By Paul Ejime
In addition to the obnoxious apartheid system practised by the white minority population in South Africa, xenophobic attacks or what many call Afrophobia have also earned the Rainbow Nation international notoriety.
The attacks by largely ill-informed South African Blacks against foreigners, especially citizens from countries that midwifed South Africa’s liberation from segregation and bondage, have become seasonal, taking place very close to national elections.
Successive governments in Pretoria after iconic leader Nelson Mandela left office in 1999 have feigned incapacity and laughable inability to stop the disgraceful attacks, which reached unacceptable proportions this year. There are troubling social media footages of weapons-wielding scantily-clad youth-led protesters on South African streets demanding that foreigners “must go back to their countries…,” “they have taken our jobs and our women.”
We shall return shortly to this outrageous behaviour by a section of South African citizens. This article is also examining the negligent and un-African attitude, response, or the lack thereof, by African leaders and the African Union Commission (AUC), which is supposed to galvanise Africa’s 54 sovereign nations and their estimated 1.4 billion people towards unity, integration and continental development.
To say that the AUC suffers a serious leadership deficit from the era of Mali’s Alpha Oumar Konare, is an understatement. Konare, a professor of history and archaeology and President of Mali for two terms (1992-2002), is better known as one of the architects and defenders of multi-party democracy in Africa. Resisting the temptation of the now infamous “third-term” or “tenure elongation” syndrome that has destroyed democratic principles in Africa, especially in politically restive West Africa, Konare was elected Chairperson of the AUC in 2003. He served just one term and stepped aside as a revered statesman.
He championed the “United States of Africa” agenda, emphasizing full economic and political integration, with a pan-African fervour reminiscent of the Kwame Nkrumah era. Konare was against unconstitutional changes of government and also worked to activate the African Union Peace and Security Council that could intervene in continental crises without waiting for foreign intervention.
These were ideals that propelled immediate post-independent African leaders, resulting in the 1963 formation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the precursor to the AUC, which Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi fought very hard to establish in 2002. Hate or love him, Gaddafi was caught between Arab sentiments and African solidarity; still, he was credited with bankrolling the AUC, modernizing its Addis Ababa headquarters buildings, and settling the financial contributions of several member States, especially during the Heads of State Summits.
Gaddafi’s critics accuse him of running an authoritarian government, but he kept the Sahel region relatively stable and peaceful, a far cry from the epicentre of global terrorism it has become today. When NATO and France-led Western forces railed against Gaddafi and provided massive military support to Libyan rebels, he chose to die a martyr in his country, where he was brutally killed in 2011. During Gaddafi’s travails, neither the AUC that he fought to set up and funded generously, nor its member States rose to his defence. The catastrophe of Gaddafi’s absence is obvious today.
After Konare, Gabon’s Jean Ping was elected AUC Chairperson and served for one term from 2008 to 2012. His tenure was largely uneventful and was followed by Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, of South Africa, the only female to have led the continental organisation from 2012 to 2017.
Dlamini-Zuma’s supporters will argue that she steadied the AUC, with Agenda 2063 as her major legacy, but that was after causing a major split among member states with her controversial election. It was unsurprising that she too served only one term.
Then came Moussa Faki Mahamat, Chad’s former Prime Minister, who served two terms as AU Chairperson from 2017-2025. His attention was divided between administering the continental body and his ambition to run for the presidency of his country. In the end, Faki was conspicuous in his anonymity while the AUC watched rather helplessly as wars, political conflicts and socioeconomic crises devastated the African continent.
The AUC’s deplorable existence resulted in the appointments of two of its leaders, Presidents Paul Kagame of Rwanda and William Ruto of Kenya, in 2016 and 2024, to lead an institutional reform.
After a decade of reform, not much has changed in Africa; the guns of war are still booming, and the socioeconomic prognosis is still grim. If anything, the election of Mahmoud Ali Youssouf as AUC Chairperson in 2025 and Burundi’s President Évariste Ndayishimiye as the rotational one-year chairman of the AU Assembly this year have turned into an anticlimax. Under both men, the lot of African citizens has worsened. They may have inherited some of the crises, compounded by the geopolitical and strategic shifts in international relations with emerging new threats such as terrorism, adverse consequences of climate change and global economic depression. However, under their watch, the AU’s response or the lack thereof, is unimpressive.
Africa is producing more wars and conflicts, from Ethiopia, its headquarters, to Sudan and Somalia, with more countries on the continent slipping from multi-party democracy to military dictatorships.
The AU has eight Regional Economic Communities (RECs) designed to serve as building blocks for continental cooperation, integration, and development. These are AMU, CEN-SAD, COMESA, EAC, ECCAS, ECOWAS, IGAD, and SADC.
Among the eight, ECOWAS is undoubtedly the trailblazer. But in recent years, the leadership of the West African economic bloc has dropped the ball and joined the list of continental REC-poor performers.
Under the present AU leadership, a disgraceful confusion has ensued over Burundi’s underhand efforts to make Senegal’s former President, Macky Sall, Africa’s candidate for the United Nations Secretary-General position. The AU belatedly tried to walk back on the ploy, but the outrage lingers.
After serving as Senegal’s president for 12 years, Sall’s unsuccessful bid for a third term was met with deadly street protests that claimed dozens of lives. It was surprising that a man with such unsavoury baggage was found suitable for the UN’s top job by the AU leadership, even when the slot was the turn of Latin America and the Caribbean under the principle of continental rotation.
On the ongoing disgraceful xenophobic attacks in South Africa, it is tragic that the AU has not mustered the courage to either condemn the attacks with the force of a serious organisation or initiate any concrete measures towards a solution, even after receiving an official petition from Ghana, one of the victim-countries. Ghana has even rejected the South African leader’s state visit request over the attacks.
The story gets more interesting, given Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama’s interest in the AU’s rotational one-year chairmanship to replace Burundi’s Ndayishimiye in 2027. With the ECOWAS endorsement, Mahama looks set to clinch the mantle, and it will be most deserving given his democratic and pan-African credentials. However, the magic he will perform in one year to clean the Augean stables and reposition the AU, which is saddled with daunting leadership and myriad political and socioeconomic challenges is another matter.
To make the AUC effective, first, continental leaders must work through the RECs and bilateral platforms, starting with putting a halt to the raging disgraceful Back-on-Black violence, whether in South Africa or any other part of the continent. The same Africans who accuse others of racism cannot be perpetrating the same crime.
Second, African governments must unite to find lasting solutions to the unending political conflicts on the continent, and immigration, which is a global problem. Third, they must prioritise the teaching and learning of African history authored by Africans with African perspectives, across all levels of education.
The South African protesters should be advised and encouraged to redirect their anger against their governments and translate their anti-immigrant passion into positive energy for Black empowerment and the elimination of injustice and inequalities in the Rainbow Nation.
To our brothers and sisters in South Africa and other parts of our continent, this evergreen saying by Maya Angelou, the late African-American poet, memoirist, singer, dancer, actress, and civil rights activist, is instructive: “The more you know your history, the more liberated you are.”
Ejime is a Global Affairs Analyst and Consultant on Peace & Security and Governance Communication
