What We Need to Know – Agenda in AU Summit 2023
African leaders touch down Addis Ababa for an extraordinary summit of Head of States amid unprecedented economic crisis and insecurity issues grappling the continent. The meeting gives African leaders a chance to assess the AU’s readiness to confront the numerous internal and external challenges the continent faces in the year ahead.
Why Does it Matter?
Recent years have been marked by bloody civil wars, armed insurrections, coups and other crises that have spread instability and cost thousands of lives on the continent. External shocks have contributed to instability. While agreements reached in 2022 offer hope in some places, renewed hostilities have flared elsewhere.
What Should be Done?
This briefing sets out eight priorities the AU should focus on in 2023: reforming its own institutions; nurturing agreements in Ethiopia and Sudan; urging regional cooperation around the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam; easing tensions in the Great Lakes and Central Africa; and steering talks to unlock Libya’s stalemate transition.
Key Recent Challenges Facing The African Union
The past two years have brought deadly internationalized civil wars in Ethiopia (Tigray war) and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) with M23 rebels. The conflict has left Kagame and Tsishekedi on the receiving end as both parties deny involvement in the escalating conflict. Rwanda shot down a jet fighter that was taking off in Goma in what Kigali described as “a plan to invade its territorial airspace.”
The situation in the central Sahel shows no sign of improving, with armed groups destabilising swathes of it and seeking footholds elsewhere. This has been a breeding ground for coup and instability for many nations such as Mali, Niger, Chad and Burkina Faso.
Somalia, Mozambique and other countries, such as in the Lake Chad basin, on the other hand, continue to battle jihadist insurgencies. Intercommunal fighting rages in South Sudan despite Pope’s historic visit recently.
On The International Scene
Russia’s full-scale assault on Ukraine in 2022, meanwhile, unfolded just as much of Africa was charting a path to economic recovery after the shock of COVID-19. The invasion, and the Western sanctions that followed, have rattled African economies and left many in deep distress. This has shutdown several economies that rely on importation of food products and agricultural inputs such as fertilizers, wheat, cooking oil among others.
Amid all this ferment, the leaders meeting in Addis Ababa should concentrate on crises where new or intensified efforts by the AU can be of greatest help, while recommitting to norms and reforms that will better enable the body to do its job.
The summit will see the chair of the assembly of heads of state, the AU’s highest decision-making body, pass from Senegal to the tiny Indian Ocean archipelago of Comoros. The handover will occur in line with an AU tradition of rotating the position. The new chair, Comoros President Azali Assoumani, will require the support of other senior African leaders to discharge the role, given his country’s limited diplomatic heft.
African Union Successes
The heads of state will have some recent successes to build on. When COVID-19 struck, the continental body rallied in coordination with the World Health Organization and Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention to help member states ramp up screening and testing, as well as obtain vaccines.
The continental free trade area (Afcfta) endorsed by heads of state in 2018 has secured member state ratification at a rapid clip. In a strikingly positive development, a panel of eminent leaders convened by the AU helped secure a 2 November 2022 agreement that ended fighting in the devastating conflict centered in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.
Still, some of these achievements came with caveats. The comprehensive cessation of hostilities deal for Ethiopia was hugely welcome, but the AU Commission drew substantial criticism for not acting more quickly to bring parties to the table. Of course in all fairness, the constraints it faced in negotiating with a major member state that also hosts its headquarters were considerable. Quite ironic.
While many governments have ratified the free trade area agreement and might be willing to allow the free movement of goods when it suits them, very few have ratified the accord on free movement of people, raising questions as to how effective the effort will be.
Agenda 2063
The organisation also has a more than full plate when it comes to peace and security issues. The 2023 summit will take place ten years after the AU endorsed its flagship Agenda 2063 vision document. That charter lists ending conflict on the continent as a key goal. The gathered heads of state should take the opportunity to examine the AU’s track record, assess ways it can do better and consider where its efforts are especially needed now.
A few openings leap out: agreements in Ethiopia and Sudan create an opportunity for the institution to consolidate important gains. But the AU may also have an important role to play in places where it has had a lower profile of late – such as the DRC, where AU engagement is likely to become more important as the UN inevitably pulls back, and the Central African Republic (CAR), where the AU could help alter troubling dynamics with more assertive diplomacy.
Read: DRC Crisis Explained
Eight Major Areas That Must Be Addressed by African Union in Addis
- Bolstering the AU’s institutional capacity;
- Steering diplomacy in CAR;
- Pitching in to rescue Chad’s drifting transition;
- Calming inter-state tensions and supporting the DRC’s elections;
- Nurturing Ethiopia’s fragile peace agreement;
- Ending the impasse over Ethiopia’s Nile dam;
- Helping the UN chart a way out of Libya’s political deadlock;
- Making Sudan’s Phase II negotiations a success.
- DRC-M23 and Ethiopia-Tigray negotiations peace process report from Uhuru led team
- Climate change resilience strategies to curb hunger in the horn of Africa
Any light at the end of the tunnel? Way forward
The priority for the AU should be to chart a transition away from its long-running military deployment and to find pathways to a wider, sustainable political settlement for the country.
The AU should keep supporting comprehensive approaches to conflict resolution that go beyond security operations. Backing efforts by local authorities to improve governance, especially in rural areas, offers a more sustainable path to resolution, particularly when paired with exploring talks with groups willing to consider a settlement.
Finally, as they work through these and other priorities, the AU and its chair will find themselves facing a number of challenges with implications for the whole continent. They will need to help marshal the international support that can help member states weather the socio-economic fallout from global shocks including the war in Ukraine – so that these do not feed loops of conflict.
Elections in Nigeria, Zimbabwe and the DRC will also demand attention; the AU should strive as much as it can to encourage transparent voting that respects the will of the people in all these countries.
Last but not least, the AU and member state leaders will have to negotiate a fluid geopolitical environment, which will require careful judgments about how to engage with major powers as they sharpen their own rivalries elsewhere – and how to prevent the continent’s most vulnerable, conflict-scarred countries from being caught in a damaging tug of war.
Will we have formidable resolutions and binding ratified laws that will keep African states on course for realization of its full potential? Or will the usual talk-summit-then-walk-away narrative be the norm in the AU 2023 summit?
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