Introduction

The seminal assembly of the African Union (AU), to be held in South Africa in July 2002, will close shop on the organisation that has served Africa since 1963 – the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).

Much hope and much hype is being generated among African elites that the AU will herald a new beginning for Africa. However, donors and the international community remain cautious in their expectations of the contribution the AU can make to African development and stability.

Ultimately the Union, like the OAU before it, is an intergovernmental organisation. The pace of change is therefore still likely to be determined by what cynics refer to as ‘lowest common denominator politics’.

Not that Africa has been slow in setting and acceding to ambitious goals relating to democracy, development, human rights and democratisation – far from it. It is the willingness and ability of leaders and countries to translate ideals into practice, that has often been found wanting. This is reflected in the litany of initiatives, dating back over decades, which have made little difference to the quality of life or the safety of Africa’s impoverished citizenry.

Collectively the AU, through the Conference on Security, Stability, Development and Cooperation (CSSDCA) and the New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), aims to change all of this. All three initiatives will come to a head at the inaugural Assembly of the AU in South Africa, making this one of the most crucial Heads of State and Government meetings ever. It is a critical point at which to clarify and co-ordinate the objectives of each initiative. It should also be a turning point for their implementation.

African Union (AU)

In Addis Ababa, where the General Secretariat of the OAU is to become the Commission of the AU, a series of expert meetings and internal consultations are determining new ways of working that will differentiate the AU from the OAU. The OAU Lusaka Summit meeting of 2001 mandated the Secretary-General to proceed, in consultation with member states, with a process to work out the rules of procedure to launch the key structures within the AU.

These are the Assembly of Heads of State and Government, the Executive Council of Foreign Ministers, the Commission (including its structure, functions and powers) and the Permanent Representatives Committee of Ambassadors.

The Lusaka Summit also agreed to incorporate the Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution as an organ of the AU after a review of its structures, procedures and working methods (apart from a possible change in name).

The Union will spawn a number of important organisations, including the Pan-African Parliament, the Court of Justice, various specialised technical committees, the Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC), designated as the portal for the engagement of African civil society organisations, including non-governmental organisations, socio-economic organisations and professional associations, and a number of financial institutions. Each will require an equitable distribution across the continent.

Earlier reports indicated that South Africa had offered to host ECOSOCC, while Libya had offered to host the Pan-African Parliament. More recent indications are that African leaders may adopt a more considered approach to the location of key institutions of the AU.

NEPAD

Rarely has Africa been the focus of so much attention. This is largely due to the efforts of South African President Mbeki through NEPAD, and more recently in response to the threat of global marginalisation following the events of 11 September 2001. In the process, NEPAD has emerged as the continent’s external engagement strategy with the G8 and other developed countries.

The very fact that Mbeki, the OAU and African member states are so keen to ensure that NEPAD is presented as a continental initiative is also its greatest potential weakness.

The attraction of NEPAD for the donor and investment community is the promise of self-governance to specific standards and the prospects to reverse the declining quality of African governance. Unlike previous initiatives through the OAU, NEPAD promises to establish criteria for membership in line with international concerns about good governance, democracy and macro-economic behaviour.
Detractors fear that if NEPAD becomes indistinguishable from its OAU predecessors, like the Abuja Treaty of 1991, it will not be implemented.

The CSSDCA

The CSSDCA is better known within the continent than NEPAD, predating the latter by almost a decade. It reflects the continental engagement of South Africa’s partner and sometime rival, Nigeria. The CSSDCA is Africa’s version of the Helsinki process, which it indigenised in 1990. Like the Helsinki process, which began as a non-governmental initiative and was later adopted by governments as the European Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the CSSDCA was driven by General Olusegun Obasanjo in his capacity as chairman of the African Leadership Forum.

In Africa’s brittle politics many leaders, including the OAU itself, did not take kindly to the subsequent Kampala Document of 1991. At that meeting convened by one of the OAU’s better known sceptics, Ugandan President Museveni, participants agreed on a unified strategy for development. They linked the issues of security, stability and regional co-operation in a comprehensive and integrated fashion.
It was the weak track record of the OAU which spurred leaders such as Obasanjo, Museveni and lately Mbeki to seek alternative strategies and mechanisms to address Africa’s enduring poverty and marginalisation. Not surprisingly, the OAU regarded the Kampala process as a threat to itself, much like some in the OAU today see the NEPAD secretariat in South Africa. As a result, the OAU sought to focus its attention and energies on the African Economic Community (the Abuja Treaty) instead.

As newly elected president of Nigeria, Obasanjo was able to resuscitate the CSSDCA in 1999. During the OAU Summit in Algiers, he called for leaders to refocus on the Kampala Document. This initiative moved rapidly to establish a continental Steering Committee, to hold an African Ministerial Conference on Security, Stability, Development and Co-operation, and then to adopt a Solemn Declaration on the CSSDCA by African Heads of State in Lomé, Togo in 2000.

The Solemn Declaration on the CSSDCA commits African leaders to implement the CSSDCA within the framework of the OAU. Leaders further agreed to establish a Standing Conference that should meet every two years during the OAU Summit. The first Standing Conference will coincide with the Assembly of the AU in South Africa during July 2002, as well as with the first report-back on NEPAD. This heightens the need to find a formula through which the two initiatives can complement one another.

