The African Union is paralysed - The Continent | Substack

Delivering us: Presidents Kagame of Rwanda and Tshisekedi of the DRC flank US President Trump.

CHRISTINE MUNGAI

MARCO RUBIO, JD Vance, and Donald Trump are wrong about the way the West was made, says African-American author and historian Howard French. “These world events took place on the back of the African continent and the millions of Africans who were enlisted in this vast construction project through enslavement,” French told The Continent.

“Rubio speaks of the need for the West to be unapologetic about this past. What he doesn’t understand is the fact that [just] because he never learned [history] does not mean it will go away.” But our diplomats in Addis won’t be the people who school US leaders on African contributions to “Western civilisation”. They are too busy holding meetings.

As conflicts spiralled in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Sahel in 2025, killing thousands of people and displacing millions, the African Union’s peace and security council convened 69 times. That is an average of more than one meeting a week. That did little to halt the wars. A new report by Amani Africa, a governance thinktank based in Addis Ababa, paints the council as irrelevant within Africa and crowded out by external actors.

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Sudan was discussed six times in 2025. The council condemned the existence of parallel governments and renewed calls for ceasefires. Yet, the war entered its third year, mass massacres were committed in El Fasher, and Sudan is now effectively partitioned between rival forces.

A presidential committee created specifically to mediate between the warring parties in Sudan never even held its first meeting. Meanwhile, the real negotiations are dominated by “the Quad” – the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates – with the AU as a bystander.

“We have to ask whether the raison d’être that brought the African Union into existence is actually completely being wiped out,” Solomon Dersso, director of Amani Africa, told The Continent. “The AU is being marginalised, side-stepped, and displaced. And the result is basically African countries being picked up [by external interests], literally, one by one.”

The pattern repeats. The 2025 review paints an institution caught in a ritualistic loop: convene, deliberate, condemn, communiqué, repeat. In the DRC, the council demanded that the March 23 Movement (M23) rebels withdraw from the eastern part of the country. Instead, they captured more territory. Like in Sudan’s case, external parties came to dominate: the US brokered the Washington Accord between the DRC and Rwanda and Qatar facilitated the Doha Framework between Kinshasa and the M23. The AU wasn’t even at the table.

Haven’t we met? Delegates attend a session at the AU Headquarters in Addis Ababa on Saturday. PHOTO: MARCO SIMONCELLI/AFP

The report describes the AU’s role in Libya, as “marginal, if not totally irrelevant”. In South Sudan, no external actors crowded out the AU. Juba simply ignored the council’s six demands to release vice-president Riek Machar. The fighting in Jonglei state, which is related to the Machar political standoff, is moving closer to a return to full civil war.

The AU says it has a “zero tolerance” policy on coups. Yet, military takeovers in Gabon, Madagascar, and Guinea- Bissau went largely unchecked. The message to soldiers seems to be: seize power, wait a bit, run for office, and all will be forgiven. The AU does have a peacekeeping mission in Somalia. But in 2025, amid aid cuts, its troops went unpaid.

Trade not diplomacy?

If Africa’s dignity in global affairs won’t be forcefully stated by effective diplomats, will it be negotiated with commercial leverage? A working paper recently published by ODI Global challenges the oft-repeated claim that Africa has that lever because it holds nearly a third of global reserves for critical minerals.

The paper’s author, Bright Simons, calls the figure “a comforting hallucination that has fostered a dangerous complacency”. The reality, when “stripped of rhetorical gloss”, is that Africa doesn’t have enough industrial minerals like iron, copper, bauxite, and zinc. Africa’s share of global reserves and production of these ranges between 2% and 5%, according to Simons. What it has are valuable minerals, like cobalt, which industries use in small quantities. These attract commodity investors – and frequently, speculators – because of their steep unit costs.

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The interests of investment bankers making a wager and of politicians like Trump and Rubio sometimes intersect, but not always. Leverage in markets doesn’t necessarily mean geopolitical influence. What Africa does have is its people. That cuts both ways. The continent’s population is increasing at three times the rate of the global average, accounting for nearly half of the world’s total annual increase. By 2070, Africa will surpass Asia as the most populous continent. With industrialisation and jobs, that could reproduce the “Asian economic miracle”.

Without that economic transformation, this demographic dividend becomes a vulnerability. So far, the external actors already treat Africa’s population boom as both a labour pool and security threat. Europe, for example, funds migration control to keep young Africans out, while simultaneously fueling a massive brain drain of African doctors, nurses, carers, and teachers to care for its own ageing population.

Africa is going to dominate the supply of new workers and consumers over the coming decades. The West will have no choice but to come knocking, says French. “[Perhaps] most dramatically, the world will come to rely on Africa’s supply of brains, of innovators, of inventors, of scientists, creatives, and thinkers.” Is that how Africa secures dignity and due recognition in global affairs? That depends, “on how well the continent prepares itself for this situation, how well states invest in their own populations, and crucially, how deeply African nations co-ordinate their efforts and work together”, French told The Continent.

That is exactly what makes the AU’s paralysis so concerning. Dersso at Amani Africa is calling for a “state of emergency” at Africa’s top governance organ to force leaders to respond collectively to conflicts across the continent.

Christine Mungai is the news editor of The Continent.