http://www.africareview.com/Special+Reports/Africa+Union+votes/-/979182/1313660/-/2x55wuz/-/index.html

Africa Union picks next leader

By CIUGU MWAGIRUPosted Wednesday, January 25  2012 at  11:30

With African Union elections slated for the coming Sunday and Monday,
questions will arise about the ICC ruling on the Kenya post-election
violence case and the implications it will have for member countries
in which the culture of impunity still reigns.

Already there are concerns about who might assume the mantle of the
next AU chairperson, who will be elected by secret ballot before the
conclusion of the18th heads of state and government summit at its
Addis Ababa headquarters on January 29 and 30.

The AU has over the years had very dubious chairpersons. Additionally,
many of the organisation’s embarrassing moments have been as a result
of its official positions on major controversies like the ones
surrounding Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir and the late Libyan
leader Muammar Gaddafi.

The stands taken by the AU in both cases, as well as the Kenyan one,
left the organisation open to ridicule by mightier entities like Nato
on the one hand, and the UN and the ICC on the other. As for the two
leaders that were lately of the AU's concern, one, Gaddafi, is dead,
while the other, President Bashir, is still contending with the tag of
an international fugitive from justice.

The organisation’s choice of its chairmen over the years have proved
to be a disappointment, and have overall betrayed the ideals of the
pioneering founding fathers of African nationhood. Ironically, some of
these founding fathers were disappointing in their own right, and many
among them have gone down in history as some of Africa’s most
disreputed rulers, many of who rose to power and left it in
circumstances marked by utter ignominy.

With that kind of history, it is hardly redeeming that the forthcoming
AU elections have attracted the interest of the likes of the eccentric
Gambian President Yahya Jammeh, who wants to become chairperson.
Having seized power in 1994 at the age of 29, Jammeh has proved his
mettle as an autocrat by ruling Gambia with an iron fist.

Mysticism

Add to that his characteristic aura of mysticism, and the fact that he
has been accused of many crimes, among them being behind the frequent
disappearances and assassinations of critics and journalists, and you
have the typical African serial dictator.

Endowed with a penchant for treating his subjects like so many
schoolchildren, only recently, ahead of his swearing-in for a fourth
term, he was berating his purportedly lazy countrymen while vowing to
eradicate corruption "once and for all" and to turn his tiny
landlocked country into an economic superpower.

"I will be more dangerous in the next five years than I was, even in
uniform, because people have to change their attitude to work," Jammeh
is reported to have warned his fellow citizens on state TV. "You
cannot be in your offices every day doing nothing or leaving the
workload to a few people, and at the end of the day you expect to be
paid. This has to stop. You either do your work or leave or go to
jail."

While threatening them with dire consequences if they didn’t change
their ways pronto, Jammeh explained that he had been “too lenient" in
the past and vowed that Gambians would soon see "a different Yahya
Jammeh." He then added: "I will wipe out almost 82 per cent of those
in the work force in the next five years unless they change their
attitudes."

With that kind of demeanour, Jammeh is hardly a great prospect for
AU’s PR, and it is only fortunate that he is not touted as a
frontrunner for the organisation’s 2012 chair. The edge is said to lie
with his Benin counterpart, the little known Thomas Boni Yayi, who has
also offered his candidacy for the chairmanship of the 54-member
organisation.

Also from West Africa, Yayi like Jammeh has reportedly over the past
six months been on a diplomatic offensive to lobby members in various
regional capitals using his country’s ambassadors.

The successful candidate will replace Equatorial Guinea President
Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who took over the AU chair in early
2011. The bloc's chairperson serves a one-year non-renewable term
while the chief executive serves for four years, renewable by another
four to make a maximum of two terms.

Ultimately, the AU elections will raise the question of whether the
organisation can in future prove that it has teeth to bite, or if it
is doomed to retain its reputation for profligacy. Notorious as a huge
and allegedly chaotic bureaucracy, the organisation is often described
as a talking shop with a penchant for endless cocktail circuits and
general misuse of funds on things like unnecessary travel and sojourns
in luxury resorts where it prefers to hold its numerous conferences.

