and Security Frameworks: Sorrow and Fear
The Chairperson of the African Union Commission, H.E Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, has set up a High-level Panel of Eminent Experts to conduct a Comprehensive Review of the African Union Governance, Peace and Security Frameworks. The meetings of the eminent experts, which are to hold on 1-5 September 2025, in Nairobi, Kenya, is discussed here as a preview and to underscore the point that Africa’s problems emanate essentially from sorrow of fear and fear of sorrow of policy summersaults. African leaders hardly learn from lessons of the past. They generally accept to be indoctrinated and used against their own people. Now that some Francophone West African countries are militating against foreign exploitation of their countries, African leaders have been compelled to sit down and see more clearly that the rain is gone in the mania of Johnny Nash, the music maestro. What about the African leaders that act contrarily to policy prescriptions? The sit-tight leaders?
For example, has the African Union’s principle of non-admissibility of unconstitutional change of government in Africa not been thrown into the dustbin of history with the inability of the ECOWAS to give effective meaning to its supranational authority over the members of the Alliance of the Sahel States (ASS: Mali Burkina Faso, and Niger)? The Alliance has defied the manu militari orders given to them. Quo vadis for this principle?
Besides, Africa remains a dumping ground for toxic wastes from Europe and America, and, more disturbingly, for unwanted prisoners in the United States and refugees from the United Kingdom. For want of money, Paul Kagame of Rwanda and King Mswati III of Eswatini (former Swaziland) have turned their countries into unholy land of imported human criminals. They lost their nobility, their African character, integrity and independence to the policy of ‘penny wise and pound foolish.’ They want money in order to acquire an international perception of being a good leader. This type of goodness is not what the good people of Africa want. African people want self-preservation and dignity, people’s sovereignty and not simply state sovereignty. The High-level Panel of Eminent Experts should therefore be more concerned with this in the review process of political governance.
AU Governance, Peace and Security Frameworks
The setting up of a High-level Panel of Eminent Experts is quite interesting for two reasons. First is the high-level quality of the experts and involvement of Nigerians. In matters concerning peace and security in Africa, Nigeria has never been found wanting and the reasons are not far-fetched. Nigeria has, more often than not, always been a Member of the Peace and Security Council (PSC) which is the AU’s standing organ for decision-making. It is saddled with the responsibility of promptly preventing, managing and resolving conflicts in Africa. It is in this regard that the PSC is considered a major pillar of the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA), which is one of the frameworks for the promotion of peace, security, and stability in Africa. The APSA is predicated on five other pillars or frameworks: Continental Early Warning System; the Peace Fund; the Panel of the Wise; the African Standby Force (ASF); and the Department of Political Affairs which serves as the APSA Secretariat. Seasoned Nigerian diplomatists have been actively engaged in the adoption processes of the frameworks and particularly AU quests for peace and security in Africa.
What is particularly important about the PSC is that its 15 members are elected on the basis of equal voting powers and regional representation and rotation. With the exception of Northern Africa that has two seats and Western Africa with four seats, the other three regions (Central Africa, Eastern Africa, and Southern Africa) all have three seats each. Eligibility to be voted for, as stipulated in Article 5(2) of the PSC Protocol, includes having contributed to the promotion and maintenance of peace and security in Africa, having engaged in conflict resolution, peace-making and peacebuilding at both the regional and continental levels, evidence of commitment to AU financial obligations, evidence of contributions to the Peace Fund and/or Special Fund, as well as willingness and capacity to assume responsibility for continental conflict resolution initiatives.
Additionally, for purposes of continuity, only five out of the total of fifteen Member States are elected for three-year terms while ten are elected for two-year terms. Every Member State has the right to seek immediate re-election. Nigeria, by virtue of her demographic size, contributions to peace support operations in Africa and globally, her regular payment of assessed and voluntary contributions to the African Union, and perhaps more interestingly at the level of her mediation of regional conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau, etc., meets all the required criteria, and hence, has not only been frequently elected to be part of the PSC but has also been engaged in all AU peace support operations and keeping peace in Africa.
Most interestingly, Nigerians who have worked at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, which is based in Addis Ababa and have worked in the African Union have proven themselves to be epitomes of professional diplomatic competence. Apart from the national support for their appointment and election, their intellectual acumen speaks more volumes for them. For examples, Ambassador Kayode Shinkaiye was former Ambassador of Nigeria to Ethiopia and Djibouti, as well as Permanent Representative to the African Union and UNECA. He also served as the Chief of Staff to the Chairman of the African Union Commission.
