Two days ago (assuming you are reading this piece on its publication date, May 27), many Africans at home and abroad were celebrating the fifty-ninth anniversary of the founding of the antecedent body of the African Union (AU), the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).
I can visualise distracted pan-Africanists in Mzansi and other countries where May 25 is not a public holiday simply going through the motions at work while their thoughts are on the captivating speeches delivered in Addis Ababa those many years ago by the likes of Kwame Nkrumah – those who dreamt of a united Africa that would no longer be the very poor cousin of the peoples of the world. The virtue of an Africa that is united in all spheres, including economics, was cogently extolled by Kenyan intellectual PLO Lumumba not so long ago, when he contended that tiny countries such as Lesotho would never negotiate as equals with mighty China, for example. The thrust of his argument was that only the might of a united continent would prevent China and other big economies from bullying small African countries into skewed trade and other relationships.
The OAU/AU report card has been mixed, which some assessments – and these are decidedly in the majority – being highly scathing, while others have been complimentary. One of the most vocal critics of all time, who labelled the OAU a trade union for dictators, was Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni. That was when he was waging a war to rid his own country of a dictatorship – long before he became drunk on power and morphed into the monster he is today, a President with no qualms about brutalising anyone who dares challenge him for the top job.
The criticism that the continental body is a trade union for dictators may have been made in the 1980s – when we still had the OAU – but my view is that it’s equally applicable to its current incarnation as the AU. This manifests in the way African leaders want lower standards to be applied to them, so that they cannot be punished for infractions that are anathema in the rest of the world. When the International Criminal Court started going after some of them, they cried foul, charging that they were being targeted – this while Omar al-Bashir’s regime was butchering scores of people in Sudan’s Darfur region. Bashir hasn’t been the only culprit; we had Robert Mugabe across the Limpopo river and in eSwatini King Mswati is riding roughshod over his subjects. I could go on.
Now they also want a very low bar to be applied when assessing their economic management. Speaking in Dakar, Senegal, last week, current AU chairperson Macky Sall revived the idea of establishing a pan-African ratings agency, claiming that “at least 20% of the rating criteria for African countries are based on rather subjective factors of a cultural or linguistic nature, unrelated to the parameters that gauge the stability of an economy”.
Put differently, Sall, who is also Senegal’s President, wants ‘comradely’ assessments that turn a blind eye to the principles of sound economic management. It’s simply not going to work – the moneyed will invest or lend at favourable rates only when a host government’s economic management is evaluated by a credible ratings agency.
Perhaps Sall needs to be reminded that, back in 2007, the South African government reportedly rejected the adverse findings of an African Peer Review Mechanism process because it felt that the report ignored the country’s unique historical background and overlooked some of the corrective measures that were already under way. The message from this incident is loud and clear: an unfavourable assessment, even if it is delivered by a pan-African agency, will most likely be rejected by the government concerned.