[BLOG] Happy Birthday, AU@50 : Time to Project Africa's Power!
The AU celebrates its golden jubilee this week. Despite this momentous occasion, the Ghanaian media has spent scant time informing about—never mind reporting on—the significance of being alive to witness the fruits of five decades of hard-fought struggles to realise Africa's own policy space. Only this week, I have heard on radio of the AU being referred to as “irrelevant” by intellectuals who might know better if .
By way of a retort, I am reprising one of my “Pax Aufricana” articles of 2012 and, in the same vein, seeking to celebrate what should have been a party in a country which first President is undoubtedly, and indeed, the African of the Millenium
Back in early March 2011, in the quiet corridors of the Institute of Peace and Security Studies--located at Addis Ababa University's Faculty of Business Administration--my only link to Ghana remained not in the company of non-existent Ghanaian students there, but through numerous websites many Ghanaians outside the country have become viscerally-accustomed to checking.
Of note was CITIFMONLINE.com, where I would chance upon an article by one Dr.Michael J K Bokor, who penned an article entitled 'Libya Exposes the African Union'.
It was perhaps one of the most Afro-pessimist pieces I have read. There were three points that were striking: first, 'The AU lacks the mechanism to be proactive and has failed. Its existence is not warranted'; second: 'The AU is nothing but a forum for idling by questionable characters who meet and compare notes on their mismanagement of affairs. The AU itself is a problem that Africans have to solve first'; and finally: 'Once again, the AU has led Africans to come across as people incapable of solving their own problems.
How will we ever be respected if we continue to portray ourselves as "the white man's burden".
I would immediately write a short riposte of his article on my AU blog (http://african-union-citizen.blogspot.com/2011/03/too-many-afro-pessimists-in-hood.htmlhttp://african-union-citizen.blogspot.com/2011/03/too-many-afro-pessimists-in-hood.html ).
Within days, the BBC Worldservice would contact me to appear on the 'Africa Have your Say' programme, which I gladly complied with. Through the troughs and peaks of criticism of the AU as an institution comprising corrupt African policy-makers that, for example, just sat and drank tea at meetings, I tried my level-best to come out with a strong defence that acknowledge the weaknesses of the AU in communicating itself, but the need to also remember how far it had come in its then-nine years of existence.
It would only be a few days later that one of the staff at the university working on the Africa Union peace and security programme--for which I was obtaining capacity-building on-- would inform me that just down the road at the AU, they had voted the Peace and Security Council as the most powerful organ of the AU.
This is the kind of information I was hoping to read in the Cameron Duodu's 'From OAU to AU' which I touched on last week.
Truth be told, it is an interesting piece that offers more of an insight into how truly the AU is perceived than anything. But the fact that someone like Duodu, who generally extols the virtue of all things-African, wrote a surprisingly-effete piece is striking. Let's see how he does this.
He sets the tone of the article by jumping knee-deep into what one might call the corporate image of the AU, writing: 'Whether a body that had existed and done business under one name for a good 39 years was wise to follow the hollow idea pursued - with commercial objectives in mind - by certain public relations agencies in the West, and change its nomenclature, with all the confusion that such an action would create in the international arena where it operated - is open to question'. To the casual reader, this might suggest that the name-change was influenced by someone somewhere, and coming from the writer, we can easily assume it was Western-driven.
Quite how the name-change was predicated on commercial objectives is unclear, and Duodu makes no effort to explain this. He subsequently then spends some four paragraphs maximum taking us from Nato never changing its name (despite undergoing a'major transformation') to why the EU went from a European Economic Community to a more-powerful EU: 'The reason was that the 'European Economic Community' did become a misnomer, when the organisation's objectives evolved with time to become radically transformed from a system of mere economic co-operation into a fully integrated unit that combines economic co-operation with full socio-political integration as well.'.
He even rambles a bit: 'Of course, the fact that NATO did not change its name brought no obligation to the OAU not to change its name, either'. The last sentence is, in my view, frankly, a totally redundant statement that adds scant value to the essence of the piece.
A point I touched on last week is that of what the academics say about the nomenclature of the AU. Academics talk of an imitation of sorts by the AU of the EU--but not an outright one, preferring to speak more of a process of diffusion that sees the AU emulating the structures of the EU but through norms and principles. An enlightened man like Duodo could have made some effort to find out the theories associated with regional integration and whether it is pure imitation.
Even academic think-tanks, like ZEI in Germany, have written many articles on this which speak to an AU even possibly emerging as a kind of United Nations counterpart for Africa. That it has established a Peace and Security Council (an imitation of the UN) with fifteen members also could be an element encouraging us to see the AU a bit more differently.
Regrettably, Duodo offers no insight into this history, preferring rather to explain it away thus: 'the name change from 'OAU' to 'AU' was the result of the African countries being seduced to imitate the European example without first enacting any of the organic arrangements that bind the members of the 'European Union' together.' Throughout the article, he uses the word 'imitation' many times as if to suggest that the whole AU project is a futile and useless endeavour. Even if he thinks it is, it would have been more appropriate to offer an objective view to the reader for them to make up their own mind.
This sensation is best exemplified by this crystal-clear statement 'The most glaring example of the emptiness of the 'African Union' idea, of course, is that despite the example that Europe has dangled before the eyes of the African leaders, most African countries still oblige African visitors to their countries to obtain a visa before they can do so.'The point he raises is a very important one, Of visas, and where Africans fear to tread
Duodu touched on the important fact that Africans continue to grapple with the challenge and hassle of obtaining visas to travel to other African countries.
