Alfredo Tjiurimo Hengari
2 May 2008
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Windhoek — EARLIER this week, Jean Ping, who incidentally completed his doctorate in economics at the Sorbonne, reported for office as President of the African Union Commission.
When the President of Tanzania, Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete, became the chairman of the African Union for the year 2008 in January, he declared: "we are aspiring for an Africa that is safe, stable and at peace with itself.
We are ashamed of the violent conflicts which are currently engulfing Africa."
It has been six years since the African Union was established and its successes are variably muted in a number of domains, in part due to its size and contradictory political ideologies and values.
I have argued in these pages before that the African Union is an appalling copy of the European Union.
Students of comparative regional integration would agree with me that it is a bad copy in the sense that it only looked at the form of the European Union without examining the substantive political processes that led to the creation of the European Union at Maastricht in 1992.
Again, in integration literature, the Union is the highest stage of integration.
This is normally achieved after economies have been integrated substantially.
This begs the question as to why the African Union agreed ambitiously to a Union without any detail that suggests that we are indeed a Union of states.
Be that as it may, such a process is perhaps irreversible and we may have to live with that painful theoretical anomaly, with its concrete, practical and hollow consequences.
In that sense, the Sirté Declaration was ambitious without the accompanying financial means to sustain and live up to those ambitions.
The end result has been a process, which is largely donor driven, for the realisation of its most basic institutional infrastructure.
In that context, it remains a matter of conjecture and luck, the extent and the pace with which the African Union will realise the long-standing objectives contained in the Lagos Plan of Action of 1981 which incorporated programmes and strategies for self-reliant development and cooperation among African countries.
Yet, in this domain, there are competing priorities, with some countries trading more with external countries than they do with their neighbours.
Such problems are also compounded by a certain reticence and a lack of commitment on the part of North Africa to be part of the integration process, some wishing to foster closer ties with the EU and the Middle East as opposed to Sub-Saharan Africa.
Such challenges do suggest that the African Union must review its objectives, and most importantly, its mandate.
A continental body consisting of over 53 states, with different histories and varying degrees of economic development is unlikely to develop common positions on economic issues, nor will it do so on the most pressing of political issues.
The institutional architecture envisioned for the AU is ambitious and broad, with neither depth nor capacity.
Nor has the AU fully sorted out how it relates to the multiplicity of other African institutions and initiatives, many of which overlap: the regional economic communities, and the Pan-African Parliament.
This explains partly, the paralysis and the generalities that have become symptomatic of its processes.
However, conflict resolution is an area in which the African Union can play a meaningful role on the continent.
It should be the raison d'être of this continental body to allow regional bodies to play the role of political and economic integration, while the AU remains in that process largely consultative and a catalyst, setting out general principles.
Such a view dovetails with Jean Ping who declared that his priority would be to reinforce the relationship between Africa and the Middle East in order to end conflicts on the continent.
This approach is informed by the fact that some of the most violent conflicts in Africa, be they Darfur or Somalia, are the result of a difficult crossroads between Arabs and Africans.
Besides, there is a general commitment on the part of external partners, such as the European Union, the United Nations and individual countries such as France, the United States and Britain to invest in a new African security infrastructure.
Thus, the starting point for the AU under Jean Ping should be for the AU to prioritise conflict prevention and resolution.
For that to happen, there must be preparedness on the part of member countries to give more powers to the AU Peace and Security Council.
Alfredo Tjiurimo Hengari is a PhD fellow in political science at the University of Paris- Panthéon Sorbonne, France.
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