“The Accidental Ecowas & AU Citizen”:
Africa's rise and how it’s Time to Project AU Power!
By
E.K.Bensah Jr
If there were
ever a greatest exponent of serendipity, it must have been when I found myself
in the home of the African Union in March 2011. Unbeknownst to many, I met my
kindred spirit—Mr. Stuart Hastings of towardsunity.org—in person for the first
time. I had met him two years earlier online when I was searching through tomes
of material on comparative regional integration and trying to find out also
whether there were other souls concerned more with the comparative approach on
regionalism than simply the single-minded one where, say, the AU, EU or ECOWAS
is the main focus.
I would come
across Stuart’s site and immediately spark a conversation with him about how
the tectonic plates were shifting towards regional unions, and how we both
needed to play a part in that change.
His website,
then as now, was clear: to travel the world from his home town of Canada and
return to produce a book on how far regional unions, such as the EU, MERCOSUR;
African Union; and ASEAN can promote promote peace and humanity through
democratic dispensations they offer in their institutional structures, and how
it was important to re-think some of the current narratives driving hegemons in
those respective unions.
So it would be
that Stuart and I would meet on 19 March, 2011 at Lime Tree cafe, situated in
the rather plush Boston Day Spa on the lush and swanky Bole Road in Addis. I
will never forget that day for the people who were there—Stuart Hastings; and a
young official of the UN Economic Commission for Africa who might never confess
in public he is a Pan-Africanist—and for the fact that after I got back to my
hotel, I would catch the news on BBC and Al-Jazeera that a multi-state
coalition had began a military intervention in Libya to implement United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973.
I had had a
stress-free visit to the AU building days earlier, and so it seemed a bit
surreal to see diplomats fluttering in and out after 19 March all over
television. It was even harder to believe that the-then almost-completed AU
building would play host to an apparent impotence of AU officials and
policy-makers it would soon host almost a year later.
It is easy to
speculate that it is probably these apparently-impotent AU policy-makers who
have just witnessed the inauguration of the new, 28-floor AU building at the
just-ended 18th session of the AU in the Ethiopian capital. After
the cacophony over the past few days of this Chinese gift to the Africans and
the numerous speculations that have abounded over possible quid-pro-quos that
might be associated with this expensive gift, it's time to get serious.
There's no
gainsaying that China will expect some favours from Africa for having built
this building that supposedly towers over the whole of Addis. To harp on it, in
my view, is as relevant as claiming that the Europeans and Western donors who
pay some sixty percent of many African countries’ budget would expect
these-same countries to be indebted to them. The argument is even a
non-starter. What I would hope we would talk about are two major things.
First – how it
symbolises a renaissance of South-South cooperation and second, how it is a
projection of the increasing power of the African Union.
Symbolism of the AU building
Both experts
and amateurs on African integration, and Western journalists alike have been
speculating over what China is likely to expect from the building they have
donated to the African Union. What, for me, took the biscuit was no less than
the venerable BBC World Service’s very respected “News Hour” programme on
Sunday 29th January interviewing the East African correspondent Will
Ross, with an angle that was Sino-African centred in a way that suggested that
China wants our natural resources, knows Africa is rising and so wants to
capitalize on that rise. In my view, this is not analysis; it is common-sense.
There really is no such thing as a free lunch. It is just that with the
Chinese, they deliver that lunch faster and with few conditions. That may be
the beauty of the relationship, and I believe what African integration watchers
all over must be doing right now is to use this as an opportunity to explore
and enhance the Sino-African relationship.
In 2010, UNCTAD launched the Economic Development
in Africa report. Entitled “South-South Cooperation: Africa and the New
Forms of Development Partnerships” it examined recent trends in the
economic relationships of Africa with other developing countries and the new
forms of partnership that are animating those relationships.
The increasing role of large developing
countries in global trade, finance, investment and governance, coupled with
their rapid economic growth, has stimulated debate on the implications for
Africa´s development.
The report urges African nations to
intensify efforts at developing better productive capacities to maximize their
gains from the emerging partnerships and the gradual global shift of economic
power to the East from the West. African countries, the report states “have to
produce goods with high income elasticities of demand and that present greater opportunities
for export market expansion”.
The report comprises five chapters dealing
with the challenges and opportunities in South-South cooperation, Africa’s
trade with developing countries, southern official flows to Africa, southern
Foreign Direct Investment to Africa and making South-South Cooperation work for
Africa.
The report concludes that Africa-South
Cooperation—whether it is Sino— or Indio—not only has the potential to enhance
Africa´s capacity to address its development challenges but the full
realization of the benefits requires gearing cooperation towards the
development of productive capacities across the region.
Bottom line is that Africa as a
continent does not yet have a unified strategy relating to Africa-South
cooperation and this is evidenced in part, for example, by the way in which the
2010 report was produced by UNCTAD, and not the African Union. Going forward,
the AU can use the donation of the building to consolidate the Sino-African
relationship—perhaps around infrastructure? — and create an effective strategy
round it in a way that will slowly and surely put paid to the West’s.
Projection
of power in the AU’s 10th anniversary year!
Who has not seen pictures of the
Brussels-based European Commission on TV and thought “wow, that’s a huge
building!” And for those who have seen it in person, there’s no gainsaying it’s
a rather imposing building. This contrasts sharply with what Stuart Hasting
related to in one of our numerous discussions of his globe-trotting in Asia to
see the secretariat of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation
(SAARC) in Nepal.
First and most importantly, after having
been established in 1985, one would have thought that they might have upgraded
their building a little. Pictures online of the Secretariat are consistent with
the descriptions associated with Hasting’s sojourn anecdotes. This has prompted
much speculation among those of us committed to propagating the development of
regional unions and groupings – especially in the developing world— as good –
and the greatest exemplification of the very-necessary projection of power the
AU so needs to do. Given that this is coming in the tenth anniversary of the
African Union, this could not but be a better and fitting presage of Africa’s
putative rise!
In
2009, in his capacity as a “Do More Talk Less Ambassador” of the 42nd
Generation—an NGO that promotes and discusses Pan-Africanism--Emmanuel gave a series of lectures on the
role of ECOWAS and the AU in facilitating a Pan-African identity. Emmanuel
owns "Critiquing Regionalism" (http://critiquing-regionalism.org). Established in 2004 as an initiative
to respond to the dearth of knowledge on global regional integration
initiatives worldwide, this non-profit blog features regional integration
initiatives on MERCOSUR/EU/Africa/Asia and many others. You can reach him on ekbensah@ekbensah.net / Mobile: +233-268.687.653.
