AU FINANCES LEAVE LITTLE ROOM TO MEET INCREASING DEMANDS
Leaders of the African Union’s 53 member states meet next week in Abuja amid growing demands from the continent’s trouble spots that far surpass the organisation’s limited financial resources.
From funding its Ethiopian headquarters and managing its South Africa-based Parliament to current and planned military deployments, the two-year-old AU is already in the red and needs significant outside help to balance the books.
Yet, unwilling to go the way of its much maligned predecessor, the now-defunct Organisation of African Unity, the AU is intent on expanding its presence through its Peace and Security Council and its legal and economic agencies.
Alpha Oumar Konare, the current chief of the AU Commission, the group’s governing body, has repeatedly called for Africa to deal with its own problems with as little extra-continental assistance as possible.
The former president of Mali has made a constant refrain of the phrase: ”Africans should be able to responsibly manage their continent’s problems.”
But like the OAU before it, the AU is cash poor and its work is further hampered by high expectations for success in meeting the ambitous goals set out in its founding charter.
Not only is the AU attempting to tackle crises in Côte d’Ivoire, Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo but it is trying to create the institutions needed to cope with the continent’s growing social and economic woes.
The Peace and Security Council, modelled on the UN Security Council, was set up in May 2004 with great fanfare amid high hopes that a pan-African group would take the lead in stabilisation operations on the continent.
But while the council’s budget of $75-million for 2005 is almost half the total AU budget of $158-million, that figure is dwarfed by the $222-million cost of its first military operation in Sudan’s western Darfur region. And the troop deployment to Darfur was painfully slow.
Amid continuing reports of atrocities in Darfur, AU troops only began to arrive there in October 2004, three months after it had decided to intervene and only 1 700 of the planned 3 320 troops are on the ground.
While the European Union has largely footed the bill in Darfur, more outside money will be required for the mission to continue and, even as it seeks such aid, the Peace and Security Council is under pressure to expand its operations.
”The more we intervene on the ground, the more we are encouraged to go further,” said Said Djinnit, a council commissioner.
The AU has started to entertain calls to intervene in long-running crises in Somalia and DRC and has even expressed interest in Haiti — ”an African country outside of Africa,” as Konare has said — — to help restore stability there before elections set for November.
”We have to re-motivate the member states,” Djinnit said, referring to the need for support among AU nations to back these proposed operations.
But officials concede that even with unanimous backing from AU leaders, none of these missions will be possible without more assistance from increasingly fatigued foreign donors.
And peacekeeping is just one piece of the puzzle in the AU’s complex and expensive mandate.
Out of the 17 institutions proposed to make up the African Union, only five have been created and one of those, the African Parliament, will not have legislative powers until 2010.
Next week’s summit is expected to call for the establishment of an Economic and Social Council which was first envisioned in 1999, even before the AU was born.
Despite the lack of money, the council is included in the 2005 AU budget while a proposed African Court of Justice, African Monetary Fund and African Investment Bank remain unfunded. – Sapa-AFP