The most glaring example of this is travelling to Addis from Ghana, where one has to obtain a visa! I have made this point in other forums of the importance of visas to Africa's diplomatic capital being scrapped for, at best, 'strategic countries', and, at worst, all countries with representations to the African Union.
How is it that Dr.Nkrumah's statue was unveiled at the new Chinese-sponsored AU building, but the nationals of that great visionary have to endure the frustration of passing by an embassy to travel to Addis? It beggars belief! Why can Ghanaians travel to Kenya (a country with which we have less strategic ties) without a visa, but have to swallow hard to make one's way to the Ethiopian Embassy? If this is not an indictment of African policy-makers, I'm not quite sure what is. This is the kind of moral indignation that Duodu did well to capture, but failed to touch on how far African policy-makers have come on ensuring it becomes a thing of the past.
Discussions on the Continental Free Trade Area in the UN Economic Commission for Africa's flagship piece 'Assessing Regional Integration for Africa V' point to how Africa is addressing some of these challenges, and I daresay the venerable Duodu might have had access to news that a report like this would be launched simultaneously at the AU Summit. A piece on how this publication seeks to respond to those challenges might have been useful for the reader.
Still on the visa regime, ECOWAS is perhaps the only regional economic community (REC) that offers visa-free travel to its community citizens. While it is true that a discussion about the AU can be had without specific reference to the regional economic communities per se, in my view, there cannot be any reference at all. This is the reason why ECOWAS could have been propped up as an example of how Africa has managed to respond to the challenge of travel. This could have been contrasted against our Central African countries which continue to demand visas to travel throughout the sub-region!
Duodu's conclusion that therefore 'the AU's change of name could not but be cosmetic' is unfortunate. The claim that 'in imitation of the European union, the AU has created the Pan-African parliament' is equally so, especially because it is not referenced against the Abuja Treaty of 1991, which had stipulated that the establishment of the parliament is consistent with one of the six stages towards the realization of the African Economic Community(AEC) by 2034.
Truth be told, the Pan-African parliament was supposed to be established as the sixth stage of the AEC, but was established back in 2004way ahead of the 2034 date. Few people will know this fact unless specialist writers on Africa tell them!
To cut a long story short, it might have been a better idea for Duodu to include how NEPAD became integrated into AU structures in 2010 to become the technical body of the AUbetter known as the NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency (NPCA). Why anyone might care about this is because this integration demonstrates that the AU itself was sensitised to civil society concerns of the neo-liberal nature of what-was-NEPAD to have done something about bringing it back home to the AUwhere it ought to originally have belonged.
A different take on 10 years of the AU
Tjiurimo HENGARI is the Head of the South African Foreign Policy and African Drivers Programme at the South African Institute of International Affairs, based at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. His piece on the website entitled 'Ten Years of a contrasted Union: The African Union at the Crossroads or Business as Usual' is perhaps what one might call a vindication of the African Union. Truth be told, it's perhaps a more objective piece about the progress of the AU, and comes highly recommended.
Set against the backdrop of the-then upcoming AU summit, Hengari writes: 'it is fitting to debate and reflect how this organization has fared a decade on, both in light of its promise of new principles, new thinking, including new approaches to African challenges and governance. These principles and approaches seek to capture on a wide continuum, the nexus between democracy, good governance on the one hand, and on the other Africa's economic development and integration in the global economy.
'He touches on governance; and the need to create 'the institutional infrastructure and processes necessary for a more efficient African Union';
While acknowledging that the AU is flawed, he writes that 'the AU is still a work in progress and the past decade of its existence did not mask contradictions between what the AU ambitiously purports to be on the one hand, and the structural and institutional impasse in which it finds itself when it comes to achieving Africa's developmental aims on the other. A continental institution is a sum of its composite parts.' We can add to that that any institution is only as efficient as the members help it be.
Remember how no less than the UN General Assembly last week criticised the UN Security Council for the permafrost on Syria? If a world body -replete with decades of experience and efficiency can experience problems, why must we expect the world for the AU, which is only 10 years old?
Going forward, the author recommends three areas for attention: the first is how 'in line with its theme the summit should put explicit emphasis on the translation of modest democratic governance into concrete developmental deliverables in African countries; second, 'more attention should be placed than what has been otherwise the case thus far on the strengthening of regional economic communities as essential anchors in matters of peace, security and development'. Finally, 'the summit should provide clear guidelines and principles around leadership of the Commission.'
Simply put: 'a continental institution is a sum of its composite parts'. It behoves all to remember this as we all go forward in our desire to see a more prosperous and assertive Africa that can do justice to the calls for it to 'arise'. Africa is at the cusp of historic change. The road towards economic emancipation is long, but it is achievable. As for the African integration revolution, it's only just started--and the RECs are going to play a more central role in that revolution.
In 2009, in his capacity as a 'Do More Talk Less Ambassador' of the 42nd Generationan NGO that promotes and discusses Pan-Africanism--Emmanuel gave a series of lectures on the role of ECOWAS and the AU in facilitating a Pan-African identity. Emmanuel owns "Critiquing Regionalism"
(http://critiquing-regionalism.orghttp://critiquing-regionalism.org ). Established in 2004 as an initiative to respond to the dearth of knowledge on global regional integration initiatives worldwide, this non-profit blog features regional integration initiatives on MERCOSUR/EU/Africa/Asia and many others. You can reach him on ekbensah@ekbensah.net / Mobile: +233-268.687.653.
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