The major breakthrough for Africa in the United Nations High-Level Panel’s work was the recognition of the role of regional institutions in the context of global peace and security.
This process was aided in no small measure by the insistence of the three Africans on the panel that an exception should be made of an earlier decision that all panel meetings be held only in countries that host the headquarters of UN organisations, and for a regular meeting to convene in Addis Ababa, the seat of the African Union.
The African panel members — Tanzanian Salim Ahmed Salim, the former secretary general of the Organisation of African Unity; Egyptian Amre Moussa, the Secretary General of the Arab League; and myself, a Ghanaian national — believed that the voice of Africa had up until then been muted. Several capitals had taken the initiative and committed resources to the organisation of seminars, symposia and workshops to which panel members had been invited to participate to hear diverse views.
In addition, civil society organisations and other NGOs in regions other than Africa had organised similar gatherings. Our fear was that the special concerns of Africa, as perceived by Africans themselves, would be completely lost in the barrage of opinions with which the panel was inundated.
We addressed a joint letter to the AU, which invited the heads of African sub-regional institutions to tell their own story of their experiences and evolving conflict- resolution mechanisms.
At the Addis meeting in April last year, the panel was extremely impressed with the arrangements currently in place for conflict resolution in Africa, fashioned under the umbrella of the AU.
The Addis Ababa meeting had another purpose. Again, on the insistence of the Africans on the panel, a forum was held on the sidelines of the meeting to solicit the views of African civil society. The refreshing ideas that emanated from the gathering informed many of the conclusions in the report.
The issue that should be confronted, however, is how to ensure that African public opinion would, in future, be adequately reflected in similar initiatives.
The panel secretariat established an Internet website to solicit public opinion on the remit of the panel. For obvious reasons of lack of sufficient access to cyberspace, African input was very minimal.
We Africans on the panel were approached, as were other members, by governments from other regions outside Africa that deemed it important to convince us of their particular stand on the issues. Their ambassadors did not leave us alone when we were in our own countries.
African leadership, in contrast, largely ignored the exercise, and did not make any effort to proffer any views to us. We did our best, under the circumstances, and took the initiative to garner ideas whenever the opportunity arose. In that sense, we suffered a certain degree of frustration.
The African media were also largely uninterested. The High-Level Panel was not considered to be newsworthy. There was very little we could do since there was a gagging order in force on members’ direct inter-action with the press, in order to obviate leaks from our deliberations — not that this did not occur.
It is important that African voices are heard early during the formulation of reports such as ours, rather than at the end of the process, only to be confronted with a fait accompli, and at that futile stage to attempt to introduce changes at the margins, on the defensive.
Africa clearly has pressing bread and butter issues that absorb most of the time of our leaders on the continent. There is, however, no justification for largely ignoring an exercise, the outcome of which is expected to make significant changes to the international political and socio-economic architecture, and introduce a new model for global governance that will affect the lives of Africa’s 850-million people.
Mary Chinery-Hesse was a member of the United Nations High-Level Panel and is a former deputy director general of the Inter-national Labour Organisation