Eight Priorities for the African Union in 2023 (Crisis Group Africa Briefing N°186. 14 February 2023)
What’s new? In the third week of February, the African Union (AU) will hold its annual heads of state summit. The meeting affords 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 stalemated transition.
Overview
The 2023 African Union (AU) heads of state summit will take place at an especially delicate moment for the continent. The past two years have brought deadly internationalised civil wars in Ethiopia and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The situation in the central Sahel shows no sign of improving, with armed groups destabilising swathes of it and seeking footholds elsewhere. Somalia, Mozambique and other countries, such as in the Lake Chad basin, continue to battle jihadist insurgencies. Intercommunal fighting rages in South Sudan. Russia’s full-scale assault on Ukraine, 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. 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.
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 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 centred 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. (In fairness, the constraints it faced in negotiating with a major member state that also hosts its headquarters were considerable.) 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.
Nor is the AU free of institutional challenges. Member state divisions dog its efforts to hold the line on cherished ideals, not least its norm against unconstitutional change of government. As discussed below, that norm suffered when the organisation decided not to suspend Chad’s membership (as its rules prescribe), instead giving it a grace period, after a junta seized power following the death of President Idriss Déby in 2021. The organisation has not repeated that mistake amid a rash of other coups in Sudan, Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea, but the precedent remains worrying. There are other reasons for concern as well: the flawed execution of personnel reforms intended to streamline the organisation has weakened certain core functions and led talented staff to leave; and perennial struggles to achieve financial self-sufficiency have failed to produce meaningful progress.
The [African Union] … has a more than full plate when it comes to peace and security issues.
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.
With these points in mind, Crisis Group has identified the following eight priorities that merit AU attention over the course of 2023:
1. Bolstering the AU’s institutional capacity;
2. Steering diplomacy in CAR;
3. Pitching in to rescue Chad’s drifting transition;
4. Calming inter-state tensions and supporting the DRC’s elections;
5. Nurturing Ethiopia’s fragile peace agreement;
6. Ending the impasse over Ethiopia’s Nile dam;
7. Helping the UN chart a way out of Libya’s political deadlock;
8. Making Sudan’s Phase II negotiations a success.
This list is, of course, non-exhaustive. It does not feature a number of hotspots — among other reasons because the AU’s role is already well defined or is not likely to become consequential, or because Crisis Group has weighed in extensively in other recent publications. Somalia is one example: there, 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 Sahel is another. In both cases, 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 (as discussed below) 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.
Source: International Crisis Group