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By Dotun Oyelami
Next week, from February 11-15, the African Union’s 39th Ordinary Session will gather in Addis Ababa under the resonant theme: “Assuring Sustainable Water Availability and Safe Sanitation Systems to Achieve the Goals of Agenda 2063.” The symbolism is profound, water is the source of life, the bedrock of health, agriculture, and stability. Yet, as signatories settle into discussions on hydrological policy and climate resilience, a far more urgent crisis drowns out the agenda; the systematic trafficking of African youth to Russia for warfare and weapons manufacturing.
This is not a sidebar issue. It is a direct hemorrhage of the continent’s future. While the summit’s theme ties water to development, what development can be sustained if our most vital resource, our people, is being exploited, deceived, and consumed on foreign soil?
Juwon Sanyaolu, National Coordinator of the Take-It-Back (TIB) Movement and a formidable voice in international human rights, frames this with unflinching clarity. “Next week, our leaders will meet to discuss water security,” Sanyaolu notes. “But what of human security? While we plan for sustainable water, we are allowing the utterly unsustainable depletion of African lives. Agenda 2063 speaks of a ‘people-driven development.’ How can it be people-driven when our people are being driven, by deception, into foreign armies and bomb factories?”
The evidence is no longer speculative. Over 1,400 Africans from 36 nations have been identified fighting for Russia in Ukraine, many recruited under false pretenses. Simultaneously, the “Alabuga Start” programme, targeting young African women with promises of education and opportunity, funnels them into assembling Iranian-designed Shahed drones in Tatarstan under conditions that meet the definition of human trafficking. Sanyaolu’s analysis is stark;
“This summit’s agenda includes ‘security challenges’ in the Sahel, DRC, Sudan, and Libya. But the most pervasive security failure is the one happening in our digital spaces, in our communities, where our children are being digitally hunted with fake job offers. This is a continental emergency. When a young woman from Lagos or Nairobi ends up in a drone factory in Alabuga, her communications monitored, her labour exploited, and her life at risk of missile strikes that is not a bilateral labour dispute. That is a failure of continental protection. It spits on the African Charter’s guarantees of dignity, equitable work, and women’s rights.”
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The AU’s aspirations, particularly Aspiration 3 on good governance and human rights, and Aspiration 6 on women and youth empowerment, are rendered meaningless if they are not mobilized against this clear and present danger. Sanyaolu challenges the very framework of the upcoming summit: “A theme is a focus, not a fence. It should not blind leaders to crises that scream for attention. We cannot afford to be a Union that discusses water governance while ignoring the governance of our own borders and the predators who slip through them with promises that are poison.”
The procedural machinery of the summit, the PRC sessions, the Executive Council meetings, must be leveraged for immediate action. “This is not about adding another workshop or side event,” Sanyaolu insists. “It is about placing an emergency item on the Assembly’s formal agenda. It is about issuing a united demand for the immediate repatriation of our citizens, a full investigation into recruitment networks, and accountability from the Russian Federation. Silence is complicity. Inaction is endorsement.”
As the final preparations are made for the summit, the question before every head of delegation is this: Will you arrive in Addis Ababa only to discuss the resources that sustain life, or will you also take decisive action to protect the lives that sustain Africa’s future?
“Next week is not just about policy,” Sanyaolu concludes. “It is about conscience. The ‘Africa We Want’ cannot be built with the hands of our children if those hands are shackled abroad. Let the summit be remembered not for the theme it chose, but for the courage it found to address the crisis it must not ignore.”
The world is watching. History, too.
• Dotun Olayemi is a public affairs analyst, he writes from Lagos.
