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Today’s Africa Day, which celebrates the founding of the Organisation of African Unity (now known as the African Union) on this day, 25 May in 1963, aiming to celebrate African unity. 

Africa Day is intended to celebrate and acknowledge the successes of the OAU for its fight against colonialism and apartheid, as well as the progress that Africa has made while reflecting on the common challenges that the continent faces in a global environment. 

The Social Development Department’s Migration Sub-Unit in Region E is hosting the 2022 Africa Day event to enhance social inclusion and promote active citizenry in partnership with the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa, the Action Support Centre and the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation.

As much as South Africa needs to play a leading role in helping to uplift our continent, we must also acknowledge that a laissez-faire attitude to allowing illegal migration from the continent and beyond it is not a sustainable solution to development. 

We must call on the AU to live up to the great ambitions it had and the promises it held at its formation to grow and develop a united Africa that generates opportunities across its length and breadth so that refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants will no longer see the need to risk life and limb to reach places like South Africa ­– which is now awash in its own challenges ­– in the hope for a better life.

This month nevertheless remains an opportunity to promote African unity, deepen regional integration in the pursuit of shared problem solving, and to recommit Africa to a common destiny.

The theme for this year’s Africa month celebration is “Strengthening Resilience in Nutrition and Food Security on The African Continent: Strengthening Agro-Food Systems, Protection Systems for the Acceleration of Human, Social and Economic Capital Development”.

Issued by The Office of the MMC for Health and Social Development, Councillor Ashley Sauls