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AFRICAN UNION - More People – friendly?

The other aspect of the AU which has engaged international attention and on occasion approval, has been the initiative known as NEPAD - New Partnership for Africa's Development. Although conceived, strictly speaking, outside the AU framework, it has been incorporated as a kind of development wing of the AU but for the moment outside the administration of the AU Commission, especially as the African Economic Community, endorsed at an OAU summit in Abuja in 1991, has not really been able to get off the ground. In that it has shared the fate of the Lagos Plan of Action of 1980, which was also born at a specific OAU Economic Summit, but which ran into the problem of the 'lost decade' of the 1980s when African hopes were hobbled by the dominance of Reagan-Thatcher free-market economics, and the hard-nosed imposition of inflexible structural adjustment policies by the Washington institutions in pursuit of financial rectitude, which did so much damage to the continent's prospects in the fields of health and education.

NEPAD, however, has been an entirely different idea, a measure of the evolution in international and African development thinking since the 1980s. It depends essentially on the notion of partnership, being at one and the same time a home-grown African product, yet couched in terms that international partners (especially, as it turned out, the G8) can go along with. While sometimes perceived as slow in getting off the ground and too much an affair of governments, with insufficient reference to civil society, NEPAD still represents one of the best hopes for securing international support for the kind of development which is considered needed both within and without the continent, to move towards the UN's Millennium Development Goals. It is seen as important, however, that it remains under the umbrella of, and in healthy inter- action with, the African Union.  

Much importance is attached to the NEPAD-initiated African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), in which a team of fellow Africans examine the performance of other African states.  Despite initial scepticism this seems to be moving in the right direction, and twenty three countries have already signed the Memorandum of Understanding on the APRM, with reports already completed from Ghana and Rwanda. NEPAD is also the first time an African initiative has truly brought in the private sector, recognising its crucial role in securing the kind of investment needed for NEPAD's objectives in such areas as infrastructure and agriculture.

It is possible, even now, to be apprehensive about aspects of the AU, bathed as it is at the moment in the golden glow of international approval. For example, was it a good idea to model itself so fully on the European Union - endowing itself with expensive institutions (which means an undue dependence on certain financial supports - notably from the Libya of Colonel Gaddafy, and inevitably South Africa)? Is not the fragility of the structure still perpetuated? The AU inherited the old debts of the OAU member states (some $42m dollars) and many members are already behind in their new dues to the AU. At the Syrte summit in July 2005 it was said that there were already arrears of some $80m, although 65 per cent of the budget comes from five states (Egypt, Algeria, Libya, South Africa and Nigeria).

The need to make the Pan-African organisation more 'people-friendly' than its predecessor is an important one and deserves every support, especially in view of its democratic mission. It is legitimately possible to wonder, however, about the sustainability of the South Africa-based Pan-African Parliament, given the still experimental condition of many parliaments of member states, or the recently established Economic Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC), also designed to involve civil society and increase transparency. It is important that both these institutions are allowed properly to fulfil their missions. Some of the 18 institutions of the new Union, such as the African Court of Justice (due to incorporate the current Human Rights Commission) and the African Central Bank, have for a variety of understandable and delicate reasons not been set up yet. When they all are, the total cost will be extremely onerous for a continent struggling as it is against crushing poverty. This is not at all to oppose them, simply to say they need to be sustainable and justify their existence. In particular, those that are 'people-friendly' need to make themselves known to the people through 'sensitisation' and education, especially as those institutions need to be independent of governments but still draw their funding from the Union's member governments. 

One also does have to be historically fair to the OAU, especially as the protagonists of the AU have unfairly tended to play down its predecessor's record.  First, it served as a vehicle to insulate Africa from Cold War tensions, accommodating them often painfully within its own institutional framework, to the best of its ability.  This was often a vital if passive role, and Africa should still be grateful it had a continental organisation at that time. It could offer mediation in crises, even if temporarily and often ineffectually, in situations where the superpowers or the UN would much rather not be involved. This sometimes led t o grave structural crises for the organisation, such as there was over Angola in 1975-6, when there was patent super-power involvement, and again over Western Sahara and Chad in 1982-4, where the involvement was more indirect.

With some help from African ingenuity, however, the organisation held together, even though there were some quarters, both inside and outside Africa, that expressed doubts whether it could continue. The price of resolving the Western Sahara crisis in 1984 was the departure of Morocco, which, to this day, does not belong to the African Union. Second, although it sometimes looked impotent, it played an incredibly useful role as mouthpiece and support system in the struggle against apartheid. A lot of the bad-mouthing of the OAU had come.

It cannot be said that the OAU, the predecessor of the AU, had helped when it came to projecting the African image. Because it had been in so many ways simply the mirror of its own membership - the "heads of state's trade union," as it was often sarcastically  referred to - which was inclusive of dictators and one-party states, accepted without any critical or moral distinction, with an absolute non-interference doctrine inspired by the territorial integrity of the existing borders built into the OAU Charter. It was also frequently condemned as an interminable talking shop full of hot air, a fact often confirmed by those who had attended its meetings.  The only occasion when it actually sent a peace-keeping force, to Chad in 1981-2,  proved to be a disastrous failure.

The inception of the AU coincided with the post 9/11 need of the West to shore up its defences against an elusive terrorist enemy - which contributed to the emphasis on the peace and security aspects of the AU in its first four years. But it does have a democratic vocation that developed in the immediate post-Cold War years of the 1990s, which happened also to be the last years of the old OAU, clearly heightening the need for reform. But it was, after all, the OAU of Secretary-General Salim Ahmed Salim that introduced an anti-coup doctrine at the summit in Algiers in 1999 that has simply been carried on and deepened by the AU (which now justifies intervention in cases of extreme human rights abuses or war crimes). This resolve was seen in the firm suspension of Mauritania from AU membership after the August 3, 2005 coup. In spite of the mitigating circumstances that subsequently emerged, it was an important principle to maintain. 

The main successes of the AU so far have been in the field of security, especially the high profile dispatch of a peace-monitoring contingent to Darfur.  Although still not anywhere large enough, and capable of running into trouble depending on how a fluid situation evolves, the presence of this 7,000-strong force has by all accounts made some difference to a tense and complicated problem. One of the AU's most important new institutions, the African Peace and Security Council (APSC), established in 2004 and designed to monitor and plan for crisis and conflict situations, has clearly been useful here.

The AU's positive support for democracy has also been, on occasion, helpful, as in Burundi, the Comoros, and to a limited extent, in Togo. Moreover, the willingness to be proactive in these fields has commended the new organisation to the international community, especially those in the west that have heightened security concerns about Africa, including notably the US and the EU (which of course includes France which has always had a special military presence on the continent). This has resulted in substantial assistance to the AU's own security mechanisms. The EU, for example, has provided $130m, which is, nevertheless, complemented by the embryonic European Rapid Intervention Force. This  force, intended for use in the last resort, has only been put into use in an extremely limited operation in Bunia in the north-east Congo in 2003. The intervention, named Operation Artemis and led by France, was not deemed an unqualified success.     [back]

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