How legit is the African Union?
Is Muammar Gaddafi going to take down the African Union with him?
You have to ask the question after the AU again refused to do what the rest of the world is doing, acknowledge that the rebels are the new interim rulers of Libya.
It is still clinging to its “road map”. What this means is that it is still trying to keep Gaddafi in the government, despite the madman being surrounded by tanks, or fleeing into the desert, or crossing into Niger, whatever the case may be.
And despite being a murderous despot who had London policewomen, plane passengers and various others killed, many among them his own people.
Jacob Zuma is complaining that Nato is underining the AU, keeping it from finding its African solutions for African problems. But the only rule of thumb being developed by AU actions to get peace in Africa is simply, undermine the AU, whatever it does and whoever it supports.
The world will probably keep on sidelining the AU, and keep on fooling its leaders by letting them strut around international forums. But there is another set of scenarios, with the catalyst being the diplomatic ineptitude displayed (surely the thing to do was to slink off into your presidential suite, and lick your diplomatic wounds, biding your time for a mistake by the new regime before you start strutting again).
Will the AU survive all this undermining? That could become the question. And: will SA survive the fallout? I’m talking here of its new piggy-backing international role as a member of the Brics alliance.
The truth about the AU is that, unlike the rebels in Lybia, it is deficient in the legitimacy stakes itself. To start with, like so many African institutions, including many governments, it is dependent on foreign funding for many of its pseudo-operations. Perhaps its real interest in the Lybian crisis is the collapse of a major financial source, Muammar Gaddafi.
But in its structures and origins the AU stands on even shakier grounds. Zuma went big from the start on the neocolonialism charge against Nato, but is there anything more neocolonialist than the African Union and its member states?
Only two new states, South Sudan and Eritrea, can claim that they are not the product of the colonialist carving up of Africa along arbitrary and fanciful lines during the 1885 Berlin conference.
When the Soviets left Africa in the late 1980s, they left behind plans for an ambitious project to redesign Africa along more natural and more ethnically viable boundaries, breaking up Africa in about 80 states.
But on less ideological and historical grounds the AU has even more to answer for. Its creation in the early years of the century was part of an ambitious process that was meant to be a dynamic transformation of the African governance infrastructure into something much more democratic than the old dictator’s club, the Organisation of African Unity.
A key institution was to be the Pan-African Parliament, consisting of members from both the opposition and the ruling part in every AU member country. In its consitution was inscribed an oversight role over the AU, which would eventually, after the completion of the full democratisation process, become the executive arm of the parliament. The latter’s decisions would become binding on member states, on the model of the European parliament.
Part of this oversight was to pass the African Union’s budget. However, this has never happened – the AU has simply not submitted the appropriate documents to the parliamentary administration in the few years of its existence. The parliament could appeal – but only to the AU.
This has been a constant bone of contention between the two bodies. When the parliament at one stage started talking about taking legal action, the AU made noises about cutting its contribution to the parliament’s budget. The result of this curious constitutional catch-22 was a stalemate that encouraged the AU to pretty much do as it likes.
Because the parliament is such an ineffectual and irrelevant body, propped up by South African taxpayers money, this legal complexity has never become an issue in public debate. But it does mean that the AU has become the opposite of the original ideal: a legally inconclusive dictatorial body, making wild statements on behalf of us, its unknowing subjects.
As for Brics, it is clear that Russia and China especially, relied on SA’s lead in their approach to the Lybian crisis. China has kept some sort of liaison with the rebels, but stands to be the biggest loser, as it had considerable interests in the country. Russia has been embarrassed by Muammar Gaddafi’s no-show when it and SA announced his participation in talks.
How will this affect SA’s standing in Brics? SA had been cold-shouldered as potential member for some time before it was eventually accepted, because it was perceived as too irrelevant and inept on the international stage. One way to downgrade it again, to cut it back to size after the Lybian debacle, would be too quietly let the Brics proto-organisation lapse into obscurity.
Talk of underming.