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Given its current higher profile in Africa, the US at the moment are also happy to be involved on the security side, though they, like the French, have their own security network with their own priorities and considerations. In the US case, it has continued to deepen, especially post-9/11. An African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI), developed by the US during the 1990s and involving training, equipment, and participation in manoeuvres, was expanded and consolidated early in the first Bush Administration in the African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA), to "strengthen peacekeeping and peace enforcement skills."   These developments have been paralleled by a similar initiative by the French since 1997 called RECAMP (Reinforcement of African Peace-keeping Capacities). 

To be brutally candid, the international powers now promoting and encouraging the AU appear desirous to have proxy institutions in order to reduce the necessity for outside interventions of the kind the French had consistently engaged in since 1960. It is obvious that since Rwanda and the CAR, they have had increasingly little stomach for more, although they were still involved from a more international motivation in Côte d'Ivoire. There have been other external interventions in Africa, such as the US in Somalia in 1992-3, and the British in Sierra Leone in 2000. But the world has increasingly turned to the AU and African regional organisations such as ECOWAS and SADC which have also been involved in security operations. 

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).     [back]

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