Although Africa's peace and security regime is promising, serious challenges remain
Much more needs to be done if the promise that the African Union Peace and Security Council carries is to be realised.
One of the ambitions of pan-Africanism is the realisation of what Ali Mazrui, the renowned Kenyan political scientist, called Pax Africana, a peace ‘that is protected and maintained by Africa herself’.
The continent put in place a mechanism that carries a genuine promise of achieving Pax Africana with the establishment of the Peace and Security Council (PSC) of the African Union (AU). Aptly, during the launch of the PSC on 25 May 2004, the Heads of State and Government of the Member States of the PSC called the inauguration of the Council an ‘historic watershed in Africa’s progress towards resolving its conflicts and building durable peace’ on the continent.
Since its establishment the PSC has made remarkable progress in providing leadership in the search for peace and security in Africa. Most notably, the PSC offered Africa a mechanism for taking the lead on the continent’s peace and security agenda.
The progress made has been evident in the role the PSC has played in dealing with unconstitutional changes of government in about a dozen African countries, in brokering peace in countries such as Sudan and Kenya, and in launching peace support operations such as in Darfur and Somalia.
The AU’s contribution is also evident from the fact that an increasing number of countries have enjoyed stability during the past decade even in parts of the continent that are generally regarded as being conflict prone, despite the fact that conflict situations continue to make headlines. Due to the impact of its role, the PSC influences the politics of a significant number of AU member states; affects relations between African states at both regional and continental levels; and increasingly shapes the nature of international involvement on the continent.
These are significant achievements. Considering the fact that the PSC will be a decade old in March 2014, its impact makes one genuinely hopeful about the possibilities of achieving Pax Africana as an important facet of pan-Africanism.
However, the challenges facing the peace and security regime of the AU show that much more needs to be done if the promise that the PSC carries is to be realised.
The most notable and widely recognised limitation of the AU’s peace and security system is its heavy dependence on external support. Close to 90% of the funding for AU peace and security activities comes from donor funding. Without addressing this gap, the PSC will struggle to credibly deliver on its mandate since it would lack effective control over its agenda.
Moreover, most AU member states do not make the diplomatic and military contributions needed for the effective implementation of the PSC’s decisions. For example, the AU Mission to Somalia (AMISOM) consisted of troops from only Uganda and Burundi for far too long. Major contributions in terms of both troops and other resources for peace operations are borne by fewer than a dozen countries on the continent. As recent events in Somalia, Guinea Bissau, Abyei and Mali have demonstrated, the armies of individual countries such as Ethiopia, Nigeria, Chad and Kenya can be much more effective than the continental mechanism known as the African Standby Force. The AU’s slow pace of achieving consensus and the resultant lack of strong decisions allowed crises to fester and escalate. In a context where no African rapid deployment capability is readily available, this can have disastrous consequences. The events in northern Mali, which led to the launch of Operation Serval by the French in January 2013, have amply attested to this.
Another drawback of the AU peace and security system is its tendency to be state-centric in both approach and implementation. As a result, it lacks a strong constituency in civil society, the media and the wider African public.
There is huge gap between the nature and scope of the mandate entrusted to the PSC and what the PSC can realistically carry out. This is partly an issue of capacity. However, as long as African states fail to pursue political and economic agendas based on the needs and aspirations of their people, they will not have the resolve to address the peace and security challenges facing the continent. In this regard, former South African President Thabo Mbeki pointed out that one of the AU’s challenges is ensuring that member states ‘respect the imperatives for democratic rule as spelled out in the Constitutive Act, and related decisions, centred on the strategic perspective that the people – the African masses – must govern’.
As developments during the past year in Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic (CAR) highlighted, parts of the continent continue to face major challenges and a number of countries are characterised by instability and fragility. This shows that the PSC’s current approach, characterised by ‘fire-fighting’ that relies largely on the use of conflict management and conflict resolution tools such as high level ad hoc mediation and troop deployment, is totally inadequate to address the root causes of conflict. As Adekeye Adebajo in The Curse of Berlin: Africa after the Cold War pointed out, ‘military solutions can only be short-term Band-Aids to more complex and deep-rooted social, economic and political problems that armed peacekeepers can freeze but not resolve’. Much more focus should be placed on building legitimate governance institutions and viable indigenous frameworks that offer mechanisms for peacefully and sustainably resolving these problems.
An equally serious problem is that the national interests of PSC members cannot always be reconciled with the principles and objectives to which they have subscribed under the AU. As Mbeki stated, ‘one of the biggest failures has been the inability of the Union to ensure that all its member states integrate within their domestic policies all the decisions they adopt at the continental level as binding African policies’.
Another major issue has been the lack of a unified voice. This is evidenced by the divergence in the policy positions that AU member states take in their capitals, in Addis Ababa and in international forums such as the UN. While ensuring a unified voice, greater attention should also be paid to a more effective engagement with the UN, which this year mandated the deployment of UN missions to Mali, Somalia and the DRC, demonstrating its increasing role in Africa.
Apart from these internal problems, the AU’s peace and security regime also faces external challenges. These are not limited to the effects of climate change and the rise in transnational security threats such as terrorism and the proliferation of arms and weapons. The multipolar global order of the 21st century is such that, as Mbeki put it, ‘[there is a] danger that the ability of the peoples of Africa to determine their destiny would be severely compromised and undermined’. This is particularly the case because of the heightening rivalry over Africa between old global powers and emerging powers, most notably China, which, if not properly managed by Africa, can have disastrous consequences.
Without addressing these critical challenges, the promise that the PSC holds for bringing about a Pax Africana will prove to be a dream deferred. These challenges are in no significant measure attributable to the current dearth of political leadership on the continent. As the AU celebrates the 50th anniversary of the OAU/AU, a major question it faces is whether African states are willing and able to acknowledge this reality and rise to the occasion; taking the difficult decisions in order to address these challenges and thus taking the unification of Africa to the next level.
Solomon Ayele Dersso, Senior Researcher, ISS Addis Ababa
