Africa: 'The AU's Parliament Cannot be Based in Tripoli'

18 February 2002
allAfrica.com

Washington, DC — Chris Fomunyoh, Senior Associate for Africa at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs in Washington, DC, spends much of his working life monitoring and assessing political parties and elections in Africa. AllAfrica asked him, as someone familiar with the problems of nascent democratic institutions, whether he believed an African Parliament could really work.

Can you really have some kind of elected body taking in members from 54 countries, on a continent the size of Africa?

You pose a very interesting question because I think that is the aspiration of the African people. The challenge for the secretariat and the administrative body is how to translate these big dreams and big aspirations into concrete, practical, functioning institutions that can respond to the needs.

How can the African Union do that? I think they have to start by identifying minimum standards; for example, as decided by the OAU at last year's conference in Algiers, that people who get into power through the use of the coup or the gun should not be allowed into AU meetings. That’s a very concrete decision and that becomes a minimum standard that can help guarantee that for leaders to be recognized, they have to be elected, for elections to be viewed as genuine, there has to be participation by all of the viable political parties, and parties must not be excluded from the process.

When you begin to set those kinds of minimum standards, then you build a set-up that allows elected representatives to come with mandates that have emanated from the people themselves; and that gives them the power to be able to make decisions that integrate Africans across national boundaries.

But isn't Africa just too big to make this work? Maybe a government sitting in, say, Liberia, will disobey the rules and fail to meet the standards but it won't care whether the African Union 'club' is willing to have it as a member, because it can go on selling its timber and rubber, doing its deals around the globe. Aren't you afraid that we're going to end up with a situation where some countries just opt out?

Hopefully, some of those leaders recognised as being autocratic who are already marginalised in the global community of democratic and globalising nations, will see that they stand to lose what little legitimacy remains to them in Africa, unless they clean up their act.

On the other hand, with today's easy access to communications, with easy travel across national boundaries, we're seeing citizens in some countries moving ahead of their governments. Take what’s happening now in Madagascar, for example - the fact that 500,000 citizens are demonstrating for transparency in the conduct of elections. That kind of wave from the grassroots upwards is going to encourage governments to want to meet those AU standards.

Okay - a different problem; Africans may be delighted to find that their new, continental organization is committed to respecting their will and guaranteeing accountability but that won't be worth much to your ordinary person in the street if they find that their national government is still behaving in the same old autocratic way.

Exactly.

But isn’t that a much bigger priority for the voter looking at their local political situation? He or she is going to say, "I don’t really care what they’re doing in Addis or Tripoli (or wherever this parliament’s going to be), I want my accountability and my democracy right here."

You’re right and that’s the credibility challenge for the African Union. These ordinary folk that have disconnected from the state at the nation-state level because they see it as irrelevant in their daily survival - if the African Union becomes equally irrelevant to them, then it is not going to last very long.

However, if the African Union learns the lessons and gets buy-in from all the stake-holders, does public outreach so that people at the grassroots level can also take ownership of some of the positions, then that’s what is going to contribute to its survival.

Let’s go back to the example of the Algiers declaration which said that leaders who came to power through military coups will not be admitted to the African Union. We saw the implementation of that decision vis-à-vis General Guei in Cote D’Ivoire and that gave hope to pro-democracy elements there that this general at the helm would not be recognized. It weakened General Guei’s ability to stay in power in Cote D’Ivoire, and we also saw that happen in Niger with Major Wanke. If the AU or the OAU, even with its position in Niger hadn’t followed up with very concrete actions in these two cases it would have undercut their credibility and people in those two countries would have disconnected from the AU because it would have become irrelevant. That’s the challenge that the current leadership of the AU is going to face and unfortunately they're not going to have a honeymoon - ordinary citizens in Africa are really demanding better rights and better conditions of living.

Can you see this project working if the African Parliament is sited in Tripoli?

The short answer is no, because there’s a credibility issue. We have to lead by example and if you’re setting up a functioning parliament, you have set it in an environment where a parliament has functioned, where people have seen elected officials take what actions are needed and challenge the executive branch on issues of governance. If you have all of these wonderful ideas and concepts and then you have the parliament in an environment where parliaments haven’t functioned before you’ve just defeated the purpose.

Then where do you want to see this parliament?

Oh, I want to see it in any one of the functioning democracies on the African continent. There’s South Africa, there’s Ghana, there’s Benin, there’s Senegal, there’s Mali, there are a number of countries that have made the transition and are beginning to make great strides in strengthening democracy on the continent.

You seem to have great confidence that a panAfrican parliament will work.

I think that we have no choice as Africans but to make sure it works.

Why don’t we have any choice?

Because we cannot afford failure. The African continent is 700 million people - more than 50% of whom are youth and the youth in Africa are asking for hope that they’ve got a future. If we fail, we will be condemning more than 50% of the population! And all of the other natural resources that we have in Africa will go to naught if you don’t have a generation of people who think that life is meaningful.[ADF3]

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