It is contemporarily the in-thing to make fun of pan-Africanists. But while they are ultimately wrong as to who is correctly part of the in-group (not North Africans, Nilotes or Horners), they are intuitively directionally correct about scale as a tool for might.

Pan-Africanists are also wrong about the specific reasons for coming together. It's not for anti-colonial, anti-imperialist reasons. A losers' club composed of random groups standing against "Western imperialism" isn't going to do anyone any good.

The people who need to come together are a specific Niger-Congo group of people, for a singular reason: it was always meant to be this way.

The reason there are now tons of different Niger-Congo ethnic groups with differing genetic distances and out-admixture rates is entirely because of problems like poor epistemology and historical technological limitations.

Poor hard technological development caused communication and transportation constraints, reducing interaction and contact between different groups, allowing for gaps that seem unbridgeable to develop over time. This is in contrast to our modern times when advanced communication and transportation mean that you can get between any two points on Earth in a day by air, and can communicate with anyone anywhere in the world at any time in real time, making the entire world into something of "a global village".

Poor agricultural technology also likely meant the need to spread across wider areas of land to find specific cultivable land.

The impact of poor soft tech of the past shows up in the inability to resolve bitter conflicts between different clans, often birthing entirely new ethnic groups. Lots of stand-alone Niger-Congo ethnic groups existing across Africa are mere recent splinters from other groups, or divisions.

Even with the existing problems of inadequate hard technology impacting transportation and communication at the time, more correct epistemology could have led to an understanding of the importance of scale for development, which is only possible with large polities.

The same epistemology and technological weaknesses are responsible for the large Niger-Congo population in the diaspora. Without serious deficiencies in epistemology (correct moral engagement with the practice of slavery), soft technology (organization into large polities capable of pursuing long-term goals, internal unity that prevents the success of foreigner "divide and conquer" strategy) and hard technologies (sophisticated weaponry to repel colonization), none of the big crises of recent times would have happened.

Since all of the splintering and division are due to historical epistemological and technological weaknesses, the morally correct thing to do isn't passively accepting path dependence caused by these problems from the past, but to show agentic courage in taking morally correct action in the now.

Niger-Congo ethnic groups thus do not matter as a factor of independent polity, only as part of the concentric nature of identity. People can think of themselves as Yoruba, Ovimbundu or Zulu, but only in the sense that it is a part of their concentric personal identity beginning with the individual, and extending to their nuclear family, their immediate extended family... and on and on like that. There cannot and there will not be an absolutely independent Yoruba/Ovimbundu/Zulu nation.

Even while the idea of ethnic groups is sound and acceptable, because there are currently a lot of tiny ethnic groups which are not culturally powerful enough to be conceived of as genuinely independent, we will come to merge/integrate lots of ethnic groups based on legible factors like genetic distance and language.

In the same vein, existing national identities are a complete farce. It is not useful for anyone to think of themselves as "Nigerian", "Kenyan" or "Congolese" at all. These borders were drawn based on strategic geographical features as considered fitting by malevolent foreign colonizers, not on any reasonable understanding of the identities of different African ethnic groups.

So... our intention is to create a super-large polity made up of all of our in-group, which then correctly pursues the entire point of existence.