Alchemy in Addis Ababa: The AU at 20

In the Middle Ages, European alchemists unsuccessfully tried to turn lead into gold, employing impenetrable, mystical language.

As the African Union (AU) turned 20 this month, it has achieved a few successes but remains a weak organisation embarking on sporadic bouts of illusory reforms.
 
The New Integrationists
The AU was born in the South African port city of Durban in 2002. Led by Thabo Mbeki, African leaders seemed determined to abandon the plethora of grandiose plans and high-sounding resolutions of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) era since 1963, in order to promote genuine economic and political integration as part of an African Renaissance.

Unlike the OAU Charter, the AU’s Constitutive Act of 2000 allowed for interference in the internal affairs of its members to stem instability and sanction military coups d’état. Military regimes in Togo, Mauritania, Madagascar, Niger, Egypt, Sudan, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, and Burkina Faso, were thus suspended from the AU, though the organisation has failed to prevent extensions of presidential term limits. The continental body also launched praiseworthy military stabilization missions into Burundi, Darfur, and Somalia. 

Libya’s mercurial Muammar Qaddafi advocated the Nkrumahist vision of a “United States of Africa” with an appointed president and ministers, as well as a central bank. Senegal’s Abdoulaye Wade similarly backed a limited continental government, with the AU serving as an embryonic federation. Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni pushed – as Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere had earlier done – for a political federation with Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda under a revived East African Community.
 
This contemporary debate was, however, quixotic, as the lessons of the past had not been properly learned. Even AU commission chair, Mali’s Alpha Konaré, conceded that: “We shouldn’t hide the fact that we ended up, after a difficult and sometimes painful debate, in a kind of confusion.” AU members eventually agreed to a “Union Government” as a transitory phase towards a “United States of Africa.”  

A 2007 audit report led by renowned Nigerian scholar-technocrat, Adebayo Adedeji, revealed how, under the Konaré AU commission (2003-2008), the nine other commissioners often acted independently of the chair, arguing that they had similarly been elected by the AU Assembly of heads of state.

The Konaré commission thus met infrequently, misunderstood its mandates and authority levels, and failed to coordinate overlapping tasks. In 2007, the AU’s annual budget stood at $132 million, with donors expected to contribute $142 million to the AU Peace Fund, while member states were assessed at $2.9 million.

However, only 40% of the budget was actually paid by members, with the European Union, China, and the United States mostly funding the rest. This led to Ping complaining that the parsimony of African leaders “does not do honour to the African cause.” Many African leaders arrived at two-day AU summits on the day they began, and most had left by the second day, leaving little time for substantive discussions.

The omnipotent AU Assembly of leaders has often failed to adhere to the principle of subsidiarity in which decisions are taken at the lowest practical level. Their deliberations are sometimes far removed from their citizens, with populations frequently left uninformed about continental integration efforts.

The AU still conducts most of its business through unanimity, though its 15-member Peace and Security Council takes decisions on substantive issues by a two-thirds majority. While the AU has some impressive staff, it also has much “dead wood” inherited from the OAU era. By 2011, the organisation had established offices in New York, Washington, and Brussels, but its commission still lacked the capacity and authority to act on behalf of its member states.

During her five-year tenure, Dlamini-Zuma, however, failed to reduce this dependence, as AU leaders refused to back alternative sources of funding such as customs duties, and taxes on flights and hotel stays. The Dlamini-Zuma-driven 2013 “Agenda 2063” was a quixotic plan that perfectly symbolised the alchemy at the heart of the AU.

The problem of a 50-year plan, of course, is that none of its authors will be alive to be held accountable for the failure of its implementation. This was a triumph of hope over experience. Among its more euphoric ideas were: increasing intra-African trade from 12% to 50% by 2045; silencing all the guns by 2020; eradicating poverty in two decades; and ending terrorism, gender-based violence, and human trafficking.
 
Under the Francophile Chadian chair of the AU Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, since 2017, the Kagame report on reforming the AU represented yet another example of institutional alchemy. This 2017 report was the most disappointing of a blue-ribbon commission in living memory. It seemed rushed without adequate consultation, lacked substance, and its fluffy laundry list of recommendations was on a level of vacuity as to be of no real utility. These were physicians proposing half-baked cures to ills that had not been properly diagnosed.

All the report’s nine “key findings” – chronic failure to implement AU decisions; limited relevance to African citizens; fragmented focus areas; overdependence on external funders; under-performance of organs; limited management capacity; lack of performance accountability; unclear division of labour between the AU and sub-regional bodies; and inefficient working methods – had been more coherently outlined in Adebayo Adedeji’s report a decade earlier, which did not appear to have been properly consulted.

The panel noted that 74% of the AU’s 2017 $439 million budget was to be financed by external donors, before euphorically calling for the implementation of the AU’s “Kigali Financing Decision” in which members fund 100% of the organisation’s operating budget, 75% of the programme budget, and 25% of peacekeeping operations.
 
A final example of AU alchemy is the 2018 African Continental Free Trade Area which seeks to facilitate trade; build infrastructure; establish a common market for goods, services, and investment; and ensure the free movement of persons.

But, outside of West and Eastern Africa, the free movement of people remains a pipe-dream, as most security-obsessed African governments remain hostile to intra-African migration. There is also a lack of convergence of African economies, many of which are competitive exporters of raw materials rather than complementary exchangers of diverse goods. Road, rail, and port infrastructure remains poor. Rules of origin are often restrictive (and need to promote more “Made in Africa” products), while non-tariff barriers are widespread. If integration has not worked at the national and subregional levels, would transferring all of these problems to the continental level really integrate Africa?

Ending Magical Realism
In conclusion, it should be noted that the AU Peace and Security Council has contributed substantively to peacemaking efforts across Africa, and coordinated closely with the United Nations. Other organs have, however, performed less well.

The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) clearly lacks the resources and capacity to develop the continent; the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) has been toothless; the Pan-African Parliament (PAP) remains a “talking shop;” while the Economic, Social, and Cultural Council has failed to provide genuine civil society participation in the AU’s institutions. The idea of the Diaspora as a sixth AU sub-region is largely devoid of substance.
 
The AU must thus adopt more realistic and less illusory approaches to implementing its mandates, based on an accurate assessment of its financial and logistical realities. The organisation’s 2003 plan to set up an African Standby Force by 2010 was postponed until 2015. In December 2020, the AU simply declared the force to be fully operational, despite the fantasy involved in such a statement. The date for “Silencing the Guns by 2020” was casually pushed back a decade, further exposing the alchemy at the heart of a body whose huge ambitions frequently fail to match its achievements.

Professor Adebajo is a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship in South Africa.