February 04, 2008	Monday	Muharram 25, 1429

ADDIS ABABA (Ethiopia): The United States of Africa. It’s one of few concrete plans African leaders agreed on as they struggled with issues of peacekeeping and political disputes at this week’s continental summit.

The problem is, so many countries want to be Washington, DC.

African leaders have been pushing for a continental government for years. And the plan continued to garner widespread support from the 40-odd delegations at the African Union summit that ended Saturday in Ethiopia’s capital.

Yet even countries facing disputed elections and conflict at home were loath to suggest they would be anything but a leader of the group — even given the light-hearted question of what US state they most resemble. Their responses highlight pecking-order positioning that could keep a federally unified continent from ever becoming a reality.

“Sudan is something like Washington, DC,” said Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem, Sudan’s ambassador to the United Nations. “Sudan is always a leader. So we want to have the White House of Africa, the Pentagon of Africa.”

Bamanga Tukur, a native of Nigeria and chairman of the AU’s New Partnership for African Development, gave the honour to Ethiopia, the only African nation to have never been colonised.

“Ethiopia can be Washing-ton,” he said. As for his own, oil-rich nation, Tukur said: “Nigeria can be Texas. Isn’t that nice?”

Everyone agrees that a unified African government could take decades, and would require many nations to make drastic improvements to governance, infrastructure, poverty and education.

But the stickiest issue is power, so most leaders advocate a slow approach that will let them cement their regional ties and position, analysts say. Others have called for quicker integration, which might favour their more established governments.—AP