African Union leaders got a wake up call at their summit in Mozambique this week from a cash-strapped member who is muzzled because it is behind on its dues.
The Indian Ocean resort country of Seychelles announced it was leaving the Southern African Development Community (SADC) because the $500 000 annual membership fee asked of it did not provide value for money.
A victim of the tourism slowdown post-September 11, the Seychelles is also closing its embassies in Pretoria and London.
South African officials did not place too much significance on the decision from Victoria.
”They were never really a logical part of [the] SADC,” said one. ”We are none the poorer for losing them.
”They are so far behind on their payments to the AU that their minister and head of government are barred from speaking at the summit. They cannot vote and they cannot put up anyone for a position in the AU commission.”
Seven other countries found themselves in the same predicament. One, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is trying to make an arrangement with the secretariat to get off the delinquents’ list as Sierra Leone and Niger did this year.
Financial problems aside, it was the decision from the Seychelles that their meagre resources could be better spent elsewhere that really hurt in Maputo.
In his report to the African foreign ministers, Côte d’Ivoire’s Amara Essy warned that small and poor countries were counting the pennies and seeking maximum bang for their buck.
Unless organisations like the AU moved on from being talk shops and provided value for money, the poor countries would start dropping off, he said.
The summit has increased the contributions of the four richest countries in the union — South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria and Algeria — from 7,25% to 8,25% of the budget.
The big four bridled at this and demanded that if they pay more their nationals should get a bigger slice of the 750 secretariat jobs.
The poor countries each pick up a mere 0,25% sliver of the AU tab.
The issue could not be decided at foreign minister level and was handed to the heads of government to sort out.
The Seychelles’s decision is significant because it strikes at a regional organisation that is one of the main building blocks of the AU itself.
When the ministers examined innovative ways of raising the union’s proposed $53-million annual budget, they looked at models created by the regional groupings.
These included the European Union’s use of value added tax in member countries; the Association of South East Asia Nations’s use of the interest of prudent investment; and the customs levy imposed on members of the Economic Union of West African States (Ecowas). They used the SADC model to determine pay scales for AU staff.
Each of Africa’s five regions has an economic and sometimes monetary union that provides the glue for the continent-wide body.
Membership of these grows more expensive and its obligations more onerous. Ecowas plays a peacekeeping role in its region. Members are asking what will happen when the AU’s own Peace and Security Council starts making manpower demands for its proposed rapid reaction force.
The Inter-Governmental Authority for Development that links seven countries in the Horn and East Africa is at full-stretch brokering peace in Sudan.
South Africa’s peace-broking efforts in the DRC and Burundi, which have been much lauded here, in fact started under SADC auspices.
Already poorer members are making choices when they see duplication or inefficiency in the organisations they belong to. The Common Market for East and Southern Africa, which links countries from Egypt to Namibia, could be the most significant victim of this.
As budget cuts start affecting their members’ diplomacy, organisations like the AU had best heed Essy’s warning.