PREMIUM TIMES
The African Union (AU) is not living up to expectations – and member states are partly to blame, according to AU Commission (AUC) Chairperson Moussa Mahamat. He says they are using their sovereignty to avoid relegating powers to the commission. As the sum of all individual African countries, the AU’s strength depends on the power member states give it to implement their decisions.
The AU’s weaknesses are evident in its failure to deal with recent crises, including conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan, northern Mozambique’s insurgency and coups in Guinea, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.
How can the continental body become more relevant as Africa enters a new year? Can it help citizens experience more stability, or will 2024 be another year of conflict? And how can member states help bring peace to the continent?
This isn’t the first time Mr Faki has chided member states for the AUC’s failure. At the 2022 Conference on Terrorism and Unconstitutional Changes of Government in Malabo, he blamed the continent’s deteriorating security on insufficient African solidarity and member states’ failure to honour their AU commitments.
For African countries, pan-Africanism or regional integration has often meant choosing between creating a powerful continental body or safeguarding sovereignty – with the latter usually winning.
As instability and underdevelopment persist, questions have arisen about whether the AU displays the systemic weaknesses of its predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).
One of the OAU’s biggest problems was that the general secretariat, tasked with day-to-day activities, was reduced to clerical functions. It should have implemented the organisation’s decisions but lacked the required institutional powers and human, financial and material resources – essentially because member states refused to grant it autonomy to function.
A current example is countries’ procrastination on adopting recommendations dealing with autonomous funding sources, which would reduce the AUC’s reliance on states’ contributions and donations from development partners.
The OAU general secretariat relied entirely on states (and external powers) for funding, recruitment and other basic functions. Many states didn’t pay their annual contributions, rendering the organisation increasingly impotent. The secretariat could organise meetings and produce reports but struggled to implement major decisions on advancing continental integration.
The AU, launched in 2002, was meant to correct OAU weaknesses and achieve a more robust, proactive and efficient organisation with its secretariat, the AUC, as the fulcrum of continental integration. But problems that plagued the OAU secretariat seem to be resurfacing with the AU.
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