| June 29, 2007
The future of the African Union
will come under scrutiny only five
years after its creation at a summit
this weekend where some heads of state
will launch a push for a closer
federation across the continent.
The three-day meeting will take place
in Accra, the capital of Ghana whose
founding president Kwame Nkrumah was
the first African leader to argue the
continent could only exercise real
clout by clubbing together.
Now after the African Union's failure
to bring peace to the continent's
major trouble spots Darfur and
Somalia, leaders such as host
President John Kufuor and Libya's
Moamer Kadhafi will again hammer home
the message that only a so-called
United States of Africa can deliver
results.
The agenda of the three-day summit
has been almost entirely devoted to
discussion of the prospects for
greater union in a tacit admission
that the AU, which was formally
established in 2002 from the embers of
the old Organisation of African Unity
(OAU), is failing to deliver.
However leaders and their top
lieutenants from the 53 African
nations are also expected to debate
their problems in raising a
long-promised peacekeeping force for
Somalia, which had been one of the key
objectives of the last AU summit in
Ethiopia, as well as the situation in
Darfur.
AU commission head Alpha Oumar Konare
told a preparatory meeting of foreign
ministers on Thursday that the
creation of an alternative USA was the
only real way in which to face the
myriad problems facing the world's
poorest continent.
"The battle for the United States
of Africa is the only one worth
fighting for our generation - the only
one that can provide the answers to
the thousand and one problems faced by
the populations of Africa," said
Konare.
Kufuor, elected AU president at
January's summit when Sudan's
ambitions were scuttled by the crisis
in Darfur, has echoed Nkrumah by
declaring: "Divided we are weak.
United, Africa can become one of the
world powers for good."
But leaders of some of the bigger
countries on the continent, including
the economic powerhouse South Africa,
are much cooler.
According to one delegate, South
African President Thabo Mbeki told his
peers in Addis Ababa that "before
you put a roof on a house, you need to
build the foundations."
Mbeki's Foreign Minister Nkosazana
Dlamini-Zuma, speaking before she
departed for Accra, said "no one
disputes the need for a United Africa
in whatever form" but it was a
question of how such a goal could best
be achieved.
The AU's inability to persuade anyone
but Uganda to send troops to patrol
the streets of Mogadishu has been
widely seen as a blow to its
credibility.
Its 7000 troops which are currently on
duty in Sudan's Darfur region have
also found themselves overwhelmed and
are desperate for their numbers to be
beefed up by UN blue helmets in spite
of opposition from Khartoum.
The union, which came into being in
July 2002, was meant to have
demonstrated a resolve that its
predecessor notably lacked.
Kadhafi however believes that the AU
in its current form is doomed to
failure as well.
"The OAU, the council of African
ministers failed, the African
parliament is a rump parliament,"
he said on a visit to Guinea earlier
this month.
"These instruments must be
created in Accra, the voice of the
people must be heard at last."
Katumanga Mutambai, a lecturer at the
University of Nairobi, said he was
unconvinced that enough leaders would
actively push for greater union even
if they made the right noises.
"I think on the issue of
continental union, there will be lots
of wishful thinking but without the
political will for a push towards its
realisation," he told AFP.
"Most African leaders are
inclined towards regime consolidation
and therefore disinclined to larger
unions whereby they become small fish
in a big pool."
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