The African Union is Near Irrelevant. What Comes Next?

When Cameroon’s 92-year-old President Paul Biya recently declared victory in his eighth election, the African Union issued a strongly worded statement of congratulations, largely going beyond credible allegations of irregularities and making no mention of the way Biya had emptied democracy of its substance by clinging to power for more than forty years.

Around the same time, the African Union issued a similar message congratulating another long-serving president, Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara, who – like Biya – has repeatedly changed his country’s constitution and electoral rules, allowing himself to remain in power since 2010. In last month’s election, Ouattara received an official tally of more than 90% of the vote, but only after leading opposition candidates were banned from the race.

When Cameroon’s 92-year-old President Paul Biya recently declared victory in his eighth election, the African Union issued a strongly worded statement of congratulations, largely going beyond credible allegations of irregularities and making no mention of the way Biya had emptied democracy of its substance by clinging to power for more than forty years.

Around the same time, the African Union issued a similar message congratulating another long-serving president, Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara, who – like Biya – has repeatedly changed his country’s constitution and electoral rules, allowing himself to remain in power since 2010. In last month’s election, Ouattara received an official tally of more than 90% of the vote, but only after leading opposition candidates were banned from the race.

On the other hand, the African Union expressed lukewarm reservations last week about elections in Tanzania, which were marked by strong signs of irregularities, followed by violent suppression of protests that left up to a thousand people dead, as well as a temporary shutdown of the Internet.

Lest one imagine that the lack of relevance of the African Union is limited to questions of electoral democracy or even local governance, recent weeks have revealed equally abundant signs of a weakening of the Union’s voice on issues related to international relations and global order.

She had little to say, for example, about the White House’s recent announcement that, of all the peoples of the continent, it would prioritize accepting only white refugees from South Africa. It also did not adopt a strong position on the decision taken by US President Donald Trump to deport undocumented people from the United States to African countries, regardless of whether they are from Africa. Likewise, she did not strongly criticize Washington’s tough visa restrictions affecting many countries on the continent.

What is worse is that the African Union has not taken a strong stance against Trump’s recent threat to launch military strikes against Nigeria, where he claims – falsely – that there are targeted mass killings of Christians by Muslims. Like many of its neighbors in the Sahel region of West Africa, northern Nigeria has long suffered from Islamist insurgencies that have terrorized and indiscriminately killed Muslims as much as Christians.

One might be tempted to ask why any of this matters, given the array of serious, unresolved problems that have bedeviled Africa in the decades following the huge wave of independence that swept the continent, beginning largely with Ghana in 1957. Yet what one might call Africa’s crisis of ascendancy, or the ability to stand firmly on its feet politically and economically, is much more than a matter of failed or underperforming national leadership alone.

Just as important as national policy, or perhaps greater, is the fact that Africa has never been able to build a continental system of governance, security, and economic cooperation that would not only help advance the continent’s prospects domestically, but also represent and defend its interests more forcefully on the international stage.

The unique circumstances under which Africa entered the international community as a group of independent states help explain why the continent needs such a system today. Although all African countries had presidential or ministerial systems at independence, and had their own flags, currencies and national anthems, African countries were, for historical reasons, unusually weak and fragile from the beginning.

In order to understand this fact, we must return to the design of nation-states in Africa. With few exceptions, these boundaries were drawn as early as the imperial era – not by Africans, who were given no say, but by the European powers who formalized the division of the continent for their exploitation, at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885.

This lack of African participation in the continent’s political formation was the first in a series of debilitating wounds whose impact still remains strong today. When European powers assumed colonial rule, they focused much more on building extraction systems than on development. Initially, this meant using forced labor – a halfway house between slavery and freedom – to produce fibres, tropical oils, minerals, foodstuffs, and other commodities to fuel European manufacturing and consumption, rather than generating income for reinvestment in Africa itself.

Not only did the colonial powers do little to promote African prosperity, but the little infrastructure they built was also generally intended to meet Europe’s needs, not the continent’s. Roads and railways moved almost directly from the places where goods were produced for the West to the ports that would transport them to these distant markets. Connecting African population centers in these colonies was, at best, an afterthought. What has been completely neglected is the linking of African colonies across imperially drawn borders.

By independence, what was left was a collection of dozens of small, poor, and mostly isolated countries, many of them landlocked, with little opportunity to trade with each other or build larger, stronger markets that would facilitate industrialization and create greater wealth through economic integration and regional trade.

Some of Africa’s early leaders understood this dilemma well, and saw the need to build a strong Organization of African Unity—the forerunner of today’s African Union—as an engine of economic growth through integration and a means of expressing and defending the continent’s interests in a world that had long exploited it economically and dominated it politically.

The strongest advocate of this approach was Ghana’s first independence leader, Kwame Nkrumah, who expressed this vision at the founding conference of the Organization of African Unity, held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1963. This is the story I tell in my new book: The Second Liberation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide. But Nkrumah’s vision of accelerated continental integration – one led by a powerful supranational body drawing inspiration from the United States Constitutional Convention, which allowed thirteen British colonies to eventually form a single nation – was rejected by his fellow heads of state.

Many of them considered Nkrumah’s vision impractical, and some doubted that his real motive was a play for power through which he could lead the continent. But the main reason Nkrumah’s ideas were rejected, in my view, had to do with the irresistible lure of the many privileges that come with leading a newborn nation. Building an effective supranational body to defend Africa’s interests at the continental level would have required the ruling elites to give up some of their newly acquired powers and opportunities for wealth, opportunities that often came through graft and corruption, including through the exploitation of extractive-based revenue sources that once went exclusively to the West.

The results for Africa were fateful and largely negative. Instead of defending African interests on the global stage, the Organization of African Unity, and later the African Union, turned into a club of heads of state. On the one hand, the Commission has never been able to establish a meaningful voice on issues of democracy and human rights, including by formulating its own standards that it is prepared to defend. This has led to an acceptance of rulers who perpetuate their power through hollow or rigged elections, and do little more than call “tsk-tsk” when civil societies are violently suppressed as regimes slide toward dictatorship, as happened recently in Tanzania.

The AU’s inaction means that crises of violence in Africa could worsen, as has long been the case with the war in eastern Congo, where Rwanda has supported rebel militias in what is widely understood to be an attempt to control some of its neighbour’s vast mineral wealth. The same is true of the absence of any meaningful continental response to the alarming spread of Islamist insurgencies in West Africa or the ongoing civil war in Sudan.

This also means that Africa still suffers from a severe lack of integrated markets and international infrastructure, such as a network of continental highways and energy networks. Each of these factors significantly affects the continent’s economic performance.

This means that Africa has almost no voice on the international stage, as we saw in the examples above regarding refugees, access to international travel, and freedom from bullying.

Perhaps the strongest evidence of the need for a strong continental organization comes from outside Africa. The European Union, a collection of relatively wealthy and prosperous nations, has come together and expanded on the understanding that the continent needed to defend its interests in a world of much larger and more powerful nations – most notably the United States, Russia and China. It seems clear that if Europeans feel the need for supranational integration and representation, even with their state of high relative development, then African countries – which are poorer, weaker and balkanised – need this kind of unity even more.