The African Union

Pan-Africanism, Peacebuilding and Development

Timothy Murithi

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351895156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The African Union was established in July 2002 by African leaders, evolving from the Organization of African Unity (OAU). However the idea of the African Union can be traced to the Pan-Africanist movement. Timothy Murithi looks at the emergence of Pan-Africanism and how it was institutionalized through the Pan-African Congress and the OAU. He argues that the African Union represents the third phase of the institutionalization of Pan-Africanism. The book examines the limitations of the OAU and discusses whether the African Union can adopt a more interventionist stance in dealing with peacebuilding and development in Africa. The volume assesses the African Union's peace and security institutions and analyzes how it is beginning to collaborate with civil society. It takes a critical look at the Union's New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and argues that Africa needs to adopt a developmental and governance agenda that will be much more responsive towards improving the well-being and livelihood of its peoples.

Chapter 1
Introduction

 

 

 

Africa has been on the development path since its liberation from colonialism. Freedom without development, however, is not genuine freedom. African people and their governments have not really had their freedom to choose their own developmental path. As far as the African continent is concerned, development has always been driven by the dominant international and geopolitical agendas of the day. After slavery it was colonialism followed by the Cold War. Today with the end of the Cold War the pressures of globalization are impacting upon Africa’s development and its capacity to promote and sustain peace.

The problems are not all external. In fact most of them are internal and home grown. African leaders and societies need to take primary responsibility for the lack of development on the continent. External forces cannot affect you unless you allow them to affect you. Some of these home grown problems are familiar to any observers of the African continent, they include political authoritarianism and the lack of democratic space for ordinary Africans to contribute towards deciding on the social and economic affairs that affect them. Another home grown problem is the plague of corruption, economic mismanagement, kleptocracy and the theft of state resources and their transfer to foreign bank accounts. For example, in August 2004, the Swiss Government traced and pledged to return US $ 463 million to the Government of Nigeria, which the Swiss believe was illegally acquired from state resources by the dictator Sani Abacha. Abacha was also infamous for his brutal dictatorship and un-democratic rule.

To the list of home grown problems we can add the lack of respect for the human rights of African citizens by some of their own governments as well as transnational corporations operating in the mining fields of Africa. The lack of access to education, health care and the absence of adequate infrastructure. When all these problems are added up we can identify why the continent remains impoverished. 340 million people or close to half of the continent’s population lives on less that one US dollar a day. The average life expectancy is only 54 years. The mortality rate of children under 5 years of age is 140 per 1000. There is an illiteracy rate of 41% for those over 15 years old. To further complicate issues there is a public health crisis caused by the scourge of HIV/AIDS, Malaria and respiratory problems like tuberculosis.

These problems contribute towards generating social and political tension as well as economic despair for the majority of the people on the African continent. These tensions are easily exploited by ruthless politicians and self-appointed leaders to unleash and perpetuate conflicts on the continent. Violent conflicts have caused massive death and damage to infrastructure. These conflicts have placed an emotional, mental and psychological strain on the people across the continent from Rwanda, the Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Cote D’Ivoire, Liberia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Angola, Uganda, Mozambique and Western Sahara/Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. Tensions are still brewing in Burundi, the Casamance region of Senegal and political instability reigns in Zimbabwe, Guinea-Bissau, Central African Republic and Chad.

Close to half of Africa’s countries have been afflicted by conflict and are either struggling to make peace or they are working on post-conflict peacebuilding. There is therefore an urgent need to establish effective systems for peacebuilding in Africa. Peace in Africa is a necessary and vital ingredient for enabling development to take place. It will be much harder for individual African states to address these problems individually. So adopting a strategy of coming together in the spirit of solidarity and cooperation is viewed by most of the leaders as the only way forward, particularly in the context of a globalising world.

Pan-Africanism is the expression of this spirit of solidarity and cooperation among African leaders and societies. Pan-Africanism is an idea and a movement that has been around for centuries. Even before the era of slavery, people of African descent have written, thought about, and sought to act in solidarity with each other to promote their well being and ensure their livelihoods. Chapter 2 will discuss the emergence of Pan-Africanism and demonstrate that its primary objective is to end racial, social, economic and political discrimination against people of African descent whether they are in the Diaspora or on the continent. So Pan-Africanism essentially is a call to create the conditions of freedom that are necessary for development.

