by Susan Njanji 14 minutes ago   ACCRA (AFP) - African leaders were thrashing out plans to forge a closer union Monday in a series of closed-door meetings on the second day of a summit devoted to overhauling the system of governing the continent. Ghana's host President John Kufuor and African Union commission chief Alpha Oumar Konare have acknowledged the current executive had to be improved and that its remit was ill-defined. The leaders will now have to bang their heads together over how best to achieve that objective. "I am confident that at the end of our deliberations, we should be able to arrive at a common understanding on the sort of continental government we want for ourselves, and a roadmap with timelines on its realisation," Kufuor said in his opening address on Sunday. Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, barred from travelling to Europe and the United States but still regarded as a liberation hero by many Africans, was among the heads of state who have invoked the memory of Ghana's founding father Kwame Nkrumah who was the first champion of African unity. "To tell you the truth, until and unless we put our act together, organise and start pulling our resources together, we will never ever prosper from any aid from any source outside Africa," Mugabe told a rally on the fringes of the summit on Sunday evening. "Nkrumah wanted the creation of a United States of Africa in 1963, but others said it was too early, and 44 years later, others are still saying we are not ready," he said. "If we were to organise ourselves in a unified form, in a united way, we would certainly emerge as a prosperous continent." Kufuor, the current president of the African Union, said earlier this year the continent had been embarrassed by the unravelling crisis in Zimbabwe. The country is reeling from the impact of an inflation rate now believed to be around 5,000 percent, as well as political violence. Although the Accra summit is meant to be devoted to the prospects for closer unity, dubbed by some as the creation of a United States of Africa, the continent's troublespots are still looming large. The Darfur conflict, which scuppered Khartoum's hopes of assuming the presidency at the last summit, also featured heavily on the opening day. Konare called for a United Nations resolution to hammer down a long-promised deployment of a hybrid UN-AU force to the western Sudanese region. UN Deputy Secretary General Asha Rose Migiro also weighed in, telling heads of state: "The violence in Darfur has been allowed to continue for far too long." The failure of a 7,000-strong AU force to make any impact on the situation in Darfur has underlined the shortcomings of the organisation which only came into being five years ago. But while some leaders such as Libya's Moamer Kadhafi and Senegal's Abdoulaye Wade believe that the formulation of common policies is the way ahead, others, such as South African President Thabo Mbeki, believe the AU's institutions need strengthening and nurturing