The African Union

Autocracy, Diplomacy and Peacebuilding in Africa

Tony Karbo, Tim Murithi, Tony Karbo, Tim Murithi

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786723284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The African Union has been a major factor in establishing peace, security and development in Africa. Today, however, the intranational body is struggling in the midst of a perceived dissipating appetite for supporting continental institutions. Previously seen as the panacea to Africa's continuing problems with violence and corruption in society, under the slogan "African Solutions to African Problems", the African Union, this book argues, seems to have run its course.
Recognizing that the measured successes in political emancipation which have been recorded across the African continent do not seem to have translated into economic and social gains for its 1.2 billion citizens, the AU adopted a new development framework dubbed "Agenda 2063". The framework calls on African leaders to rediscover the `Pan African' spirit and to create the `Africa Africans want'. In practice this means a new focus and engagement with the African Diaspora, tapping into their strong track-record in economic development. As this book shows however, there remain deep differences over the meaning, timing and sequencing of pan-African integration. Indeed, different member states have different understandings of the role of the African Union itself.
This essential handbook, from one of the leading research institutions on the continent, seeks to uncover what some of those understandings are and why the unification project has remained so elusive.

PART I

PAN-AFRICANISM:
FROM THE OAU TO THE AU

CHAPTER 1

THE AFRICAN UNION AND
THE RENAISSANCE OF
PAN-AFRICANISM

Kuruvilla Mathews

As the twenty-first century progresses, there is growing optimism about the future of Africa. One of the most important developments in this direction has been the establishment of the African Union (AU) in Durban, in July 2002, and the adoption of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) in Abuja, Nigeria, in October 2001. These initiatives represent the revival and re-emergence of Pan-Africanism under the general rubric of an African Renaissance with a vision for an integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa that will be a dynamic force in the global arena driven by its own citizens.¹ This chapter accordingly discusses the renaissance of Pan-Africanism and the challenges and prospects of continental integration under the African Union.

The Concept of Pan-Africanism

Pan-Africanism, as Ogba Sylvester and Okpanachi Anthony express it,² signifies a set of shared assumptions expressing the desire for political and psychological liberation and the unity of all Africans, whether on the continent or those in the Diaspora. It locates its origins in the liberation struggles of African-Americans and the aspirations of people of African descent everywhere around the nineteenth century at the height of slavery and at the dawn of colonialism. Pan-Africanism with its many forms of expression was not only a movement that brought together people of African origin. It was also a strategy for social solidarity, as well as cultural, political and economic emancipation.³

Pan-Africanism is also an ideology with a shared vision of what is desirable for the future of all Africans in Africa and in the Diaspora, rather than what actually existed. The key conceptual themes emerging from Pan-Africanism have been the ‘redemption of Africa’ and ‘Africa for Africans’.⁴ As Timothy Murithi notes, ‘essentially Pan-Africanism is a recognition of the fragmented nature of the existence of Africans, their marginalization and alienation whether in their own continent or in the Diaspora’.⁵

Pan-Africanism has historically consisted of four key themes: a clear expression of the pride and achievement of Africans; the idea of returning to Africa, a notion mainly promoted by Africans in the Diaspora; the liberation from colonialism and all forms of oppression; and the promotion of African unity as a primary objective in the struggle for liberation from European colonialism.

Pan-Africanism has so far passed through three major phases.⁶ The first phase denotes the five Pan-African Congresses held between 1900 and 1945. It was at the fifth Pan-African Congress, held in 1945 in Manchester, where Pan-Africanism was advanced and directed to the decolonisation of the African continent. The second phase ascended with the inauguration of the OAU in May 1963. Forty years later, the third phase followed with the creation of the African Union in 2002.

The Case for Pan-Africanism

The quest for continental unity has always been timely. Most African nations have a low population density, small internal markets, limited infrastructure and porous borders. African economies are also highly vulnerable to fluctuating world prices. Following the independence of most African countries, ‘no African state is economically large enough to construct a modern economy alone. Africa, as a whole, has the resources for industrialization’.⁷ Without access to a larger market area that could be created through economic integration, it was impossible for these small countries to grow economically and develop. Indeed, the balkanisation of Africa remains the most enduring of the colonial legacies. Economic and political integration, therefore, become essential in the development of Africa.⁸

A united Africa would command more respect in the world on account of its larger market and greater economic potential. Regional unity increases comparative advantage when it comes to negotiating in international forums. Undoubtedly, prospective investors would be more inclined to invest in a united Africa, particularly if they can be ensured access to larger markets. A united Africa would also have access to more human and material resources.