At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, Pan-Africanism took on an institutional form with the inauguration of the Pan-African Congress. The ideas that inspired the Congress were based on the emancipation of Africans and Afro-descendants from exploitation, marginalization and oppression. These ideas were adopted and modified by the African leaders on the continent to mobilize efforts against colonialism. Leaders like the first President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure of Guinea, Leopold Senghor of Senegal, Banar Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Ali Ben Bella of Algeria took the idea of Pan-Africanism to another level on 25 May 1963, when the mobilized support for the creation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). At that time, the major challenge for the OAU was eradicating colonialism from the continent. From 1885, in what came to be known as ‘the Scramble for Africa’, European powers colonized African peoples and communities across the entire continent. The Belgians were in the Congo, the British in East, South, West and North Africa, the French in West, Central, North and East Africa. The Italians were in the present day Somalia. The Portuguese were in the present day Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, Angola and Cape Verde. The Germans, who later lost their colonies due to their defeat in the Second World War, had colonized present day Tanzania and Namibia. The principles of the OAU were based on liberating African countries from colonial oppression and fostering their social and economic self-determination. The OAU was the institutionalization of Pan-African principles and it sought to encourage the tradition of solidarity and cooperation among Africans.

The OAU succeeded in its primary mission in liberating the continent from the yoke of colonialism when on 27 April 1994, the system of internal colonialism was dismantled in South Africa. However, the OAU was not as effective in monitoring and policing the affairs of its own Member States when it came to the problems discussed earlier of political authoritarianism, corruption, economic mismanagement, bad governance, the abuse of human rights, the absence of gender equality and the eradication of poverty. As Chapter 3 will demonstrate many of these problems still remain endemic to the daily lives of Africans across the continent.

With the onset of the twenty-first century in became increasingly clear to many African leaders that it was necessary move beyond the continental status-quo which was complicit in permitting, among other things, genocide to take place in Rwanda in April 1994. The spirit of Pan-Africanism was once again revived and utilized to launch the creation of the African Union, when the OAU Assembly Heads of State and Government met on the 8^th and 9^th September 1999, in Sitte, Libya. The leaders at the meeting stated that they had been ‘inspired by the ideals’ which guided the creators of the OAU and ‘generation of Pan-Africanists in their resolve to forge unity, solidarity and cohesion, as well as cooperation, between African peoples and among African states.’¹ The Assembly decided to establish the African Union. The Assembly further decided to create African Union institutions such as the Pan-African Parliament, the African Court of Justice, the African Central Bank and the African Monetary Union. It also mandated the OAU Council of Ministers to prepare a ‘constitutive legal text of the African Union’ which would be ratified by Member States.

The Constitutive Act of the African Union was signed in Lomé, Togo, on 11 July 2000. The African Union was officially inaugurated on 9 July 2002, in Durban, South Africa. In effect, the African Union replaced the OAU and took on all of its assets and liabilities. The creation of the African Union remains consistent with the spirit of Pan-Africanism which is to end the international discrimination against Africans and to ensure their social, economic and political development. Today discrimination and marginalization takes on a different form from its counter-parts in the era of slavery or colonialism. In fact one can try to argue that there is no discrimination or marginalization of African peoples and states since there is now political independence and a level playing field in terms of free markets. The reality of course is different, globalization has become a force that has to be recognized. African countries and societies that try to work individually, in isolation from others, in the context of this globalized world, are vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation. Chapter 3 will demonstrate that the challenges faced by African states such as an unfair global trade regime, the economic and environmental exploitation by foreign transnational corporations, the illicit trade in small arms, the activities of mercenaries in the internal affairs of countries and refugee flows cannot be addressed by one country acting alone. This is one of the reasons why the African Union is necessary in the context of changing international relations.

Chapter 4 will discuss the creation of the African Peace and Security Council and Commission to coordinate the peacebuilding efforts on the continent. Pan-Africanism in action today can be seen in the peacekeepers from Rwanda and Nigeria trying to assist with stabilizing the conflict situation in Darfur, in Sudan. Pan-Africanism in action is South African, Ethiopians and Tanzanians helping with the peace operations in Burundi. Pan-Africanism is West African States intervening to stabilize the situation in Cote D’Ivoire.

The African Union also created a Pan-African Parliament which will be based in South Africa which will bring together legislators from across Africa. An African Court on Human and People’s Rights has been established in Banjul, Gambia. The AU has also established an Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC) which will promote the inclusion of civil society actors in the social, economic and political efforts to reconstruct the African continent. One of the criticisms of the process leading to the creation of the African Union was the lack of adequate consultation with civil society prior to its creation. Chapter 5 will discuss the efforts that the African Union has taken to reinforce its partnership with civil society and the African Diaspora in its efforts to build peace and promote development.

Peacebuilding is not sustainable without an effective strategy for development. Chapter 6 will argue that Africa needs to take over control of its economic and development strategies because only the people on the ground know what is best for them in terms of their immediate needs to improve their access to education and health care. The external control of the economic policies of African countries is a situation that has to be addressed genuinely. Bilateral and multilateral partners often state that they only have Africa’s interests at heart, yet the insist on force-feeding its governments and peoples economic doctrines that actually undermine peacebuilding and development. The Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), the so-called Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), and the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative that have been promoted and enforced by the IMF and the World Bank have had a negative impact on Africa’s development. If there has been a positive impact it is hard to find. Yet a lot of money has been thrown at this issue of development. By their own admission the IMF and World Bank have admitted that these programmes did not achieve what they planned to do. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) estimates that the IMF/World Bank policies dictated since 1980 have led to a 10% decline in Africa’s growth.

