African Union as a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council

The prospect of the African Union becoming a Permanent Member of the United Nations raises many doubts and fears.

The AU has consistently failed to demonstrate that it represents the many citizens of its nation members.  It has, to a very large extent, been a well-fed, foreign-funded discussion group to enable the Heads of States in Africa to hatch plots to rob their citizens of cash, assets and rights, with practically nothing being done to solve the many large problems confronting the continent, from autocratic leaders who flaunt their ability to disregard their constitutions and the laws of their country, to the abject poverty that is growing apace throughout the continent, while said leaders are gaining in wealth all the time. 

The latest failure of the AU to ensure peace in Burundi, in contravention of its resolution to send a peacekeeping force there to protect the citizens, is a flagrant example of the inability, or unwillingness, of the continent’s leaders to do anything to prevent a wrong developing into a genocidal crisis, or, even worse, into a continental scale war.  The example set by Rwanda of how this can happen was simply ignored.  One wonders what incentives were handed to the leaders involved to look the other way.  However, Burundi is only one of a long chain of denial of the rights of the citizens, which the AU professes to hold dear.  Rwanda is another example, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Mozambique, South Sudan, Nigeria others, not to mention the crippling droughts that are killing millions in large areas of Africa, without the AU doing anything more effective than expressing anguish for the suffering of the ‘ordinary people’ affected and calling for foreign aid to feed the citizens (ignoring the fact that the present President of the AU diverted US foreign aid to sell it, for his own benefit, to members of his Party while depriving the Opposition areas of food, while it should have been initiating programs years ago to prevent the development of the conditions that have caused those problems.  The same criticism applies to the AU in its lack of action to prevent the religion-based civil wars affecting many more millions.  The only peacekeeping actions undertaken under the AU have been subject to rumors about how much has been promised, and paid, to leaders of the nations supplying the peacekeepers, with Robert Mugabe again being involved in this way, and even those peacekeeping actions have demonstrated the absolute incapacity of those nations to do anything meaningful in the field.

A consideration that should be of great concern to the citizens of the world is the likely composition of the body that will make the decisions driving the actions of the AU should it gain Permanent Membership.  They will include the likes of Robert Mugabe, a man decisively linked to genocide in his own nation, to election rigging, to the collapse of the previously strong economy of Zimbabwe, and to the promotion of inflammatory statements regarding Western countries, Omar al Shabir, a man who is the subject of a Warrant of Arrest issued by the International Criminal Court (which many of the AU member nations want to abolish, because it ‘targets only African leaders’ – as though they have not earned that), Jacob Zuma, a man who arrogantly ignores the findings of organisms of the State founded under the Constitution to control the excesses of his office, who simply disregards Orders of the High Court (to prevent al Shabir leaving the country, to hand over the tapes recording the discussions leading to the dropping of 749 criminal charges against him, who is likely to be prosecuted on those charges by any new Government not under his control, and who has waged war against the participants in the economy in South Africa in the interests of handing over a large slice of that economy to private interests while, no doubt, pocketing huge bribes in the process, Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza, who has pushed through an amendment to the Constitution permitting him to retain his grasp on power for another five years, who is suspected of huge corruption during his term of office, and who is now suspected of genocide of his own people but who remains uncorrected by the AU, by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who has imposed a draconian policy of silencing any opposition to his rule, extended indefinitely when he orchestrated a change of the Constitution limiting the Presidential term of office in 2005, which effectively bars any reporter who criticizes his Government from access to the proceedings of the AU, and who runs the country in a totally undemocratic way, and Hifikepunye Pohamba, President of Namibia, a country which views the North Korean style of Government as worthy of emulation.  There have been reports of the corruption of numerous of the African Presidents, including Angola and Nigeria, of genocides carried out in several African countries within recent years, and of other aspects of dishonesty, criminality and lack of adherence to the rules of democracy to which those countries claim to adhere. 

One must ask the question:  “Do we really want to hand over the functioning of the United Nations to an entity that is controlled by incompetents, men who place their own interests highest on the list of priorities with those of the people only a very distant second, men who are the political equivalent of the Mafia dons?

Mugabe and the Credibility of the African Union

 

If there was any residual hope that about the African Union has the desire, the capability and the leadership to undertake any of the crucial work needed to turn Africa into a place where civilised people would wish to live, the performance of Robert Mugabe, in his capacity of Chairman of that body, has confirmed that Africa has far to go, and much to suffer before it can join the ranks of modern civilized nations.

