Washington, DC — Among the most exciting ideas of the African Union is the creation of a pan-African parliament made up of elected members from all over the continent and with real powers to shape the future. Yet given the history of the OAU, and most African leaders reluctance to be held accountable to democratic structures, it may not be very surprising that many are deeply sceptical. Julius Nyang'oro, Professor of African Studies and Afro-American Studies, University of North Carolina, USA, is among them. He told allAfrica why.
Could an African parliament succeed?
I think the idea of an African parliament is a sound one. The problem has been the lack of institutional capacity in most of these countries to establish even a working parliament. In many instances, working parliaments have been in existence for only the last 10 or 15 years. And this has been associated with, of course, the opening up of the political system, the liberalization of the political system.
One striking thing about the liberalization or democratization of African politics has been the difficulty of making the transition from a strong-arm government making all the decisions, controlling everything and not expecting to be questioned on their policies, to giving a real, viable role to members of parliament who in democratic political surroundings expected to be the true representatives of the people.
And so, at this point there is a disjuncture between the expectations that governments have and what parliaments should be.
Institutionally, according to some of the constitutions on the continent, the government cannot pass a budget unless it is approved by parliament. Deliberations are supposed to take place within the parliaments. But as we all know, in some places the government simply comes in with a budget, imposes that budget and parliament passes that budget without any kind of discussion. In a true democratic system that should not happen.
Government needs come up with proposals, parliament needs to come up with proposals then they need to reconcile as to what the priorities for the countries might be. That doesn't take place in most of these places. And for that reason if we then transfer this incapacity at the local level to the regional level it simply means that while we may have a continental parliament, the role of this parliament will still be an open question. It seems to me that it will be an institution that will be glorified for being continental but substantively sorely lacking.
In other words not very different from the OAU today, or yesterday.
That's correct. I'm an African who lives in the diaspora. And in the last few years there has been a raging debate between Africans who live in the diaspora and Africans who live on the continent about what the OAU has been able to accomplish. Some people on the continent would argue that the OAU has been quite effective given the limited facilities that it has to deal with serious issues on the continent.
But many people in the diaspora continue to point out that the OAU has to a large extent been a failure in the sense that it has never been able to successfully deal with the issue of conflict on the continent, that it has never been able to deal with the union itself -- the union of Africa. It has not been able to deal with economic development, etcetera, etcetera. And so we have this disjuncture between the expectations of Africans living in the diaspora on the one hand and analysts who live on the continent who may think the OAU is working.
From my own perspective I think the OAU has fundamentally been a weak organization. African countries have never wanted the OAU to be a strong organization for the simple reason that the dynamics of politics within countries in which individual leaders sought to control all political power has been transferred to their relationship with the OAU. Many African governments have never wanted to give any teeth to the OAU. And for that reason the OAU has been a very weak organization.
What are the implications of that for the African Union?
The implications that are quite simple and straightforward. The African Union may look very appealing, very ideologically sound, but in reality the African Union is something that will reflect the weakness of the OAU and I don't see it as accomplishing any of the objectives that it lays out - the integration of African peoples on the continent, and eventually maybe the formation of a union government similar to what the United States has.
The other criticism has been that many of the ideas related to the African Union mimic or mirror the ideas of the European Union. I do not necessarily think that borrowing ideas from elsewhere is a bad thing; but the relevance of those ideas is what has to be considered. The European Union has been an effective regional economic organization, integrating its economies; the question is, can we translate that on the African continent? The answer is no, because of the highly underdeveloped and dependent nature of our economies, because of the vertical relations between African countries and their former colonial powers, and because of the fact that as globalization proceeds, it results in the further marginalization of the continent.
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In terms of economic policy, African countries have not seriously sought to create regional economic organizations that are effective. So African economies are further marginalized. The way we could improve that would be to stop and rethink the consequences of globalization in African economies, which almost no African government is seriously questioning. The discourse is all about joining the World Trade Organisation and abiding by WTO rules; or how to become one of the countries benefiting from AGOA (the African Growth and Opportunity Act passed by the US Congress).
This is a very dangerous trend. It's not a matter of being pessimistic, but of being realistic.[ADF3]
