By Pascal Fletcher

DAKAR, June 7 (Reuters) - African leaders meeting next month should start forming a continental federal government that would allow Africa to solve its own problems like Darfur and AIDS, and speak with a single voice, Senegal's foreign minister said.

Cheikh Tidiane Gadio said a July 1-2 African Union summit in Accra would try to start turning into a reality the dream of a federal United States of Africa conceived by Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president and pioneer of Pan-Africanism.

"That is the only item on the Accra summit agenda," Gadio said in an interview late on Wednesday. He said the debate would have symbolic force 50 years after Ghana became the first black nation in sub-Saharan Africa to win independence.

But he acknowledged there was still reticence among some African leaders about the viability of the project -- an ambitious enterprise on a vast 54-nation continent carved up by artificial colonial borders and rent by ethnic, political and religious differences that have spawned wars and massacres.

Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade was proposing that the existing AU Commission, a purely administrative body, be converted into an embryonic African government of ministers with powers to take decisions on key issues like the environment, health and education, and defence and peacekeeping.

Gadio said a union government would give the continent of 800 million people a powerful single voice to defend African interests in international trade talks, and an administration with the authority to solve continental problems, be they illiteracy or AIDS or the humanitarian crisis in Sudan's Darfur.

He rejected suggestions that debating the merits of a federal government would distract attention from the urgent situation in Darfur, where several million people face violent death and starvation in a seemingly intractable conflict.

"It's so strange that people cannot understand that if we had a union government, if we were politically united, Chad and Sudan would not have a problem at their border and the Darfur crisis would have been taken care of within the global borders of Africa," Gadio said.

"MORE DIVIDED THAN EVER"

Gadio said some leaders still believed the best way to build a United States of Africa was to approach the goal gradually through the consolidation of regional economic groupings -- like SADCC in the south, ECOWAS in the west and COMESA in the east.

He called this the "old strategy", which had failed to lift Africa from its ranking as the world's poorest continent while other large territories, like Brazil, India, China and the United States, advanced, most after embracing federalism.

"It's interesting, but 44 years of that (old strategy) have yielded the outcome that we know -- we are more divided than ever and our development is not coming about," he said.

As an example, Gadio said an African defence minister in a continental government would have power and resources at his disposal to carry out effective peacekeeping in Africa.

An under-equipped 7,000-strong AU peacekeeping mission in Darfur has suffered casualties in the violent Sudanese region. Some contributors like Senegal have threatened to withdraw their peacekeepers unless the force receives more U.N. support soon.

"Frankly, we have 2 million Africans serving their countries in the army, and we need only 20,000 Africans to go to Darfur, (but) we cannot even collect 7,000, barely. So an African minister of defence would help," Gadio said.

He said a consensus in Accra to start forming the union government would be a fitting tribute to Nkrumah, who was overthrown and died in exile without seeing his dream for a federal United States of Africa become reality.

"I'm even dreaming of Nkrumah City or Nkrumahville, like Washington D.C., one day, in a federal Africa," Gadio said.

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