The African Union (AU) was born in the South African port metropolis of Durban in 2002. Under its first chair,Thabo Mbeki, African leaders appeared decided to desert the grandiose plans of its predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). The OAU had been established in 1963 to advertise African unity and liberation. Other goals included: to guard the territorial integrity of its member states, promote non-alignment, and advance the peaceful settlement of disputes.
The African Union, for its half, was established to realize an built-in, affluent and peaceable Africa which might be led by its personal residents and play a dynamic position in international politics. Unlike the OAU Charter, the AU’s Constitutive Act of 2000 allowed for interference in the inner affairs of its members to stem instability, halt egregious human rights abuses and sanction navy coups d’état.
Military regimes in Togo, Mauritania, Madagascar, Niger, Egypt, Sudan, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali and Burkina Faso had been thus suspended from the AU. The continental physique launched praiseworthy navy stabilisation missions into Burundi (2003), Darfur (2007) and Somalia (2007). However regardless of this progress, autocrats continued to rig electoral outcomes.
As the AU turned 20 in July 2022, it had achieved a few successes. But it stays a weak organisation embarking on sporadic bouts of illusory reforms. This is because of monetary and capability constraints. And an excessive amount of decision-making energy resides with its all-powerful heads of state which has denied the organisation the potential to take selections, and act extra successfully on behalf of its members.
Institutional sclerosis
The Addis Ababa-based AU Commission – its implementing arm – is led by an Assembly of Heads of State, with an Executive Council of overseas ministers and a Permanent Representatives Committee of ambassadors. The ambassadors work with specialised improvement, governance, parliamentary and judicial organs. The AU Commission has, nonetheless, struggled to determine its independence to take initiatives on behalf of its 55 member states in fulfilment of its mandate.
A 2007 audit report led by the Nigerian scholar-technocrat Adebayo Adedeji revealed how the AU Commission headed by Malian Alpha Konaré (2003-2008) misunderstood its mandates and authority ranges, and did not coordinate overlapping duties. Some of those issues nonetheless persist.
Under the French-influenced Gabonese Jean Ping (2008-2012), the fee’s annual price range had reached $260 million by 2011. Only 40% of this sum was really paid by members. The European Union, China and the United States largely funded the relaxation. This posed the danger that AU institutional priorities may very well be set by its donors.
The AU Assembly of heads of state has typically failed to stick to the precept of subsidiarity: taking selections at the lowest sensible degree, as the European Union – the world’s solely genuinely supranational regional organisation – does.
The AU additionally conducts most of its enterprise via unanimity, making it tough to succeed in fast selections.
While the AU Commission has some spectacular employees, it additionally has a lot “dead wood” inherited from the OAU period.
The AU’s 2003 plan to arrange an African Standby Force by 2010 was postponed until 2015. In December 2020, the organisation merely declared the pressure to be totally operational, regardless of the fantasy concerned in such a assertion. The deadline for “Silencing the Guns” (ending armed conflicts) by 2020“ was casually pushed again a decade.
Illusory reforms
As chair of the AU Commission (2012-2016), former South African overseas minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma complained that over 97% of the continental physique’s programmes had been funded by external donors. In 2013, $155 million of the $278 million annual price range (56%) was nonetheless provided by foreign partners. But Dlamini-Zuma failed to scale back this dependence throughout her four-year tenure. AU leaders refused to again efforts to seek out different sources of funding, similar to customs duties and taxes on flights and hotel stays.
Among the extra quixotic concepts of the Dlamini-Zuma-driven 50-year improvement imaginative and prescient, “Agenda 2063” consists of rising intra-African commerce from 12% to 50% by 2045, ending armed conflicts by 2020 ](https://au.int/en/flagships/silencing-guns-2020) and eradicating poverty in 20 years.
Under the Francophile Chadian chair, Moussa Faki Mahamat, since 2017, the report chaired by Rwandan president Paul Kagame on reforming the AU appeared rushed and lacked substance, and its laundry listing of suggestions on institutional reforms had been on a degree of vacuity as to be of no actual utility.
These had been physicians proposing half-baked cures to ills that had not been correctly recognized. All the 2017 report’s “key findings” had been extra coherently outlined in Adedeji’s report a decade earlier, the suggestions of which nonetheless haven’t been applied.
Another disappointment has been the 2018 African Continental Free Trade Area which seeks to facilitate commerce, construct infrastructure, set up a frequent market and guarantee the free motion of individuals. But outdoors West and Eastern Africa, the free motion of individuals remains a pipe dream.
Most African governments are security-obsessed and hostile to intra-African migration. There can be a lack of convergence of African economies. Many compete to export uncooked supplies slightly than change numerous items.
Road, rail, and port infrastructure stays poor. Rules of origin – which outline the place items are made – are sometimes restrictive, and non-tariff boundaries are widespread. If integration has not labored at the nationwide and sub-regional ranges, transferring all these issues to the continental degree will definitely not combine Africa.
Need for realism
The 15-member AU Peace and Security Council has contributed substantively to peacemaking efforts throughout Africa, and coordinated intently with the United Nations.
But different AU organs have carried out much less properly.
The New Partnership for Africa’s Development clearly lacks the assets and capability as a improvement company to uplift the continent. The African Peer Review Mechanism, which identifies governance challenges in 41 nations, is toothless.
The Pan-African Parliament stays a “talking shop”. The Economic, Social and Cultural Council has failed to supply real civil society participation in the AU’s establishments. The thought of the African Diaspora in the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe as a sixth African sub-region, together with the 5 continental ones, is basically devoid of substance.
The AU should thus undertake extra practical and fewer illusory mandates. Its strategy ought to be based mostly on an correct evaluation of monetary and logistical realities.
More positively, AU members had contributed $295 million to their revised Peace Fund by June 2022, complementing a $650 million 2022 budget . African leaders should now strengthen the establishments they’ve created.
They should additionally set up one efficient financial physique in every sub-region that may promote socio-economic improvement and supply jobs for the continent’s youthful inhabitants.
The AU’s first 20 years have largely represented a magical, mystical world of unfulfilled expectations. This is just not yet uhuru (freedom).
Adekeye Adebajo, Professor and Senior analysis fellow, Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria
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