Mugabe is a man who, for decades, has enriched himself at the expense of his nation, once one of the hopes of Africa.  He has brought Zimbabwe to its knees with ‘redistribution of the productive farms’, taking them from the efficient White farmers who built from bare land a capacity to supply huge quantities of food to the rest of Africa, handing them to his cronies, who did not have the ability, or even the desire, to operate them with any discernible level of skill or knowledge.  That single move brought Zimbabwe to the brink of starvation, forcing thousands of Zimbabweans to escape his brutal form of ‘democracy’ by moving to South Africa.  The official figure for Zimbabwean expatriates in South Africa is over 500 000, but the real figure is probably in excess of a million.  Mugabe followed that lunacy with the next, the ‘indigenisation’ of mines and the few productive industries that remained in the country, exciting another wave of emigration.  It should be noted that many thousands of Zimbabweans flocked to Apartheid South Africa before 1994, to escape the despotic rule that Mugabe imposed.  Those refugees obviously believed that South Africa at that time was better than the workers’ paradise that Mugabe claims the country to be.  America provided vast quantities of food aid in the form of grain, which was transported in bulk to Durban, for packing into bags labelled “Gift of the American People – Not For Sale’.  Mugabe did not like this, because America, alongside Britain, is, in his twisted mind, responsible for everything that has gone wrong in Zimbabwe under his rule.  He insisted that the grain be packed in plain bags which he supplied, and he then sold that grain to the favoured people in Zimbabwe, refusing to deliver any grain, free or sold, to areas in respect of which which his Party did not hold a seat in Parliament.  Mugabe, in his recent tirade in South Africa, which was watched with sniggering approval by Jacob Zuma, stated boldly that the previous regime had killed thousands of Zimbabwean Blacks, and dumped their bodies down a disused mineshaft.  The truth of that matter is that Mugabe’s ‘freedom fighters’ slaughtered some 40 000 of their Black Matabele opponents and dumped their bodies down the mineshaft of a mine which had been in operation until some years after the accession to the Presidency of Robert Mugabe.  Now, Mugabe has had the arrogance to declare that none of the people who emigrated from Zimbabwe in recent years has done so as a result of the catastrophic economic conditions he and his Party have brought about.

The rapidly-growing flight of refugees from Africa to Europe must surely be seen as an indicator of an escalating disaster in Africa, one that is perhaps more visible to the World than the flow of refugees from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, Nigeria, Sudan and numerous other countries.  However, while those flows are less visible, they are no less there.

Many people simply accept that ‘this is Africa’, and ignore the bald-faced lies told by Mugabe.  It is true that if you tell a big lie often enough, it becomes the truth.  Anyone with an understanding of what Adolph Hitler and his gang of Nazi lunatics did to Germany and to Europe will recognise that our meek acceptance that ‘this is Africa’ is putting us all firmly on a path to catastrophe on a world scale.  The sniggering obsequiousness of Jacob Zuma, Julius Malema and other aspirant African billionaires, their abject hero worship of Robert Mugabe for the example he has set in his rise to power and obscene wealth by means of corruption and outright theft, and his self-serving stance of hatred of the Whites and the West, must surely be a warning to the world that a cancer is growing within Africa.  The cancer has taken root in South Africa, where the ANC has been single-minded in its support for the corruption headed by the State President and strongly supported by the Speaker of the House of Parliament in her views that he is not subject to the same rules as other citizens.  That cancer will continue to grow, accelerating its destruction of the hope for peace and prosperity in Africa that drove the West to support the independence of the former colonies.  That cancer has the potential to bring the hopelessness of Africa to the West, just as the acquiescence of Britain and the United States to the development of the cancer of the Nazi threat under Adolph Hitler, their desperate desire for ‘peace in our time’ epitomised by the speech of the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, plunged the world into a war that changed the lives of millions.  As Roman Herzog said in his first speech as President of West Germany, ‘we must solve the problems of Africa in Africa, otherwise we will have to solve them in Europe.’  Now is surely the time for the Western world to formulate a set of principles to be applied to their dealings with Africa and its dictators, under whatever guise they may hide.

The problems of Africa are clear to see by anyone with the interest to look.  They are not problems of race or religion.  They are problems of dictators grabbing whatever there is, leaving the people to starve and to provide a fertile ground for extremism in every form.  They are the threat that the rest of the world has to deal with, now under principles, or in the future under arms.