In Africa’s ubiquitous urban slums, children play at Formula One racing with bricks they push through the dust. At the African Union summit in Accra last week their leaders did much the same. There was just one item on the agenda, and it had nothing to do with the persecution and slaughter of their brethren in Darfur, Somalia, Congo or (heaven forfend) Zimbabwe, let alone the political and economic reforms that could bring jobs and hope to those urban slums. Africa’s overlords had weightier matters on their mind.

Urged on by that well-known African, the gold-garbed Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, they devoted the entire three days to a “Grand Debate” on creating a United States of Africa, complete with a federal government with a 15-member cabinet and a two million-strong continental army under the command of – who other than Muammar Gaddafi, who has proposed himself as Africa’s minister of defence.

No matter that all concerned knew that this was an exercise in futility that would at best end in a “road map” to union, destined to peter out in a dead end. Asked whether it was not more urgent to get their domestic houses in order before building this continental palace, or at least to practice African unity before preaching it.

Ghana’s Foreign Minister replied: “Yes, we have serious problems, people are dying in places like Somalia and Darfur. But people are dying everywhere in the world, not just in Africa.” Let them eat grenades. Not bad, toasted.

It is more than 50 years since Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah raised the pan-African banner, arguing unsuccessfully for a federal African government. Nkrumah failed even to forge a permanent union with neighbouring Mali and Guinea, and in practice set about dismantling such common West African institutions as the British had left behind. Since Nkrumah’s day Africa’s 53 states have become more, not less, divided. Its governments have signed countless regional agreements, on human rights, economic development and trade, which they then ignore. They do not even pay their dues to the African Union, thus ensuring its ineffectiveness.

Gaddafi will not give up bribing and bullying African governments to support his Big Idea because his African love affair is less capricious than might appear. It is his “insurance” against the day when his barren land runs out not only of oil, but also of water. Libya, he tells his people, would cease to exist in a US of Africa, but Libyans would have the run of the “paradise” of Africa’s natural wealth. Africa’s political heavyweights know what he is after. But they will not admit that pan-African unity is make-believe. The kids playing in the townships have a better grip on reality.

Times Recommends

• Britain doesn’t need a dose of shock therapy
• Why the sea eagle has no right to land here
• Let older women have a voice at the BBC