Travel around Africa and you will find schools and roads built by European Union money; private sector foundations supported by USAID; projects funded by the DfID; mosques and health centres built by the Qatar Fund or the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. The list is long.

There is one thing you will not find — anything built or funded by the African Union, which is currently having its summit in Uganda. Not even a chalkboard or chair in a village school.

So what is the AU good for, apart from being a talking shop and a stage for the colourful and eccentric Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to stage his circus shows?

Occasionally, it will do things like send a peace-keeping force to maintain a peace that doesn’t exist in Somalia. Very many countries promised to send troops, but in the end they left Uganda and Burundi to carry the can.

However, even that AU mission is largely funded by non-AU member states, especially the Americans.
So would Africa be worse off without the AU?

I suspect so. First, the decisions of blocs like the East African Community and the Economic Community of West African States are more likely to be implemented and to have greater impact on their regions, than an AU one.

On Somalia, as indeed it was in the case of the long war in Southern Sudan, IGAD tends to think and act more clearly and creatively than the AU.

In fact, the AU tends to be a stumbling bloc because its leaders are far removed from the situations they are taking decisions on and therefore tend to be obstructive. Take Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe.

When he had run amok, the Southern African Development Community recognised that there was a crisis, and some of its members were hard in their criticism of Uncle Bob. But Uncle Bob would go off to an AU and receive a standing ovation.

In East Africa, because of the long years of conflict, including the genocide in Rwanda, the war in eastern DR Congo, and the ravages of the civil war, the regional governments are willing, at least, to give tepid support to efforts by the International Criminal Court at The Hague to go after chaps who have been indicted for war crimes like Sudan’s President Omar al Bashir.

However, when the AU gets together, it turns into a lynch mob against the ICC, passing resolutions urging African states not to co-operate with it.

The most serious Africawide institution that puts food on the table is the African Development Bank, now based in Tunis.

However, the serious money in AfDB comes from the west and international financial organisations.
It is notable that the Kampala meeting is a shambles of sorts, that has been marked by loud quarrels on the sidelines over rooms, internet access, and even food.

It is probably notable that unlike the 2007 Commonwealth summit on which Uganda spent billions of shillings to clean up Kampala, this time the government wasn’t even bothered to fix the streetlights and fill up the one thousand potholes in the city.

Right now Africa’s true love are its regional organisations like the EAC. The AU’s time will come, of course. When Africa is in mid-life crisis, it will take it on as a good second wife.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s executive director for Africa & Digital Meida. E-mail: [email protected]