The yearlong transition to the new body faces many potential pitfalls. Nonetheless, regional commentators are optimistic about the OAU’s endorsement of a plan which symbolizes a new approach by Africa to itself and the world. “It’s a major step forward,” says John Stremlau, head of the international relations department at South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand.
Among the key gains of this week’s summit: agreement on a new African Initiative program, designed to rescue the continent from conflict, poverty and disease, and some progress to end the messy wars in Burundi, the Congo and Angola. A Burundi peace-brokering effort by former South African president Nelson Mandela led to an agreement to forge ahead with a transitional government and peacekeeping commitments from South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal. Angola expressed its willingness to renew peace talks with the rebel group UNITA, and Namibia announced that it would withdraw its 2,000 troops from the war in the Congo, a conflict that sucked in six countries.
The African Initiative developed out of a merger of two plans: the Millennium Partnership for the African Recovery Program (MAP), developed by South Africa and Nigeria and enthusiastically promoted by South African president Thabo Mbeki during recent trips to Europe and the United States, and the competing Omega Plan, drafted by Senegalese president Abdoulaye Wade. Its key points are a “map” (as in MAP) of steps considered necessary to haul Africa out of the quagmire of conflict, disease, underdevelopment and deteriorating quality of life.
Unlike the rest of the world, the continent is getting poorer: average income in sub-Saharan Africa has fallen by 1 percent a year for the past 25 years, and an average life expectancy of 54 is slipping due to HIV-AIDS and other infectious diseases. The initiative calls for strong African leadership and a global partnership to overcome a “development chasm that has widened over centuries of unequal relations,” believing there is a new global willingness-epitomized by the U.N.’s Millennium Declaration last September-to support Africa’s efforts if the continent can get its act together.
Africa, of course, has tried grandiose recovery plans in the past. One example: the Lagos Plan of Action, drawn up at an OAU summit back in 1985. That program went nowhere, but changing times-and attitudes-may make a difference this time around.
For most of its 38-year history, the OAU has been viewed as an ineffective, costly old-boys club whose primary purpose was to shore up the undemocratic regimes of its members. But a new air of sobriety prevailed in Lusaka, shored up by Africa’s greater acceptance of what Stremlau calls Nelson Mandela’s “democratic realism”-the “realization that today’s human-rights abuse is tomorrow’s refugee.” Africa, says Stremlau, is abandoning its view of human rights as a fuzzy Western notion that is being imposed on the continent, instead seeing rights as universal and key to avoiding future conflict, and thus a national security issue.
Another force behind the emerging new face of Africa is a strong alliance of the continent’s two biggest economies, South Africa, led by Mbeki, and Nigeria led by Olusegun Obasanjo. Both countries attained democracy in the 1990s; both have strong leaders determined to place Africa on a path toward democratic reform and development and astute enough to admit that achieving this will require better African leadership as well as global support.
Turning a fractured continent into a United States of Africa, however, will be no easy task-if it can be done at all. For one thing, not all of Africa’s leaders are as pragmatic as Mbeki and Obasanjo. Others at the summit included Libya’s Muammar Kaddafi-the leader behind the African Union plan-and Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean president who has confiscated thousands of white-owned farms.
The OAU summit did score a diplomatic success when it watered down a draft resolution supporting the land grab into a quiet call for land talks between Zimbabwe and Britain, its former colonial power, but the issue is unlikely to fade away anytime soon. (Kaddafi, in fact, caused a stir after the summit when he swept south to Zimbabwe in a 100-vehicle cavalcade to express his support for Mugabe.)
Africa, in fact, will almost certainly have to scale down its plans for union. Under the new leadership of former Cote d’Ivoire foreign minister Amara Essy, the OAU is supposed to transform itself within a year. It will create an African parliament, executive commission, central bank and court of justice and will be charged with pursuing continental peace and effecting political reform and economic integration.
Potential stumbling blocks are the Union’s composition, including as it does more than 50 very different states; the fact that it faces the same fundamental problems as the OAU; has a very likely unachievable timetable, and that there are no apparent means for it to enforce continental norms and standards. By trying to do after 50 years of independence what it took Europe 500 years and two world wars to achieve, Africa is setting itself up to fail, some analysts warn. “While there is willingness to debate ways of holding governments accountable, it’s hard to see how that will be put into practice,” says Stremlau.
Economic and political integration will more likely proceed along regional rather than north-south lines. Nevertheless, the concept of an African Union that breaks down trade barriers, boosts economic growth and encourages democratic political reform is a first step along what could be a sensible road. It has also-in theory at least-inspired new ideals of pan-Africanism and reason for hope among ordinary citizens.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, an African who is unafraid of unwelcome truths, warned that the continent’s plans could not succeed without departure from past practices. “This historic effort will require leadership, courage and willingness to depart from the ways of past, if it is to do for Africa what the European Union has done for Europe,” he told the OAU summit. “Unless it is pursued with singular determination by you, Africa’s leaders at the beginning of the 21st century, it will not succeed.” For the troubled continent, good leadership is just the first step.
