One day, blocs will rule, the AU will wither away

 

By Charles Onyango-Obbo
 

 

On Friday, I attended a launch meeting of the Kenya Futurist Group. The founders hope that in years to come, the effort will have led to the rise of a group of futurists with clever tools to paint a picture of Kenya in, say, 2070.

That got me thinking about the future of the African Union, which has just marked its 50th anniversary in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa.

There was pomp and ceremony, and Big People gave rousing political speeches, denounced the West, and hit out against the International Criminal Court at The Hague, and its alleged hatred of Africa’s rulers.

While what grabbed headlines was the AU Summit’s vote demanding that the ICC drop its cases against Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto, it is interesting that the two main issues that occupied most of Kenyatta’s speech were infrastructure and markets. Indeed, President Yoweri Museveni, who has emerged as Africa’s new commander in the war against the ICC, spoke quite a bit about infrastructure too.

And right there was a hint of the future of the AU. The AU is not going to collapse into oblivion, as some suggest. However, it will mutate into a very different organisation, not the current political umbrella.

Right now, Africa is a continent where nearly all organisations are based on geography. One senses that, in the next two decades, we shall see the big AU fragmenting around interests.

The oil-rich African states, thus, could form their own thing, leaving out the oil-poor ones. We could have an African G7 Group of the leading seven economies — say Nigeria, South Africa, Ethiopia, Angola, Tunisia, Botswana, and Kenya.

Then we could have new groupings based on values — political culture and outlook on international relations. The ICC matter, then, could be the start of a split between countries that are aligned towards the Western-bred global regime of the past 100 years (maybe Ghana, Malawi, Botswana, Senegal, Cape Verde, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Gabon), and those preferring a more Afrocentric and East-leaning orientation (Uganda, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Sudan, Ethiopia, South Africa, Zambia, and so on).

Then we shall have regional groupings, but the present architecture will be overthrown. I see three clusters:
The East African Community, the Horn, and Southern and Central African communities shall fold into one bloc. There will be the broad West African bloc. And North Africa and the Maghreb belt shall become one big economic bloc too.

The AU will become like the Non-Aligned Movement today. It will be there, but people will mostly speak about its past and unfulfilled promises. It will not meet every year. Maybe every three years, when a new African leader who has just been elected or has taken power in an uprising, has some loose change and wants to spend it on a photo opportunity with other leaders on the continent to lift his profile, and thus calls a meeting.

Ethiopia may have overtaken Nigeria as the most populous African country by then. If it can reform its politics and continue to modernise its economy, Addis Ababa will still be one of Africa’s most important political capitals. But not because it is the headquarters of the AU.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s executive editor for Africa & Digital Media