Page 44 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 2
P. 44
The building was inaugurated on 28 January 2012. pull 200 million dollars together to build the African
The AUCC is built on the site of the former Alem Union Headquarters, while China which is just one
Bekagn prison, used during the Italian occupation nation could do so, is nothing but nonsense. And
of Ethiopia, and subsequently by Haile Selassie and come to think of it, what really has happened to the
Mengistu Haile Mariam to house political prisoners. Afrikan pride? Or are the fifty-five leaders of the fifty-
The decision to construct the AU headquarters five nations of Africa unaware of the fact that he who
on this former prison grounds was criticized by builds the town hall of the community has control of
survivors, as they were disappointed by the AU’s the proceedings of the elders in that town hall and
lack of acknowledgement of the torture used on the by extension the community they represent? What
site. happened to the ancient wisdom of God bestowed
to Afrika and how did she become so helpless?
Facilities
I shared my worries with the magazine team. And
The office tower of the AUCC one question that was on my mind all that time was
The headquarters comprise a 20-storey office “what if the Chinese government, in their beautiful
building, housing the administrative departments benevolence, rigged the entire building with bugs
of the African Union Commission; a 2,505-person- to spy on the meetings and recordings of the AU
capacity plenary chamber; and a sub-conference proceedings”? Little did I know that not only did
building with 32 conference rooms. The AUCC they suspect that it was possible, but in January
is designed to be environmentally-friendly, using 2018, six years after the opening of the AUCC, a
passive cooling to control the building’s climate report in the Afrikan edition of Le Monde, confirmed
in the heat of Addis Ababa without high energy by the Financial Times, claimed that the AU’s IT
consumption. The complex also contains the African department had discovered in early 2017 that the
Union Grand Hotel, funded by the Ethiopian-Saudi site’s computer systems were connecting nightly to
billionaire Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi and servers in Shanghai and uploading AU files as well
managed by Westin, which is primarily for hosting as recordings from microphones embedded in the
presidents and diplomats during AU summits. walls and furniture. The espionage allegation was
outrightly denied and the matter buried.
The lost Afrikan pride
A visit to this grand edifice, like I said earlier was My take on this issue is this, even if the Chinese
beautiful, but it left me with lots of questions that I government has no espionage undertone for
could not find straight answers for. But of the many donating the building to the African Union, should it
questions that flood my mind, the main one was, not be a thing of worry that Afrika, after almost sixty
why should China or the Chinese government be years of independence from colonial rule, still cannot
the one to build a conference center where the take responsibility for her own things and must still
leaders of fifty five nations of Africa meet? I could depend on foreign money to do her projects?
not understand why that was even possible. What
in God’s name is happening I asked. The continent Afrika needs to wise up, in order to rise up.
of Afrika is the richest continent in the world,
irrespective of the lies and the many hoaxes that
have been created about how poor, malnourished,
backward, uncivilized Afrika and Afrikans are. So
to tell me that fifty five nations of Afrika could not
