The African Union (AU)is a nice, highfalutin idea. If I understand it correctly, the premise is that, since the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) managed to do nothing but spend a lot of money on a massive bureaucracy, endless summit conferences, pomp, ceremony and other forms of buffoonery, the best thing was simply to dump it. In their wisdom,
Africa’s deeply divided leaders decided that reform was simply out of the question, and a clean slate was the only way forward.
The question is: will the new union (launched this week with OAU-like pomp and ceremony in Durban) really have a clean slate on which to map out the glorious future of our continent? If the OAU blew it in grand style, why should the AU have better prospects of success?
It is not easy to pin down the exact logic of our leaders’ thought processes. In an SABC television interview a couple of weeks ago, President Thabo Mbeki did his best to explain patiently to a somewhat passive, unchallenging interviewer just what the whole thing was all about. In the absence of skilful questioning and the interviewer’s failure to follow up on any unclear points, the interview came across more like a carefully scripted lecture from the president.
This is a bad start, considering that the whole idea of the AU is supposedly about dialogue. The leaders continually inform us that the union has come about because the people have demanded it. Yet we, the people, sit in bafflement on the sidelines, while the leaders manoeuvre among themselves on centre stage, and tell us when to cheer, and when to sit down and listen.
Confronted by the interviewer’s blank stare, Mbeki tried to elaborate on how the advent of the AU was inevitable because, besides representing the will of all the people of Africa, its creation had been passed into law by the various parliaments of the continent.
The interviewer accepted this without a murmur. But the question that was screaming out was: “How representative are our parliaments?”
Let’s start with our own. South Africa has, for some bizarre reason understood only by the great and the good who framed our Constitution, opted for a system of proportional, rather than direct, representation. This means that voters elect parties rather than people. This in turn means that, whichever way the ruling party decides to swing under a different set of political circumstances, the whole country has to go along, willy-nilly.
Parliamentarians have no indivi-dual accountability. Whatever the boss says goes.
This would be fine if we lived in a perfect world, and if the boss was always right. But the boss does not always explain to us exactly why he is right. Our electoral system does not oblige the boss to be anything but the boss. Therefore a vote cast three years ago gives the boss carte blanche to think his way into the future on our behalf, without any real reference to our opinions.
Apparently there are commissions composed of more of the great and the good who are reviewing this rather undemocratic situation as we speak. But in the meanwhile great deeds, such as the creation of the AU on behalf of all the silent people of Africa, proceed apace.
What about democracy in the rest of the continent? I seem to remember a session of the now-defunct OAU in Algiers almost three years ago where the leaders, in yet another of those costly private summits, declared that, from henceforward, no leader who had come to power through the barrel of the gun would be allowed to get involved in the greater debates shaping the future of the continent.
This was an interesting statement even at the time, considering that at least half those present had seized power sometime in the past through violent means. Yoweri Museveni of Uganda was one (although his means had been entirely justified). Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Sam Nujoma of Namibia were two others who could have been cited. Mbeki, if the African National Congress’s claim to have taken on the apartheid state through guerrilla warfare is to believed, was another.
And then there were all those other grey dictators who had miraculously transformed themselves from warlords and disloyal generals to demo-crats at the stroke of a pen: Gnassingbé Eyadéma has been undisputed head of the Republic of Togo since he staged a military coup in 1963. Former generals Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Mathieu Kérékou of neighbouring Benin also seized power from elected governments by military coup, bowed out to the democratic ideal some years later, but then came back again in civilian garb, riding on the obligatory support base they had established as rulers-by-decree.
And Libya’s Moammar Gadaffi, nigger in the woodpile at the recent launch of the AU, also came to power as a dashing young army captain, overthrowing the feudal King Idris, promoting himself to colonel, and proceeding to hold power ever since.
Some of these people might be doing a damn good job (and all of them showed up for the self-congratulatory razzmatazz this week.) But that does not take away from the fact that many of them are not exactly a good advertisement for the concept of democracy.
When these leaders state that the new AU will be modelled on the European Union, credibility starts to be stretched beyond plausible limits.
First of all, the EU is formed out of states whose citizens cling jealously to their democratic rights. No new initiative within the EU (let alone the formation of the organisation itself) would have been possible without a hard-fought process of democratic consultation in each country.
And then again, the EU is made up of countries with strongly independent cultural, political and economic identities. One has to ask: which country, or which region, of Africa is even out of the starting blocks in these terms?
African unity is desirable, but the strength of each component part in voluntarily entering into this potential state of unity is even more desirable.
Are we juggling acronyms, or are we actually getting somewhere? I guess we shall just have to wait to be told — once again.
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