The African Union: few accomplishments and great challenges

Addis Ababa, Sep 9 (EFE). —  The African Union, or AU, celebrates on Wednesday 16 years since the signing of the Declaration of Sirte (Libya), its founding document, with a long list of challenges and duties and another rather short one displaying its achievements as the highest political institution in Africa.

On Sep. 9, 1999, African countries, meeting under the auspices of Muammar Gaddafi, took the historic step of burying the Organization of African Unity, created in 1963 to lead decolonization, and start a project of continental integration.

“Although part of the continent is at peace and there are economic and political relations between countries, there is another part that is disintegrating between separatist movements,” Ali Adam, Professor of International Relations at the University of Addis Ababa, told EFE.

A clear example, as Adam pointed out, is the situation in Libya, which hosted the decisive meeting for the creation of the AU and is now in chaos between “two competing governments that each rejects the legitimacy of the other.”

Another case is that of Sudan, which has for years witnessed fighting between rebel groups and which in 2011 lost the southern part of the country with the creation of South Sudan, which in turn has also been consumed by civil war for nearly two years, in which the AU has played a discreet role.

However beyond the current crises affecting the continent, the main problem is that the AU is still in a very early stage of development as an organization and most of the institutions proposed in its founding document have not been activated.

The Sirte Declaration included the creation of an African Central Bank, an African monetary union, an African Court of Justice and the PanAfrican Parliament, the latter being the only one that works regularly to ensure that African people are involved in discussions and decisionmaking.

According to Professor Adam, the economic integration of Africa still has a long way to go, because, although there is a growing intraregional trade, African countries still trade more with the rest of the world than between them.

Nevertheless, the work of the AU as a supranational organization has improved substantially in the past 16 years, as evidenced by the deployment of an international peacekeeping mission in Somalia, which coordinates more than 22,000 troops from various countries, or in response to the Ebola crisis.

In the case of Somalia, the African Union Mission to Somalia, or AMISOM, has made remarkable progress against the radical Islamist group alShabaab, which it has managed to expel from numerous cities that were under its control, but have not yet been able to end the terrorist threat.

The response to Ebola during the worst phase of the outbreak, severely limited by lack of funds, was also well above expectations and the AU managed to send nearly 900 doctors and health workers, mostly from Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia and Congo, to help control the epidemic.

Both examples give an idea of the potential that AU has and support the thesis that, with outside advice and financial assistance, the answer to African problems can and should be led by African countries themselves.