Another argument in favour of a united Africa is that it would be able to mount a credible defence force to guard African interests against internal and external attacks. Individual African states spend a significant amount of their resources on defence systems. So, perhaps Kwame Nkrumah rightly noted that ‘it is ridiculous, indeed suicidal, for each state separately and individually to assume such a heavy burden of self-defense’.⁹

The OAU and Pan-Africanism

Following the Manchester Pan-African Congress in 1945, Pan-Africanism became ‘Africanised’ as such Africans in exile as Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta took the baton from such leading proponents in the Diaspora as W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. Nkrumah and Kenyatta were later joined by other radical Pan-Africanists such as Modibo Keita of Mali, Ahmed Sekou Toure of Guinea, and Gamal Abdul Nasser Hussein of Egypt to form the Casablanca Group (Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Morocco, Egypt, Libya and Algeria), which, called for the immediate unification of independent African states. Their radical proposal for an immediate continental unity was met with opposition from moderate progressives that formed the Monrovia Group (Liberia, Nigeria, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Togo, Senegal, Ethiopia and Libya). Mediated by Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie, the two groups in 1963 compromised their polarised positions and created the Organisation of African Unity as the institutional manifestation of Pan-Africanism on the continent.

The OAU was tasked mainly with leading the struggles for decolonisation and end of apartheid in the rest of Africa, and facilitating the gradual unification of the continent. With the liberation of Namibia in 1990 and end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, the OAU achieved one of its goals – to end colonialism and racial rule in the continent.¹⁰ Despite this, the continental organisation proved ineffective in meeting peoples' expectation for united and prosperous states. As the OAU wound up, Africans were not only the world's poorest people, but also poorer than they had been at the dawn of independence, with their former colonial masters merely replaced by their own blood tyrants. Independent Africa found itself paradoxically to be the epicentre of poverty, bad governance, political instability and conflicts, economic retardation, the HIV/AIDS pandemic and preventable or curable diseases.¹¹

At the heart of the OAU's dysfunction in addressing those challenges was its doctrine of non-interference in the internal affairs of its member states, which made it difficult to articulate and analyse the problems facing each and every member state in their respective countries. Most of the member states in the aftermath of their decolonisation fell under nationalist dictators who paid lip service to Pan-Africanism and refused to subordinate sovereignty to a higher political entity. The doctrine of non-interference therefore provided those ‘leaders’ with the impunity to run their countries' affairs without regard to good governance, peace and development.¹² The assertion of nationalism undermined the OAU's effort to ‘promote the unity and solidarity of the African states’ as outlined in Article 2(a) of its charter.¹³ Soon afterwards, the harmony demonstrated during the years following the establishment of the OAU began to dissipate. Those who heralded the founding of the OAU as the dawn of a new era soon realised that it was nothing more than a weak compromise organisation that stood more for safeguarding and consolidating the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of its member states than facilitating their eventual unity, as the rhetoric for its creation suggested.¹⁴

The OAU's weak position and evident incapacitation allowed sub-regional organisations to gain ground and occupy the space that would have otherwise been held by the continental organisation. Pan-Africanism may have accelerated the achievement of political independence for Africans, but external economic dependence remained the crucial problem. The quest for addressing this dependency led African leaders to adopt the Lagos Plan of Action (LPA) in 1980 as a blueprint for ‘collective self-reliance’ on the continent. This was reinforced in 1991 by the signing of the Abuja Treaty, which established the African Economic Community (AEC) with the goal of increasing economic self-reliance and promoting an endogenous and self-sustained development. None of those initiatives, however, tangibly materialised.

