Pan-africanism exhibition at AU HQ, an insult for Continent!

Worku B. from Kera

Thanks to Ethio telecom! Text messages flood our cell phones daily in the face of our little space of memory card we own. Of late, most people have received one SMS message read as 'Promoting pan-Africanism & African Renaissance through ICT' and my friends and I did not want either to miss this huge opportunity or delay for it. And we attended the exhibition on the 22nd of November.

Alas, by the time we arrived at the head quarter of AU, there was a long queue on the irritating hot sun making our while too bitter. And finally we got the chance to enter into the new gracious and tall African Union Commission complex. Inside the complex, at one corner we saw some people displaying materials, their number does not exceed fifteen. Most of the displays, if not all, has nothing to do with the theme of the exhibition.

In the first place this huge idea need to be well managed, other African countries' innovations with regard to ICT, achievements in ICT registered so far that holds hopes to tie up the people of Africa together, progresses African people show in the area and the likes should be shown off. And at least third of African countries could have displayed their successes that match the theme. Some of the displays even gave us a shock wave as we hardly understand why they are there.

Africa is a big continent, and pan africanism encompasses a wide range of noble ideas. Plus, the continent has conceived and delivered a lot of innovative persons, thus, is endowed with varieties of innovations in the ICT area which the organizers look like are failing to understand. Compared to that the so called exhibition takes a dwarf position, I can say. Almost every of the people who attended the session on that morning expressed the exhibition, 'a total wastage of time'. On top of that, the very funny stuff was security personals of AU did not allow visitors stay there more than an hour, even my friends and I could not stay for thirty minutes, we were driven out soon from the small display room.

Therefore,those who organize the 'event' need to ask apology for the messes created, and should change the theme they have wrongly assigns!!