TimetoBeBold
The AU must not be just a collaborative platform to coordinate viewpoints and policies as important as that might seem, but should generate ideas, which would induce fresh thinking of its member states by which it would cease to be a mere trade union platform of African leaders.
IN reinstating the long standing tradition of having smaller and less influential countries to head its executive body, the 54 members of African Union (AU) cast their votes in a secret ballot on January 30 to elect Chadian Foreign Minister Moussa Faki Mahamat as the chairperson of the AU Commission.
The election of the previous chairperson, South Africa’s Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma in 2012, broke from tradition, where both the AU and its predecessor, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), has had its administrative leader coming from small states in the region. The understanding is that small and less influential states could never muster sufficient diplomatic or political muscle to use the regional platform to advance their own specific national interest. These states are more likely to find the regional platform a compelling mechanism with which their own interests could be coalesced on a broader framework, to be effectively deployed to obtain concrete results.
Due to the critical challenges of enhancing the economies of scale of the region through plugging the enormous hole of infrastructure deficit and confronting security problems, the job of the leader of the executive of the AU is more demanding than is ordinarily supposed. Interpreting Africa’s realities from the routines of conventional wisdom means fresh thinking, requiring a more scientific interrogation of the facts and issues as they are. In more than half a century of political independence for most of the African states, the received political wisdom from the West, which has shaped institutions and processes of the countries on the continent, has refused to fuse with the fabrics of the respective indigenous political lives of the African states.
Africa’s social landscape is dotted with youth restiveness, deepening poverty, and decaying infrastructure, only currently mitigated by China’s decisive involvement.
Therefore, for the executive secretariat of the AU, it cannot be business as usual.
Faki, an African politician with no history of rocking the boat, must find the unusual courage to shake things up, if Africa is to break from asphyxiating routines, which has hobbled the continent from engaging the world with the full weight of its capabilities.
The AU must not be just a collaborative platform to coordinate viewpoints and policies, as important as that might seem, but should generate ideas, which would induce fresh thinking of its member states by which it would cease to be a mere trade union platform of African leaders, as the defunct OAU was serially deplored.
The strand of Africa’s global relations and cooperation that has the highest possibility of bringing practical value to its renaissance must be cultivated with relevant policy engagements to drive it. China, a country who shared the common trenches of anti-colonial struggles with Africa and has identified with the core concerns of sustainable and inclusive development with Africa, has laid out its roadmap not only to strategically partner with Africa, but also to develop a comprehensively cooperative arrangement with the continent. The AU Commission’s executive arm must demonstrate profound understanding of this important partnership and design enabling policy frameworks to nudge the process along and keep it running.
China’s boldest framework of international cooperation, the Belt and Road Initiative is a strategic platform to build connectivity among nations through overland and maritime networks of infrastructure.
China’s unequivocal commitment to the Belt and Road Initiative brings Africa’s most strategic needs to the international priorities of China.
Such an uncommon alignment of visions and priorities should be seized upon by the AU Commission leadership to drive Africa’s renaissance and rejuvenation. It must be new ideas and hard work that underwrite the continent’s fulfillment of its manifest destiny.
(The author is the director of Center for China Studies, in Abuja, Nigeria)