The Case for ‘New’ Pan-Africanism and the African Union

As we entered the twenty-first century, Pan-Africanism demanded a re-interpretation in terms of the need not only for political independence and regional integration, but also for throwing off the yokes of economic bondage and democratic stagnation that had for so long reversed the short-lived prosperity of the independence era.¹⁵ Along with this demand for a ‘new’ Pan-Africanism¹⁶ emerged a new generation of Pan-Africanists. Dubbed by Gilbert Khadiagala as the ‘renaissance coalition’, these leaders underlined the need to stop blaming donors and called for Africans to take control of their affairs.¹⁷ This was expressed initially at the 30th session of the OAU's Assembly of Heads of State and Government, in Tunis, Tunisia, in 1995, where former South African president Nelson Mandela noted Africa's ascent into a ‘new era of renaissance’ based on Africans' own efforts to transform the continent's social, economic and political conditions for the better. This renascent generation also recognised the indispensability of good governance, democracy, human security, stability and international cooperation for Africa's development. As Chris Landsberg notes, the new Pan-Africanists also became keen to address the post-independence taboos of non-intervention, and articulate new norms of intervention and democratic governance.¹⁸ By the end of the 1990s, multi-party elections were taking place in more than 30 countries in Africa. Some of the African leaders who championed the new Pan-African agenda included South African's Thabo Mbeki, Nigeria's Olusegun Obasanjo, Senegal's Abdoulaye Wade, Mozambique's Joachim Chissano, Mali's Alpha Oumar Konaré and Algeria's Abdulaziz Bouteflika.

Africa's new generation of leaders accordingly articulated Pan-Africanism afresh in the form of a comprehensive set of new norms, values, and principles of democracy, good governance, peace and security, development and partnership-based cooperation. In a fast-globalising world economy, Pan-Africanism and the African Renaissance demanded hastening Africa's integration into a powerful united entity that could set its own agenda and effectively play a leading role in world affairs. Between 2000 and 2001, those leaders laid the crux of the new African architecture with decisions to formally incorporate the Conference on Security, Stability, Development and Cooperation in Africa into the OAU's machinery for conflict prevention, management and resolution; merge the Millennium Africa Recovery Plan (MAP) with the OMEGA Plan for Africa and launch the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) as a new Africa-wide development initiative; and transform the OAU as an obsolete institution into the African Union to live up to the demands of the new Pan-Africanism's human-centred norms, values and principles and hasten continental integration and eventual unification. With this, Pan-Africanism was transformed into a development blueprint and a mobilising force.¹⁹ ‘African Renaissance’ soon became the buzzword for the emerging generation of African leaders, the ‘new’ Pan-Africanists. They started using the term as a way of comparing the past ‘Old Africa’ with the ‘New Africa’ in order to chart the path to a future of genuine continental change. This sent a message of optimism about Africa's future that reverberated in many other quarters.²⁰

The African Union came into being at the Durban summit of heads of state and government in July 2002, modelled on the European Union. It was a qualitative transformation of the institutional framework for realising the Pan-African vision and mission – from what some critics regarded as a mere ‘talking shop’ (the OAU) to an action-oriented forum.²¹ In Desmond Orijiako's words, the AU ‘is a political, economic and social project aimed at creating a democratic space across Africa, promoting economic development, and for reflecting a common African identity’.²² This gave the AU a vastly expanded mandate from that of the OAU, including the principles and goals in the OAU charter as well as those of the Abuja Treaty. The AU's proclaimed vision is for ‘an integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens and representing a dynamic force in the global arena’. Highlighting its prime focus on enhancing’ the well-being of Africans, the AU adopted NEPAD as its development program. The AU's vision has been subsequently detailed and elaborated in its Agenda 2063: The Future We Want for Africa, adopted at the OAU/AU's Golden Jubilee Anniversary in 2013. Composed purportedly of seven aspirations and 20 goals of the African people, Agenda 2063 sets a definite timeframe – consolidated into five ten-year action plans – for realising Pan-Africanism's ultimate objective of creating a united, prosperous and peaceful Africa by 2063. By adjusting itself to new demands and new generations, Pan-Africanism therefore asserts its relevance and con...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Pan-Africanism: From the OAU to the AU
• 1. The African Union and the Renaissance of Pan-Africanism
• 2. Pan-Africanism and the African Diaspora
• 3. The Africa Group at the United Nations: Pan-Africanism on the Retreat
• Part II Governance, Security and Development
• 4. The Evolving African Governance Architecture
• 5. The African Union: Regional and Global Challenges
• 6. The African Peer Review Mechanism
• 7. The AU’s Peace and Security Architecture: The African Standby Force
• 8. The African Union’s Socio-Economic Challenges
• 9. The African Union and its Relations with Sub-Regional Economic Communities
• Part III The AU’s Potential Hegemons and External Actors
• 10. Caught Between Pan-African Solidarism and Realist Developmentalism? South Africa’s Pivotal Role in the African Union
• 11. The African Union and the United Nations: Crafting an International Partnership in the Field of Peace and Security
• 12. The African Union-China Partnership: Prospects and Challenges
• Conclusion The African Union in Transition: Sustaining the Momentum
• Select Bibliography