Formed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia by 32 countries on May 25, 1963, to promote unity, solidarity, and progress across the African continent, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) evolved into the 54 independent countries African Union (AU) in 2002 with a more ambitious agenda to, among other things, promote regional integration, interstate solidarity, peace, good governance and to enhance the African voice in the global system. Steps have been made towards progress, but these have been painfully slow with limited gains realised by the average African citizen.
We understand the main objective of the AU as being the promotion of peace, good governance, safety, and security, including food security in the continent through promoting healthy use of soft power by member states to normalise using diplomacy to avoid and/ or resolve conflict.
No matter how good goals may sound, they are worthless if they do not improve people’s lives. Goals are only as good as the changes they make to the lives of average citizens. The success or failure of the AU agenda will only be judged on how it serves the public, not how effectively it protects the political elite interests.
We can say with a sense of disappointment that the AU has yet to achieve its goals. The organisation’s response to threats to peace, safety, issues of gender equity and equality, access to health and education services, food security, research, innovation, technological advancement, and good governance in the continent is wholly inadequate.
Bad it is, surprising it is not. The AU is not broken but it works exactly as intended by its members. It is the work of the political elite, and it serves and protects the interests of that class. Imbedded structural inadequacies of the AU mean that various organs of the organisation are literally incapacitated and unable to effectively perform their legally assigned roles.
It is important that we identify the source of the AU’s operational problems. The organisation’s various organs lack the necessary legislative powers to implement and/ or enforce supranational binding agreements. This is because real power lies in the hands of its assembly which is composed of heads of state and government.
Significantly, the assembly has repeatedly rejected calls to transfer meaningful powers to any of the AU organs. Consequently, the Pan-African Parliament is powerless and unable to exercise any binding legislative powers. In the same token, the AU Commission cannot compel member states to comply with AU rules, and often using the autonomy argument, most member states blatantly refuse to comply with the decisions of the Human Rights Court (Staeger and Fagbayibo, 2024).
There is general frustration among the public who feel we have been stringed along by the political elite who have used the AU not to advance public interest but that of the political class, to shield themselves from public scrutiny while further marginalising the average citizen from active participation in decisions of national interest.
It is a serious indictment to AU leadership that Africa has yet to accomplish food security for its citizens. Ukraine, now in over 2 years of a full-scale war with a global superpower, Russia, is not only able to feed its population, but it is exporting grain to parts of Africa which, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), has about 20 percent of its population (nearly 282 million people) classified as undernourished. Additionally, more than a billion people cannot afford a healthy diet, and about 30 percent of children are classified as stunted because of malnutrition.
Furthermore, state violence against certain population groups continues unabetted. As states brutality against minority population groups including political opponents and advocates of human rights continues without tangible intervention from the AU, many population groups have felt betrayed and marginalised hence the increase in threats of and real internal conflict.
Citizens cannot be remotely blamed for criticising and rejecting the AU as a boring, toothless and ineffective talk show of dictators; the organisation has proved itself incapable of ensuring prosperity, safety, security, and peace for all Africans. Glaring weaknesses are illustrated in the organisation’s failure to deal with continent’s crises, including food insecurity, crisis of democracy, conflicts in Cameroon, Nigeria, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan, northern Mozambique’s insurgency and coups in Guinea, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.
To an average African, the AU is nothing but a dictators’ club where shameless political elites meet to review the safety of their grip on power, identify potential threat to that grip, and make fools of the average African. It is a congregation of political elite to celebrate their unrestricted hold on power before delivering long-winded, deluded speeches for their African audience and the international community. Giving a list of intentions without implementation and/ or enforcement mechanism is a gambit bound to fail.
MTHWAKAZI INDEPENDENT 