In Burundi, the Africa Union (AU) has a clear and non-controversial opportunity to shed its image as “the trade union of dictators,” as Yoweri Museveni used to refer to its predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity — before himself becoming its most ardent spokesman.

Though coming a little late in the day, the AU’s concern about the deteriorating situation in that country is a hopeful sign that the continental body has not completely given up its moral ghost.

We can be forgiven for viewing anything the AU, or its predecessor the OAU, does with a healthy dose of cynicism.

For many years, the OAU employed a false nationalism, playing the self-righteous colonial victim in order to defend dictators in power from accusations of gross human-rights abuses by entities in the West.

The body, through secretaries-general such as Salim Ahmed Salim, the longest serving and most obstinate secretary-general, would protest, with appropriate histrionics, that governments and human-rights organisations in the West had no moral authority to criticise governance in Africa.

Another beloved argument of the OAU was to posit that such organisations, by demanding democracy and human rights, were imposing a foreign culture on Africans.

Even the transition to the AU would seem to have been more in name than anything else. True, the AU has many important-sounding organs and commissions. But it has never managed to transform itself into a people-oriented organisation driven by the interests of the African people in the manner of the European Union.

By and large, it still functions as the “trade union of dictators,” with its dirty work now being performed by an AU Commission Chair, instead of a secretary-general.

As evidence of this, consider the body’s continuing effort to get immunity from prosecution by the ICC for presidents accused of gross human-rights abuses.

Witness also that the AU chairman is Robert Mugabe, and a few years earlier, the chair was held by Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea. The gross human-rights abuses perpetrated by the two gentlemen are well-documented.

Still, all that notwithstanding, we have to laud the AU’s robust stand on Burundi, including a declared intention to send in troops to protect civilians. There is also an AU-supported peace effort led by Uganda. Of course, as intimated earlier, these laudable actions should have followed incremental penalties such as sanctions against Pierre Nkurunziza and his associates, freezing of government assets outside of Burundi and lobbying for the ICC to focus its lens on the country.

We have to bear in mind that the slide towards murder and mayhem in Burundi has followed a pattern we have seen before. First, a regime becomes self-serving without a people-focused socio-political or economic agenda. Then it perpetuates itself in power through stamping out independent voices, before it finally descends or disintegrates into murderous mayhem.

This same pattern, to varying degrees, is being replicated in Zimbabwe, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon and Gambia, while in Burkina Faso, the final descent into mass murder was stopped by citizens and the AU’s firm stance.

In order to prevent another Burundi-like situation, the AU must start paying attention to all these places now, with a view to arresting the slide towards murderous anarchy.

AU organs concerned with peace and governance must devise and begin to robustly implement a clear policy whereby regimes exhibiting the patterns detailed above attract penalties that increase in severity, leading to troop deployment.

Moreover, the ICC, far from being an enemy of Africa, should be considered an important instrument in this process. The nationalist rhetoric of the AU is as self-serving as the dictatorships it has defended for so long.

In 1994, as the Habiryamana regime in Rwanda began the final descent into murder and mayhem, the OAU, faithful to its policy of “non-interference in the internal affairs of member states,” watched as that country was reduced to one huge killing field. It is a crime that will forever remain a blot on our collective conscience.

The AU and the international community must not let Burundi slide back to the killing field it has been for most of its history.

Tee Ngugi is social commentator based in Nairobi