The South Africa-Algeria duo lacked the political will to formulate and execute a clear African foreign policy to shape African solutions to solve African problems.
Washington D.C. – South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s one-year tenure as the African Union (AU) chairperson was a debacle.
Ramaphosa’s lack of initiative has amplified tensions on the African continent and his feeble diplomatic efforts rendered the AU irrelevant and ineffective. The South African presidency had no clearly defined agenda and no blueprints for achieving its stated goal of “silencing the guns” on the continent.
Adding to the AU woes was the unenthusiastic performance of the Algerian Ismail Sharqi who chaired, during the same period, the powerful Commission for Peace and Security (PSC) of the African Union.
During South Africa’s tenure as chair and Algeria’s stint as the head of the PSC, the AU did not meet its key objective to bring peace to all Africans as violence intensified in the Sahel, Libya, Mali, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Mozambique and on the Moroccan Algerian borders.
In the past year, the Pan-African organization undertook few meek and muddled diplomatic initiatives to end the violence in Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali and Cameroon, while the United Nations and Morocco have kept the lead in negotiating an end to the Libyan conflict.
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The South Africa-Algeria duo lacked the political will to formulate and execute a clear African foreign policy to shape African solutions to solve African problems.
However, the worst failing of the South African presidency was ignoring the inevitable impact of the long simmering troubles in the Horn of Africa.
The civil war in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, where fighting between Federal forces and Tigray People’s Liberation Front led to several thousand deaths and thousands more displaced, should have been an ominous warning that there will be more bloodshed and chaos.
The PSC, the commission in charge of peace and security, was reluctant to act as the fighting expanded to involve Eritrea while the Ethiopian Sudanese borders flared up with fresh violence.
Notwithstanding the establishment of the AU Covid-19 response fund to assist in fighting the Coronavirus, Chairman Ramaphosa sidestepped confronting Africa’s major conflicts. Under his tenure, AU negotiations around the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam dispute, the Libyan civil war and the Sahel insecurity collapsed.
The AU inaction under the South African-Algerian leadership has exacerbated ethnic violence and harmed regional relations in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa. Moreover, Ramaphosa’s reluctance to fully engage with the Ethiopian government had led to the escalation of violence in the Tigray region and thrusted Sudan and Ethiopia into a war that could involve Egypt and engulf the whole region.
In Southern Africa, the AU remains absent as Mozambique is tottering into a humanitarian crisis with the government fighting against insurgents folding and thousands of civilians dying amid an escalating conflict.
Meanwhile, the crises in Central Africa have deepened while the AU showed no initiative to end the humanitarian nightmares. In the Central African Republic, the government is losing control over big areas of the country as the rebels advance toward the capital threatening to starve thousands of innocent people.
Meanwhile, in Cameroon, the civil war in the Anglophone side between government and rebel forces persists in the absence of an African peacemaking plan.
Ismail Sharqi did not fare much better than Mr. Ramaphosa did. The Algerian diplomat ran the PSC for two consecutive terms without showing any diplomatic achievements on the face of a growing list of disasters. Moreover, under his leadership, Africa’s foreign policy setbacks have been more frequent than advances. The AU has suffered from systematic flaws in its thinking and approach to conflict resolution.
Thankfully, South Africa lost its bid to head the PSC. The veteran Nigerian diplomat Bankole Adeoye was elected this month to succeed Sharqi. Africans have high expectation that Mr. Afeoye can make enduring contributions to a more peaceful, stable and a war-free Africa.
For his part, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s President Félix Tshisekedi, who took over the rotating presidency of the AU from Ramaphosa, faces an uphill battle to attend to several growing African crises that require urgent and immediate attention.
Ramaphosa’s aloofness and Sharqi’s vanity have cost Africa and Africans dearly. It is now up to President Tshisekedi and Ambassador Adeoye to find the momentum and will to prevent tensions on many fronts in the continent from escalating, threatening to make an already challenging situation far worse.
