Pan-African Parliament seeks its role in changing continent

 He said Tanzania’s official stand regarding the willingness of other countries to enter bilateral or trilateral arrangements needed consensus before their implementation. PHOTO|FILE 

By Nicholas Kotch,The citizen

In Summary

“We believe the time has come for (the draft) to be adopted. It’s not the ultimate goal, just a step forward,” the PAP’s president, or speaker, Nigerian politician Bethel Nnaemeka Amadi, said in an interview.

Lying unobtrusively next to Gallagher Estate in Midrand, the Pan-African Parliament, whose unfortunate acronym is PAP, is just about showing signs of life during a visit in the middle of its third ordinary session last week.

The car park is three-quarters empty and the machine that makes badges for visitors is so underemployed that it needs a while to warm up, an assistant explains apologetically.

In the ninth year of its existence, the PAP is minding its own business and definitely not making waves.

How could it? This is an assembly without enough power to generate waves or noise or, saddest of all, positive change in a continent that needs it.

There were no queues lining up to fill the public gallery. No arrows on the N1 or at the Gautrain’s Midrand station saying: “This Way to the PAP”.

Zero danger of a Julius Malema from any of Africa’s 54 states marching at the head of a fist-waving mob to storm the nondescript buildings.

It’s not that kind of Parliament. Its proceedings are barely reported. Its 265 members from 47 national parliaments — nominated by their peers rather than elected by the people — are unknown to the citizenry, at least in Midrand.

Yet its mission statement says: “The Pan-African Parliamentarians represent all the peoples of Africa. The ultimate aim of the Pan-African Parliament is to evolve into an institution with full legislative powers, whose members are elected by universal adult suffrage .”

Those objectives were spelt out when the PAP was born, in March 2004, with the unstated ideal of redressing the extreme imbalance in the governance of most African countries that favours presidents and reduces parliaments to rubber-stamp chambers.

Former President Thabo Mbeki was one of the important midwives as the PAP took its place in the architecture of the new Africa, alongside the African Union (AU), the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) and the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM). Catchy titles were evidently not considered by the naming committee.

None of these bodies has set African pulses running and the PAP is arguably the biggest disappointment of them all.

“Some member states are not willing to cede their sovereignty at all,” said the parliament’s clerk, Zwelethu Madasa, a South African. “They are in a small minority in the African Union but we have agreed that consensus is required to effect change