Co-ordination of initiatives

The differing levels of commitment by Nigeria and South Africa to NEPAD and the CSSDCA respectively, have been interesting to track. Following the decisions taken at Lomé, the OAU established a CSSDCA co-ordination unit within the OAU secretariat. Unlike previous initiatives (and based on the same principle of ownership as NEPAD), the CSSDCA is funded by member states. Nigeria has already committed some $500,000 to the initiative and South Africa is considering a similar amount.

Further decisions taken at Lomé were to:

convene Review Meetings to monitor the implementation of the CSSDCA decisions, in between sessions of the Standing Conference; and



incorporate CSSDCA principles and guidelines into national institutions that would be responsible for monitoring the implementation of CSSDCA activities.

A subsequent process of detailed discussions on the various ‘Calabashes’ that constitute the CSSDCA is now almost complete. Those for development and democracy were concluded in South Africa during November 2001 and the deliberations on safety and security are scheduled to occur in April 2002 in Kampala.

The conclusions of these meetings will eventually be forwarded to the OAU/AU Summit meeting in South Africa as an integrated Memorandum of Understanding between African member states. It will reflect a single, common position relating to commitments on development, cooperation, security and stability. How these common standards will relate to those implicit and explicit to NEPAD is not yet clear, apart from the general view gaining currency with proponents of the CSSDCA and the OAU secretariat, that the CSSDCA should serve as the monitoring mechanism of NEPAD.

Issues regarding safety and security as they interrelate with NEPAD are particularly complex. A meeting of the NEPAD Implementing Committee of Heads of State in Abuja in October 2001, decided to make capacity building on peace and security an OAU responsibility. The same communiqué announced a sub-committee on Peace and Security to focus on conflict management, prevention and resolution in Africa, to be chaired by President Mbeki. Other members of the sub-committee are Algeria, Gabon, Mali and Mauritius.

On the one hand, NEPAD speaks of African leaders taking joint responsibility for, among others:

strengthening mechanisms for conflict prevention, management and resolution at the sub-regional and continental levels;



promoting and protecting democracy and human rights, developing clear standards of accountability, transparency and participatory governance at the national and subnational levels; and



building the capacity of the states of Africa to set and enforce the legal framework and to maintain law and order.

On the other hand, the locus of such responsibility and the issue of peer review remain unclear, given the stated desire of the NEPAD leadership to ensure that “all other initiatives promoted by individual African countries should be subsumed under the NEPAD process …”. The difficulties this presents in practice were soon demonstrated when, during October 2001, the Heads of State and Government of 27 African countries, meeting in the capital of Senegal, adopted the Dakar Declaration Against Terrorism.

The Declaration recommended that the:

“… OAU convene an extraordinary summit to discuss the progress so far made in Africa in the fight against terrorism and to ensure that the post September 11, 2001 events and their consequences have the least possible adverse impact on the development of Africa, in particular on the implementation of the New African Initiative [now NEPAD].”

At the time of writing, the Peace and Security Initiative of NEPAD consists of three elements that are also reflected in the CSSDCA and Constitutive Act establishing the AU:

promoting long-term conditions for development and security;



building the capacity of African institutions for early warning, as well as enhancing their capacity to prevent, manage and resolve conflicts; and



Institutionalising commitment to the core values of NEPAD through the leadership.

NEPAD further identifies capacity building at the regional and sub-regional level in four key areas that also run parallel to the CSSDCA and the AU, namely:

prevention, management and resolution of conflict;


peacemaking, peacekeeping and peace enforcement;


post-conflict reconciliation, rehabilitation and reconstruction; and


combating the illicit proliferation of small arms, light weapons and landmines.

NEPAD is now engaged in finalising its Strategic Framework Document under each of its five priority areas for presentation to the G8 Summit in Canada in June 2002 and the AU Summit in South Africa in July 2002. These should include detailed and costed measures required in each area, the actions required of partners and the nature and sources of financing of such activities.

Even the most cursory review of the content of the CSSDCA and NEPAD underline the close correlation between these two initiatives driven by Nigeria and South Africa respectively, and their overlapping and mutually reinforcing roles and engagement. Obasanjo, as the chairman of the NEPAD Implementation Committee, has spoken eloquently about the linkage between the CSSDCA and NEPAD. But Nigerian engagement with the CSSDCA appears to be of a different calibre to that of South Africa in the case of NEPAD. While the CSSDCA is now formally an OAU process, the relationship between NEPAD and the OAU, and indeed between NEPAD and the CSSDCA, remains unclear.

For African consumption, both initiatives have to be presented within the framework of the Constitutive Act of the AU. For foreign and donor consumption, Mbeki has to emphasise the separate, discriminating nature of NEPAD.

More importantly, smaller African states and the OAU have been effective in ensuring that they will benefit from any NEPAD initiative by calling for the institutionalisation of the programme within the OAU – an objective largely achieved in Lusaka when the OAU Summit formally adopted NEPAD.
The inaugural Assembly meeting of the AU in South Africa in July – dealing as it must with the transformation from the OAU to the AU, with NEPAD and the CSSDCA – promises to be an interesting event. At most, it should co-ordinate the three initiatives and lay foundations for their implementation. At the least, it should reduce the number of acronyms to master.