AU institutional reform - what is the deadline?
The Kagamé panel’s report on AU reforms provides little detail but rather sketches a broad outline for reforms.
The latest round of reforms of the African Union (AU), drawn up by a committee led by Rwandan President Paul Kagamé, was presented to heads of state at the 28th AU summit. The report provides little detail but rather sketches a broad outline for reforms. A timeline for the reforms’ implementation is yet to be set.
In its report entitled ‘The imperative to strengthen our Union’, presented to the AU Assembly last month, the Kagamé panel makes a frank assessment of the state of the AU. According to the report, the AU is plagued by ‘a chronic failure to see through decisions’, lacks focus, underperforms and has inefficient working methods.
The AU is plagued by a chronic failure to see through decisions |
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There is a perception among Africans that the AU is of ‘limited relevance’, it states. ‘The AU Assembly has adopted more than 1 500 resolutions, yet there is no easy way to determine how many of those have actually been implemented,’ laments the panel.
Despite this unusually lucid view of the AU, the report itself is relatively vague – rather a broad framework than a concrete plan. It will now be up to the new AU Commission (AUC), assisted by a troika of heads of state, to thrash out the details and oversee the implementation of these proposed reforms.
This is also not the first proposal to reform the AUC. The previous attempt, launched in 2007, did not work, mainly due to complaints that the AUC was not sufficiently consulted.
Fewer areas of intervention
According to the Kagamé report, the AUC should be reformed in line with a number of broad principles.
Firstly, the AU should focus on fewer continental priorities (political affairs, peace and security, economic integration and being ‘the voice of Africa on the international stage’). To make this possible, the division of labour between the AU and regional economic communities (RECs) needs to be streamlined in order to improve their respective impacts.
 The division of labour between the AU and RECs needs to be streamlined |
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Secondly, AU institutions should be re-aligned to support these priorities. The report advocates, among others, a review of the AUC and a reform of the Peace and Security Council (PSC) to improve its impact on conflict prevention and crisis management.
Thirdly, the report wants to see an improvement in the management of the AU at the political and technical level. It calls on the AU to host only one Assembly summit a year.
The second annual summit will only gather the AUC chairperson, a troika composed of the outgoing, current and incoming AU chairs, and the heads of RECs, in order to coordinate their actions.
The report also calls for the implementation ‘without undue delay’ of the decision taken in Kigali on funding the AU. The Committee of Ten Ministers of Finance will oversee the AU budget and its Reserve Fund. In addition, the scale of contributions will be revised ‘on the principlesof ability to pay, solidarity, and equitable burden-sharing, to avoid risk concentration’.
On accepting these recommendations, the AU Assembly decided that Kagamé, in collaboration with Chadian President Idriss Déby (the outgoing AU chairperson) and Guinean President Alpha Condé (the current chairperson), should oversee its implementation. A unit for reform and implementation is to be set up within the office of the incoming AUC chairperson.
| A unit for reform is to be set up within the office of the incoming chairperson |
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The challenges ahead: keeping the momentum of reform
A number of ambitious recommendations proposed by the panel were left out of the final decisions of the AU Assembly. According to a draft, seen by the PSC Report, the heads of state chose to scrap the recommendation that the AUC chairperson should appoint the deputy chairperson and commissioners. The panel felt that changing the way in which the commissioners are appointed would increase the efficiency of the commission. Currently, the AU Assembly appoints the chairperson and his/her deputy. Commissioners are appointed by the executive council. This means commissioners are not directly accountable to the chairperson.
Other recommendations not included in the final decisions are a reform of the criteria guiding PSC membership and limitations on external financing to the levels agreed in Johannesburg in 2015. (It was agreed that AU member states would fund 100% of the operating budget, 75% of the programme budget and 25% of the peace support operations budget.)
Finally, the decisions adopted by the Assembly also lack any timeline or benchmarks for implementation. The French version of the Kagamé report divided the reforms in three categories based on the timeline for their implementation: six months, one year and two years. The lack of these instruments could affect the reforms in an organisation that is known to be highly bureaucratic.
| The decisions adopted by the Assembly lack any timeline or benchmarks for implementation |
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In this regard, the next AU summit, to be held in July, is critical, as the incoming AUC will have to present an implementation plan in coordination with the troika appointed by the Assembly. The mechanism for monitoring the implementation of the reforms is critical. It will, on the one hand, have to avoid the trap of being too far removed from the AUC in Addis Ababa, with its specific realities, without being ‘embedded’ in the AUC, so it can make a case for the need for reforms over bureaucratic interests.
The challenge faced by the Kagamé panel going forward will be to keep the momentum for the reforms. In 2002, when the AU was created, the interim chairperson of the commission, Amara Essy, had an explicit mandate to ensure the transformation of the Organization of African Unity into the AU. The new AUC, elected at the 28th summit in January, was not elected with such an explicit mandate in terms of reforms.
Impact on peace and security
While the report referred to the need to focus on fewer priorities, among which political affairs and peace and security, there are few specific recommendations in this regard.
| Proposals regarding the reform of the PSC were removed from the final decisions |
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As stated earlier, ambitious proposals regarding the reform of the PSC and the funding of peace support operations were removed from the final decisions taken by heads of state. However, the call for closer coordination between the AU and RECs, based on the principle of subsidiarity, will have an impact on the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA).
At this stage, both the legal and political frameworks governing the relations between the two levels lack clarity. The PSC protocol stresses the primary responsibility of the AU in promoting peace, security and stability in Africa. The protocol spells out a top-down relationship whereby the AUC chairperson and the PSC are supposed to ‘harmonize and coordinate the activities of the RECs’ to ensure their coherence with AU principles. The memorandum of understanding between the AUC and RECs signed in 2008 stresses the principles of subsidiarity, complementarity and comparative advantage without specifying the relevant modalities of implementation.
From this perspective, the latest reform proposals present an opportunity to define a flexible division of labour between the AU as a whole and the RECs. This clarification would help avoid competition between the AU and regional mechanisms when it comes to crisis management.
The second major recommendation is ‘the launch of a deep reform of the PSC, reinforce its rules of procedures and improve its role in preventing conflict and managing crises’.
This recommendation comes in the wake of the adoption, also in January, of a ‘Master roadmap of practical steps to silence the guns in Africa by year 2020’. In 2016 the AU had also adopted an APSA roadmap. The challenge is to ensure coherence between these various documents in order to increase the AU’s impact on peace and security in Africa.
| The challenge is to ensure coherence between these various documents to increase the AU’s impact |
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Finally, the call for fewer priorities and the alignment of the AUC will likely lead to a debate about the current structure, which separates peace and security from political affairs. Issues such as linkages between the African Governance Architecture and APSA, between conflict management and post-conflict reconstruction and development, and between structural and immediate prevention require an improved framework of coordination.
In the area of conflict prevention, the lines are especially blurred. Some activities, such as electoral observation, located in the Department of Political Affairs, can be assimilated into conflict prevention. The Peace and Security Department also hosts a unit with this name.
The effective and coherent division of labour within the AUC can only improve the AU’s overall impact in promoting stability on the continent.
