The motor convoy is, of course, a feature of leadership transport around the world. But in Africa, it takes on a symbolism all its own, its flashiness usually in stark contrast to the want and need through which it rides.
Heads of state who gathered in Maputo last week for the second African Union assembly careened through the tiny (and quite easily navigable) city in glossy convoys of between seven and 15 cars, squawking scooters at either end, sweeping aside other motorists and pedestrians, going right through the traffic lights fixed, ironically, for their bash.
The convoys were an unfortunate symbol of an old Africa of haughty leaders who see themselves apart from and not a part of their citizenry, at a meeting held to highlight that which is new and awakening.
The AU is said to represent a new Africa of accountable leadership — through the New Partnership for Africa’s Development’s (Nepad) peer review — an Africa that places development at the centre of its work.
The continent is still heart-stoppingly poor. Thirty of the world’s 34 poorest countries are in Africa. Through the Nineties, they have fallen off the radar of the global economy and got poorer. HIV/Aids is adding to its burden, with 30-million African adults and children infected.
The jury is still out on which of Africa’s two visages — modern versus regressive — are in the ascendancy after last week’s second meeting of its nascent union. Its dinosaurs certainly stole the limelight.
Libya’s Moammar Gadaffi undercut vital progress on HIV/Aids, tuberculosis, tsetse fly and malaria when he declared these Africa’s armoury against neo-colonialism. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe was appointed a ceremonial deputy chairperson of the union, which he trumpeted at home as a mark of legitimacy. And a conservative Muslim bloc including Sudan, Somalia, Egypt, Libya and Algeria rallied against a gender rights charter to buttress the most basic of women’s rights including a ban on female genital mutilation, child and forced marriages, and the end of discriminatory inheritance laws that can reduce widows to paupers.
The latter were hauled into line by a gender lobby of growing influence in the AU, though Mugabe and Gadaffi have enough backers to secure a worrying degree of laissez-faire.
But a fair report-card of the second meeting of the AU cannot be mingy. From 2001, when the Sirte Declaration to forge a union was passed in the Libyan city, to the Maputo meeting, the body has come into being and is taken seriously.
Most of its work in the past year is not made of the stuff that makes headlines — it is the business of ”operationalising” the AU. ”We’ve reviewed the financial and accounting system to enable the organisation to function effectively. Agriculture and trade policy has progressed — we’ve widened the AU from politics only. We’ve institutionalised the assembly, the executive council and elected a commission,” said an Addis Ababa-based diplomat.
And while it has its detractors, Nepad has entered the political lexicon. It was confirmed last week as the de facto economic and development policy of the AU, and its peer review mechanism as a vital advance.
Former Malian president Alpha Oumar Konare was elected chairman of the commission — in effect, the chief executive of the AU. Konare has good credentials with the Group of Eight (on whom Africa still depends both for trade and aid) and his stature as a former leader would secure access to the halls of power, said officials. He is joined by eight commissioners, five of whom are women. In a patriarchal society, gender parity is a healthy signal of modernity.
Time-wise, the AU is not doing too badly. The European Union’s precursor, the European Community, was formed in 1958 and it is still a work in progress. But it’s also worth bearing in mind that 13 previous efforts since 1963 at varying degrees of African political and economic union have floundered. Still, the world is taking this latest effort seriously.
In addition to its rulers, other guests who convoyed into Maputo were some of the most powerful global figures: United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan; International Monetary Fund chairperson and managing director Horst Köhler; United Nations Development Programme administrator Mark Malloch Brown and the European Union Commission president Romano Prodi, among others.
All welcomed the union for its unprecedented effort at forging an African-led path to peace and well-being, but warned the road was long. As the meeting went into session, Liberia exploded; the Bunia and Ituri regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) revealed killings of near genocidal proportions; and the bodies of child soldiers in the Burundian capital, Bujumbura, cut a heart-breaking sight. Five other countries were classified hot spots.
”Lasting peace,” said Annan, ”is far more than the absence of war. It is sustainable only if accompanied by democratic transformation and good governance. We know democratic countries usually do not declare war on each other. Democracy also means alternating government.”
The architects of the AU, led by modernists such as South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki, Nigerian President Olesegun Obasanjo and Mozambican President Joachim Chissano, have got all the paperwork right. Conflict resolution tops the bill, with plans for a 15-member Peace and Security Council incorporating an African Standby Force and an early warning system to detect and manage conflict before it becomes volcanic.
The peer review mechanism, perhaps the AU’s most innovative method to secure basic democratic standards, provides for a panel of six eminent continental citizens to put member countries through a governance grid.
A Pan-African Parliament is meant to close the yawning gap between the union and its people.
In South Africa half of those surveyed had not heard of or did not know enough about the AU to form an opinion about it, according to an Afrobarometer poll released last week by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa.
Still, this was a better showing than Lesotho, where more than eight in 10 did not have a clue they were part of a union. In Mozambique, the host country, six in 10 people were ignorant of the momentous event about to unfold in their capital. About half those surveyed in Cape Verde, Ghana, Senegal and Uganda were equally distant from the idea of and identity with the union. The survey reveals a lack of popular support and enthusiasim for Africa’s primary political experiment. Support and enthusiasm are also not in great supply among the leaders.
In a political union, the policies or protocols to bring it closer to home and, more importantly, to put it into practice must be ratified by each country. And the AU summit did not succeed in increasing the rate of commitment to ratify more quickly.
Only 14 countries of the 27 needed to get the security council going have ratified; only 19 of the necessary 30 have ratified the Pan African Parliament, while an anaemic 15 have signed up for peer review.
A vital philosophical change from the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) to the AU is the latter’s commitment to allow a supranational authority. The OAU pivoted on the principle of non-interference — which suited the dinosaurs fine, but is out of kilter with the philosophy of union.
Piqued, Mbeki told his fellow leaders that ”the earliest possible signing, ratification and entry into force … are central to the consolidation of peace, democracy and must therefore receive our urgent attention”.
He added: ”We have to place our individual national interests within the context of our continental and collective interests.”
What’s clear after the summit is that this support for the balance between national and collective interest does not enjoy critical mass. In this and other ways, the AU is not yet a modern organisation. It remains opaque and distant and risks getting caught in the bureaucratic tangle that strangled the OAU, unless political will is secured.
In completely ignoring the time-bomb that is the human and economic crisis in Zimbabwe, the AU signalled a trend: it will intervene in conflicts, but not where there are rights abuses. Countries like Uganda, Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Malawi all are in breach of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, but these were not scrutinised. In fact, by appointing Mugabe a deputy chairperson, the AU has shown it will continue to mollycoddle those who are not up with the times.
Outside the seaside convention centre where the AU assembled, the Mozambican hosts had planted young saplings, their stems thin, their roots barely covered. Their future is fragile, dependent on care and nourishment — a future similar to the union in whose honour they had been planted.