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The African Union, which succeeded the Organisation of African Unity on July 9 2002, is often criticised for being largely a talk shop that has not markedly succeeded in either forging African unity or creating a sustainable roadmap for its political and economic development aspirations (Davis, 2019; Okhonmina, 2009) . In fact when in 1999, the Heads of State and Government of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) issued the Sirte Declaration calling for the establishment of the African Union, some critics saw it as more of a ‘bleaching complex’ in which African Heads of States felt they would be more accepted by world leaders if their continental organisations sounded like the European Union and modelled after it (Trivedi, 2003) - but obviously without bothering whether a mere change in name would automatically imbue the new organisation with the sort of organic arrangements that helped to bind the members of the European Union tog...
On July 7, 2019, African leaders met in Niger to launch the African Continental Free Trade Area. This is a significant step in furthering the African Union’s vision of uniting the African continent. The essays in this issue address different dimensions of the process of African unity. Mngomezulu’s paper, reiterates the goal of the African Union (AU) to enhance Africans’ abilities to take their own destiny in their own hands. Mngomezulu invites us to assess the AU’s performance in providing African solutions to African problems. He calls on us to celebrate AU’s successes and learn from the challenges the continental body faces. It is important to note that the achievement of AU’s goal presupposes a consciousness of common identity. Phakathi argues that AUs instruments such as African Common Position on Migration and Development and the Protocol to the Treaty Establishing the African Economic Community Relating to Free Movement of Persons, Right of Residence and Right of E...
Editorial Khondlo Mtshali University of KwaZulu-Natal, School of Social Sciences, KawZulu-Natal, South Africa Email: khondlo@hotmail.com or mtshalik@ukzn.ac.za The Sirte Declaration set the primary goal of the African Union (AU) as “accelerating the process of integration in the continent to enable it to play its rightful role in global economy while addressing multifaceted social, economic and political problems compounded as they are by certain negative aspects of globalization.” Thus, one of the objectives of the African Union is to “achieve greater unity and solidarity between African countries and the peoples of Africa” (African Union, no date). However, the goal is not simply to have a united Africa, but an Africa that has a shared vision. The Akans of West Africa have a saying that “Crisis is the occasion of proverbs” (Sekyi-Otu, no date). Crisis challenges us to think of alternative ways of dealing with our conditions. Cri...