The question of citizenship is central to a number of political conflicts and violation of human and people’s rights in Africa today. The rights of citizens in a particular polity, the rights of non citizens especially African migrants, refugees and residents in other African countries are explosive issues that are often swept under the carpet of on going discourse and initiatives on these issues in many countries. In most cases these non-citizens are usually long term residents, second and even more generations of African migrants and settlers in other African countries. For example, Southern Africans in South Africa; Nigerians in Ghana; or Ghanaians in Nigeria and West Africans in other West African countries. Often the narrow interests of governments and different political interests disregard the fine texts of these legal instruments when it comes to treatment of ‘aliens’, ‘foreigners’, who are usually blamed for all kinds of economic and political problems.

The ruling party of Zambia tried to deny the former president any future political participation by amending the constitution of the country. There are too many cases of mass denial of legal and political rights to thousands of Africans, sometimes even whole communities right across Africa. Most independence negotiations in countries with significant non-African settlers had some inbuilt protection of the rights of these groups such as Zimbabwe, Kenya, Uganda and more recently South Africa.

Lastly, the legal protection of Human Rights is too strongly in favour of individual rights and at best, ambiguous on people’s rights. This is one of the reasons why the African charter on human and people’s rights was adopted by the OAU member states. PADEAP’s consultations and initial research across the Great Lakes region completes the first phase of our project. We hope to extend it to other regions.

Our aim is to build a network of Advocacy groups to focus on these issues and work towards the adoption of an African Charter on Citizenship.

A brief report of the work is now available. We hope to bring out the book that would include all the presentations and other commissioned papers as a modest contribution to the necessary debate on these issues.

We would also like to thank all the participants and also the Ford Foundation (Nairobi and New York) for supporting the project.