Haunted by memories of its founders, many of who metamorphosed from
revered nationalists into shameless dictators, and who either were
deposed unceremoniously or were assassinated, the organisation will
also be looking towards electing an effective chairman of the AU
Commission, the chief executive of the body, with a view to salvaging
its reputation.

Regional interests

The contest for that position is expected to be even more riveting
than that for the ceremonial head of the organisation. Pitting
Gabonese incumbent Jean Ping and South African Home Affairs minister
Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, it will to a great extent be a contest between
Anglophone and Francophone Africa, with regional interests thrown in
for good measure.

First elected in February 2008, the half-Chinese Dr Ping is seeking a
second term. Remembered for leading delegations to Gaddafi’s desert
tent in Sirte last year before the Libyan dictator’s tragic end, Dr
Ping has in recent times been busy trying to bury the murdered
dictator’s ghost.

Having only recognised Libya's new leaders in September last year, the
AU had miserably failed to assert itself as a mediator in the conflict
between the Libyan rebels and Gaddafi.

As for the AU’s reputation as a dictators’ club, it is indeed
instructive that President Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the outgoing
chairman, presides over a regime that has one of the worst human
rights records in the world, with the president himself ranked by
Reporters Without Borders as among "predators" of press freedom.

Having deposed his predecessor and uncle, the notorious dictator
Francisco Macías Nguema, in a bloody coup d'état on August 3, 1979,
the current president has since then had to contend with no less than
12 real or perceived unsuccessful coup attempts. He has somehow
managed to hold onto power, though, without leaving a reputation quite
like that of his predecessor.

Political status

During his bloody reign the latter is reputed to have butchered or
forced into exile an estimated 100,000 people, approximately one-third
of Equatorial Guinea's population at the time. Such was the dictator’s
ruthlessness, indeed, that and on Christmas day in 1975, for instance,
he had 150 alleged coup plotters executed in a national stadium to the
sound of a band playing Mary Hopkin's tune Those Were the Days.

With that kind of background, Equatorial Guinea even today retains
notoriety as one of Africa’s worst kleptocracies. The situation has
been exacerbated by the discovery of big petroleum reserves in recent
years, a factor that has altered the economic and political status of
the country, whose gross domestic product (GDP) per capita today ranks
a very respectable 28th in the world.

This generous endowment with oil notwithstanding, most of the tiny
country’s considerable wealth only benefits a small elite. The
privileged include the president’s own son,Teodorin, who is reputed to
live on the fast lane in the US, enjoying an outrageously hedonistic
lifestyle that rivals those of Hollywood stars.

In the midst of such excesses, the majority of the country’s
population remain onlookers in an environment of grossly unequal
distribution of wealth. This is despite the fact that Equatorial
Guinea ranks 9th highest in the Human Development Index (HDI) out of
44 sub-Saharan countries, and 115th in the world, placing it among the
medium HDI countries.

Ironically, a controversy arose at the 2006 AU summit after Sudan
announced its candidacy for the AU's chairmanship as a representative
of the East African region. Some member states refused to support
Sudan, however, citing the then prevailing tensions in Darfur. Sudan
eventually withdrew its candidacy, and President Denis Sassou-Nguesso
of the Republic of the Congo was elected.

At the January 2007 summit, President John Agyekum Kufuor of Ghana
replaced Sassou-Nguesso, despite another attempt by Sudan to gain the
chair. Sudan’s spirited bid for the chair was only thwarted when
President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania took over from Kufuor in January
2008. Because he was representing the East African region, Kikwete
effectively ended Sudan's attempt to become chair.

Until, that is, the regional rotation returns to East Africa.

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-- 
-Laye
==============================
"With fair speech thou might have thy will,
With it thou might thy self spoil."
--The R.M

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