With Libya’s transitional leadership saying they awaite state visits by British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, some analysts are warning that Africa may yet face echoes of its colonial past.

­Gaddafi’s Libya was the engine uniting Africa, argued Dan Glazebrook, a political analyst on the Middle East. And a united Africa, he noted, would have meant a final break from the centuries of Western colonial rule over the continent.

“Gaddafi was the main driving force behind founding the African Union in 2002,” he told RT. “His country was the main financial contributor to the three major financial institutions of the African Union: the African Central Bank, the Investment Bank and the African Monetary Fund. Between them, they would have posed a huge challenge to the IMF hegemony in Africa.”

Moreover, Libya’s dinar, which was proposed as the single currency of the union, would have posed a threat to the US dollar, British pound and French franc as the main currencies in Africa.

“All of this is a threat to Africa’s subordinate role in the global economy,” claimed the political analyst.

Glazebrook also played down Washington’s concerns about emerging sectarian violence in post-revolutionary Arab states, including Libya.

Portraying “the US as some kind of champion of religious tolerance is part of an exercise in ideological confusion designed to obscure the fact that the US has been the biggest supporter of religious intolerance around the world,” he said. “It is a part of a divide-and-rule strategy to keep the Third World’s peoples from uniting.”