of state while the continent continues to bleed under the weight of colonial scars and modern imperialism. If it is to be the voice of Africa’s liberation, the AU must rise with urgency and purpose. It must dismantle the economic inequalities, rampant poverty, corruption, displacement, illiteracy, and institutional biases that have plagued contemporary African nations.

Despite the promises of independence, far too many Africans still live in conditions shaped by colonial-era inequalities. Land is stolen or sold to foreign investors. Resources are extracted while local communities are left in poverty. Education systems glorify European thinkers while silencing African knowledge. Debt traps, climate injustice, and global trade structures continue to rob Africa of its potential.

Furthermore, many of Africa’s leaders of today have failed to uphold the values of those who formed the OAU. Let’s call it for what it is: betrayal. Too many African leaders have sold out the Pan-African vision, trading liberation for tea with global elites and foreign applause. They speak the language of unity while striking deals that deepen inequality and crush transformation at home.

Pan-Africanism was never meant to be about polite diplomacy or power games, it was a revolutionary project rooted in collective freedom and self-determination. Africa doesn’t need more performance or empty rhetoric. It needs leaders who serve the people, who build with the grassroots, who uphold the fibre of indigenous Africans in their lands.

The AU knows the contentious battles that have been launched in the name of exploitative trade deals and asserting full control over Africa’s vast resources. It must stand boldly against foreign military occupations and debt traps disguised as aid. More importantly, it must listen - not just to presidents, but to the people: the youth, the workers, the elderly, the organisers who have never stopped fighting for a truly free and united Africa.

Pan-Africanism was never meant to be polite diplomacy. It was, and still is, a revolutionary call to uproot oppression and reclaim African power. The AU must return to that radical promise, or risk becoming irrelevant in the face of mounting challenges faced by Africans everywhere in today’s unscrupulous world.

More than a ceremonial moment, Africa Day is a day of reckoning, a clarion call to rekindle the fire of Pan-Africanism, the liberation ideology that once rallied an entire continent against colonial rule, and which must now be revived to dismantle the ongoing chains of economic exploitation, political marginalisation, and social injustice.

Pan-Africanism insists on justice, not charity, not aid. It demands reparative policies that correct historical theft. It is about the liberation of African people in every form: social, economic, political, psychological — a liberation that is truly entrenched in the lived realities of Africa’s people.

Africa Day is not just a commemoration of the past; it is a battle cry for a future rooted in unity, justice, and African self-determination. Today is more than a celebratory date; it is a demand for Africa to unite, not just in spirit, but in purpose, policy, and people's power.

As the former Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie once beautifully articulated: “We must become bigger than we have been: more courageous, greater in spirit, larger in outlook. We must become members of a new race, overcoming petty prejudice, owing our ultimate allegiance not to nations but to our fellow men”. Indeed, Africa for Africans. One voice. One struggle. One destiny.

* Tswelopele Makoe is a gender and social justice activist and the editor at Global South Media Network. She is also an Andrew W. Mellon scholar at the Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice, UWC. The views expressed are her own.

** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, Independent Media, or IOL.