Besides fight and threaten each other, what does the PAP actually do?

Fifty four young adults walk into a bar. After a few drinks they think, “You know what? We’re having so much fun, we should start a club…but Morocco can’t sit with us!”

A decade later, they’d let Morocco in and in all that time, and ever since, it might just be the most significant thing that self-fulfilling club has done.

Ahh yes, the African Union. A platform where we can be treated to Juju, the lover of fellow Africans, threatening to kill one. Credit where it’s due though, he did say it would be outside, so at least he’s Covid considerate.

That, however, was just one highlight of the pedestrian fights, elementary debates and unsubstantiated arguments in the African Union’s Pan-African Parliament this session. If they went on any longer, I’d half expect SuperSport to buy the rights just to give Naas Botha the opportunity to say “on the other hand…” and try make some sense out of the mess.

As South Africans, it’s not like this behaviour is foreign to our expectations of a political playground. On the other hand, at least our legislature occasionally, y’know, does something significant.

It may be few and far between but sometimes they make an appointment to an institution. Sometimes they even put out worthwhile laws like the Consumer Protection Act, Protection of Personal Information Act, or dare I venture to say, the Cyber Crimes Act which the President signed off on just this week.

So among the children’s theatre that our Parliament often emulates, there are also spurts of value to the constituencies. The same cannot be said of the Pan-African Parliament or indeed the African Union as a whole.

I’d go as far as saying that dishing out free non-stick pans to all Africans would be more useful to them than having a pseudo-representative body in the Pan-African Parliament.

The place can’t get its story right even. The chairperson of the Union is the President of the DRC, Félix Tshisekedi who took national office in early 2019 after the Constitutional Court dismissed allegations of election rigging.

Funny story about that situation; when South Africa congratulated him, the African Union and European Union were warning of doubts about the result. Guess those doubts must have been dispelled in the two years leading up to the continental appointment.

Then again, it’s not like the chairperson (who, by the way, must be elected by a two thirds majority) has always been a statesman of grand repute. The chair has been held by Maybe-I-accept-bribes-from-China-and-stay-in-power-for-21-years-until-I’m-killed Idriss Déby of Chad.

There was also My-constitution-lets-me-rule-by-decree-and-I’ve-stayed-in-office-since-1979 Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea. Lest we forget, there was also So-guilty-of-corruption-I-refuse-to-answer-judges’-questions  Abdel-Aziz of Mauritania. I dare not exclude We-are-not-gays-Robert Mugabe.

There were obviously some good apples in there too, but for an organisation that lists sovereignty, social-economic integration, peace, security, and stability, good governance, human rights and raising living standards as matters of solidarity, two thirds of them aren’t exactly picking the most shining examples of those objectives as their leaders.

And the stuff that they eventually get around to doing doesn’t really do much.

Remember back in 2003 when the AU adopted the African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption? Good thing that was done, otherwise Africa would have been suffering from so much corruption, right?

It’s not like the UN resolution that had been in the works for three years and passed months after the AU’s version would have done the same job. No! We needed an African instrument to resolve African problems, because of course we did.

I’m really tired of doing things for their own sake and getting either duplicate results or, in the case of the AU, no results.

The other day, a friend approached me asking my opinion on the Israel/Palestine conflict. They were relatively shocked when I did not have one.

The conflict is extremely complex and unless I have a vested interest or I’ve found capacity and used it to allocate time to deeply studying the situation, there’s little point to my opinion. They may think I don’t care but the case is that I really care enough that I don’t give an under-considered lay answer for the sake of giving it.

Any opinion is likely to cause some rift, so I’d like to be sure I would be on the right side of any rift I cause or better yet, not cause an unnecessary rift at all.

To do the work, you need to put in the time and to do that, you need the capacity.

That’s the AU for you. A group of dudes… Oh wait no, a group of dudes who force each other to bring at least one woman along because quotas among leadership, who espouse values of equality but know very little about each other and have little intention to engage fruitfully, who get together simply because they come from the same landmass.

I guess I should be grateful though. The time our politicians spend at the AU is time off from screwing up South Africa, so maybe the AU does have an unintended positive consequence.

So thank you AU for all that you do, which is basically just being there.

Richard Anthony Chemaly. Entertainment attorney, radio broadcaster and lecturer in communication ethics.