Looking beyond AU for solution to Africa’s problems

It is unfathomable that sixty-one years after its founding, the African Union has yet to justify its purpose as an assemblage of visionary leaders charged with providing guidance, direction and leadership for the African region.

From security to politics, economy, infrastructure, and technology to the welfare of its citizens, Africa remains at the base of the comity of the global community. The region reels in debt overhangs, bad leadership, bad governance, corruption, climate change issues, civil wars, and military takeovers, among a raft of crushing challenges.

It is on the strength of this horrible profile and realities that the call by the African professionals at the African Peace and Security Dialogue organised by the Thabo Mbeki Foundation for dialogue by African leaders, including diplomats and academics for sustained dialogue and the employment of home-grown solutions to the region’s problems become apposite. We cannot agree more as intellectualism powered by sincere engagement, collaboration and political will remains the solid foundation for realising the desired united and prosperous Africa.

Africa is mired in multidimensional crises requiring collective and collaborative efforts—not leaders immersed in power struggles―to resolve.
The African Development Bank Group estimates that Africa’s total external debt stood at $1.152 trillion by the end of 2023 up from $ 1.12 trillion in 2022 and that the continent will pay $163bn just to service debts in 2024, up sharply from $61bn in 2010.

According to the President of AfDB, Akinwumi Adesina, Africa loses $7-15 trillion to climate change annually and will increase to $50 billion by 2014 if stringent action is not taken.

Warning that stunted children will lead to stunted economies tomorrow, Adesina says malnutrition and stunting of children pose huge development challenges to Africa, with 86 million children under the age of five facing malnutrition, 63 million stunted, over 12 million overweight and 3 million underweight. While the continent loses two to three percent of its GDP due to malnutrition.
According to Adesina, it is estimated that, of the 783 million people hungry in the world, 288 million are from Africa, yet, the region has 65 percent of uncultivated arable land left in the world to feed 9.5 billion people by 2050.

 These myriad challenges underscore the fact that Africa requires the sustained collaboration of its leaders in all professional sectors to find enduring solutions to its problems. 
Emphasising that  Africa’s problems could be addressed through dialogue, the Chairman of the Thabo Mbeki Foundation Board of Trustees, Geraldine Frazer-Moleketi, said, “We are immensely worried that our continent faces myriads of problems, whether it’s climate, debt crisis, civil wars, military takeovers, with the highest number of countries, 16 in total, suspended by the African Union as a result thereof. In many of our countries, the democratic dividend is not extended to the masses of our people, leading to instability and violence. With the escalation of conflicts in various parts of our continent, it has shown the AU’s peace architecture to be ineffective.”

Frazer-Moleketi regretted that despite the creation of the AU Peace and Security Council 20 years ago, to collaborate with the UN Security Council to build peace in Africa, “these institutions seem overwhelmed and unable to stem the tide of conflicts and war.”

In a keynote speech at the Dialogue, Prof. Funmi Olonisakin, criticises African leaders’ penchant for “external agenda without question and without adaptation in managing African conflicts and affairs, foreign norms at the expense of their local variants that have not worked for years.” 

These aforementioned developments and more underscore the call for home-grown solutions to Africa’s problems. Indeed, if two-decade collaboration with the UN Security Council has yielded no tangible results, it is time for Africa to look inwards.

Of course, Africa has always received the short end of the stick in relationships with the developed world. African leaders are beset by selfish interests and “power struggles” at the expense of their people, thus making the achievement of good governance and peace unattainable goals. 
Although sustained dialogue by Africa’s best brains for generating ideas for moving the continent forward is the way to go, implementation, which lies with the political leaders, remains the strong end of the governance chain.

The people, the Civil Society Organisations and the media should wake up from their docility stance and champion the attainment of a process for electing political leaders.

Individual countries should entrench electoral reforms that will throw up the best to rule them as a precursor for achieving reforms at the AU for optimum results. There should be a workable model for electing African leaders and a structure for sanctioning the erring ones.