There is, therefore, a need for Africa and the African Union to make a declaration of economic independence and identify programmes that will bring genuine development to its peoples. It is in this context that we witnessed the birth of yet another initiative the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). NEPAD is a programme of the African Union and not a separate institution. It was designed by African leaders and adopted in Abuja, Nigeria, on October 2001. The formation of NEPAD was essentially a top-down process and again there was a lack of consultation with African civil society. As Chapter 6 will discuss NEPAD proposes ways to advance and accelerate Africa’s peacebuilding and development strategy through improved access to education and training, access to healthcare, and building the necessary infrastructure necessary to make Africa an equal partner in global trade and economic development.

Critics of NEPAD argue that the programme cannot succeed, in its current form because it borrows its ideas, and tries to integrate Africa, into a global framework of neo-liberal economics. They argue that Africa is in its current situation precisely because of the neo-liberal economic framework in which richer countries preach free trade but practice protectionism for their industries. Rich countries provide subsidies and tariffs to their farmers and undercut the ability of African farmers to trade on the so-called ‘open’ market. As an illustration, in the agricultural industry alone, members of the ‘developed’ countries club the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) spend US $ 320 billion a year on subsidies which undercuts farmers in the rest of the developing world. Rich countries put pressure on Africa to open up their markets to penetration by their transnational corporations which have little or no regard for the social and environmental welfare of the people and communities that they extract their wealth from. These corporations repatriate their profits out of Africa and back to their global shareholders thereby denying African people, from whose regions the profit was generated, the benefit of using some of these resources to build schools and hospitals. Critics argue that this global economic framework is part of the reason why African industries have been exploited. Through the collusion of corrupt and undemocratic leaders capital has been accumulated by a few African elites at the expense of the majority of people. It goes without saying that the type of thinking that got you into a particular problem or crisis is not the type of thinking that is required to extract you from the problem or crisis. Specifically, adopting a neo-liberal framework for development is like adopting a violent strategy for peacebuilding.

Chapter 6 will argue that at the very least African governments should take on the responsibility of strengthening and protecting their local industries and finding ways to ensure that the wealth that is generated by the continent remains in the continent to build schools, hospitals and infrastructure. It will further discuss the issue of promoting inclusive governance, eradicating corruption and the need for debt cancellation and education and training.

The book will conclude with the observation that African states and their societies, in the context of globalization, cannot not achieve their peacebuilding and development objectives individually. The ideals of Pan-Africanism will only be able to achieve their peacebuilding and developmental objectives if, first of all, there is the genuine political will to do so. Secondly, the African people have to be empowered to contribute to this process. An un-informed population is easier to manipulate, so education and the development of the capacity of Africans to address their own problems is vital. The African Union exists but the African continent is not yet united. Pan-Africanism and the African Union are only vehicles to be used to enable Africa to achieve its goals. It is in the nature of vehicles to sometimes to refuse to start, sometimes they breakdown or have accidents. The key will be to ensure that despite the starts-and-stops the Pan-African and African Union vehicles must be supported and encouraged to enable African people to reach their desired destination of peace and development.

Note

¹ Organization of African Unity, Sine Declaration, 4^th Extraordinary Summit of the OAU, Sirte, Libya, 8 to 9 September 1999.

Chapter 2
From Pan-Africanism to the African Union: The Invention of an Idea

Africa must unite or disintegrate individually - Kwame Nkrumah, First President of Ghana and Co-founder of the Organization of African Unity

Introduction

Africa’s marginalization in the global sphere has motivated renewed enthusiasm for regional and continental integration. The Organization of African Unity evolved into the African Union which was inaugurated on 9 July 2002 in Durban, South Africa. It is often assumed that the process of continental integration begun with an extraordinary Summit of the OAU convened in Sirte, Libya, in 1999. In fact, the process begun with the Pan-African movement and its demand for greater solidarity among the peoples of Africa. To understand the emergence of the African Union we need to understand the evolution of the Pan-African movement. A review of the objectives and aspirations of Pan-Africanism provides a foundation to critically assess the creation of the AU and its prospects for promoting peace and development on the African continent. This Chapter will begin by looking at the state of the continent and why the renewal of Pan-Africanism is necessary and timely. It will then assess the illusion of sovereignty and propose that continental unity is much more useful framework through which Africa can solve its problems and interact with the world. The ideas of a select group of Pan-African thinkers and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 From Pan-Africanism to the African Union: The Invention of an Idea
• 3 Peace and Development Challenges for the African Union
• 4 Peace and Security Institutions
• 5 Reinforcing the African Union-Civil Society Partnership
• 6 Towards a Paradigm of Auto-Development
• 7 Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index