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Now we have Kagame, Faki at AU: Will they help us?

Wednesday January 24 2018
kagafaki

Rwandan President Paul Kagame (right) as the new African Union chairman and AU Commission chair Moussa Faki are expected to lead continental reforms. PHOTO | RWANDAN PRESIDENCY

By MUTHONI WANYEKI

From January 22, all roads lead to Addis Ababa for the African Union Summit. Although the official focus is anti-corruption, the real focus is on the transition from Guinea’s Alpha Conde to Rwanda’s Paul Kagame as chair of the AU Assembly.

Already, Kagame’s AU reform team has moved into the AU Commission chair’s office. Its external priorities are peace and security, politics, regional integration and collective representation internationally, while efficacy, efficiency and reduced external financial dependence are its internal priorities.

Neither priorities will be easy to achieve within a year, even without resistance to his single-mindedness within the AU Commission or from key member states. And there is resistance from both quarters.

There is also scepticism among the populations where the AU’s peace and security interventions are most needed, amid fatigue from the international community, who are largely financially responsible for those interventions.

Against this background, the International Crisis Group (ICG) this week released a report, Seven Priorities for the AU in 2018, in which it urges attention to the contested transitions in the Democratic Republic of Congo and three of the 17 upcoming elections this year.

Cameroon, where an Anglophone insurgency complicates existing spillover problems from both the Central African Republic (CAR) and Nigeria, is creating a spillover of its own.

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In Mali, the failure of the 2015 peace agreement has left a vacuum in the north that jihadists are happy to fill. Then there is Zimbabwe, where the euphoria at the removal of Robert Mugabe has dissipated in the face of blatant entrenchment of the ruling party and the military in the “new” executive.

The ICG also urges attention to all the stalled conflict resolution processes, notably in CAR, Somalia and South Sudan.

The AU reform process, therefore, needs consensus-building to succeed, and the first point must be around Morocco, whose demands concerning the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic must not be allowed to be as disruptive as they have already proven.

In the Seven Priorities, ICG’s Africa director Comfort Ero highlights the risk trends on the continent. As concerns contested transitions, the concern is about the mismanagement and poor quality of many of the electoral processes and the role of external observers, which have enabled the “backsliding” or authoritarian drift now in Central and East Africa.

Other risk trends are all we don’t know about changing multilateralism in the region. The North and the West have ceded responsibility to the region, albeit with a formulaic and premature return to stability in, for example, Burundi, CAR and South Sudan.

Others like the Mashreq are upping their engagement, meaning that their old tensions are playing out on the continent, as in the Gulf/Saudi tensions, blamed for the recent tiff between Ethiopia and Egypt, dragging in Sudan and playing out on the Eritrean border. Then there is Israel’s diplomatic offensive in Africa.

The interests are messier and numerous than before, enabling all sorts of forum-shopping by recalcitrant that the AU is trying to hold to account. And the individual interests of member states are sometimes hard to discern.

We have a hard year ahead. Will Kagame and Faki Mahamat help us?

L. Muthoni Wanyeki is the Africa director of the Open Society Foundations. [email protected]

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