This observation is also true of Ambassador Olusegun Akinsanya who has served as Nigeria’s Ambassador to Ethiopia and Permanent Representative to the AU. There is also Ambassador Bankole Adeoye who is the current AU’s Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace and Security. His competence and proactive attitudinal disposition towards a new self-reliant Africa not only led to his first appointment but also to his re-election.
Additionally, nothing could have been more interesting than the establishment of a High-level Panel of Eminent Experts to which one of Nigeria’s distinguished scholar will be participating, Professor Ibrahim Agboola Gambari. Professor Gambari is undoubtedly a notable diplomatic giant. He, without any whiff of doubt, was a former Minister of Foreign Affairs, former UN Under Secretary-General for Political Affairs, former Joint AU/UN Special Representative to Darfur in Sudan, former Chief of staff to President Muhammadu Buhari and Chair of the Savana Centre for Diplomacy and Development which he created as an authoritative non-governmental research organization committed to advocacy, training and policy analysis.
Secondly, empaneling a High-level Panel of Eminent Experts reminds me of Africa’s recidivist sorrow and fears. In other words, Africa is not simply being an object of international exploitation per se, but also a major problem unto itself for quite a long time now. It was largely as a result of this problem that nationalists struggled for independence. Most unfortunately, several African countries secured their political independence but not with economico-cultural independence. They jettisoned African mythologies and often behaved as if they are whiter than the Whiteman. They are holier than the Pope. The fact of Francophone African countries whose economies are tied to the apron strings of France is noteworthy. And perhaps most noteworthy are two novels that have drawn public attention to the colonial mainmise of African people but to which little attention has been given.
For instance, there is the Weep Not Child published by the Heinemann with the name James Ngugi as author in 1965. He later changed his name to Ngugi wa Thiong’o to reflect his African originality. Weep Not Child dealt mainly with Njoroge in Part One of the novel and with the Mau Mau uprising, as well as the dispossession of Kenyans from their ancestral land in Part Two. Put differently, Ngugi wa Thiong’O, who wrote the novel in 1964 when he was a student at the Makerere University in Uganda, was very critical of colonial exploitation. Most unfortunately, even until he died on 28 May 2025 at 87 years of age, African leaders are not on record to have learnt meaningful lessons from the stories of colonial exploitation of their land. On the contrary, they happily facilitate recolonization in various dimensions.
Additionally, there is also the Cry The Beloved Country. It was authored by Alan Paton in 1948. It was about the story of a black man’s country under a white man’s law or about the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and Absalom, his son. One notable and relevant quotation from the novel is ‘sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least, an arrival.’ Without any gainsaying, political governance, peace and security in Africa have been fraught with sorrow and fear since the time of general accession of African countries to national sovereignty in the 1960s. These are part of the issues that the eminent experts should not forget to address in their deliberations this coming week.
Manifestations of Sorrow and Fear in Africa
Although the setting up of the AU High-Level Panel of Eminent Experts has its origin in Aspirations 3, 4, and 7 of the AU Agenda 2063 which deal with AU’s governance, peace and security agenda, Africa’s real ordeals are quite different from the processes-related aspirations. For example, Aspiration 3 is about good governance, democracy, respect for human rights, justice and rule of law. Aspiration 4 is on the need for a peaceful and secure Africa. The noisome issue here is why has the AU not been able to achieve its lofty aspirations even in part? Why is there no good governance in Africa since the adoption of Agenda 2063 more than a decade ago? Why is there frequent disregard for human rights, justice, and rule of law? Why did the AU condone unconstitutional change of government in Chad? How do we explain the internal war between the government and the M23 rebels in the DRC? What about the conflicts in Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan?
For a long time now Africa has never ceased to be a terra cognita for sorrow and fear in various aspects of African life. Ambassador Shinkaiye asked in 2005 whether the African Union would be ‘a Union of the African peoples’ or it would ‘remain a so-called “Club of African Presidents and Heads of Government.’ More important, he observed that ‘with the launching of the African Union, great hopes and optimism were engendered that the new organization would be a force for positive change in Africa and an effective instrument for addressing Africa’s multifaceted challenges in the new Millennium’ (vide his chapter on “Nigeria and the African Union: Roles and Expectations,” in Bola A, Akinterinwa, ed., Nigeria and the Development of the African Union (Ibadan: Vantage Publishers, 2005, pp.76-97)
He noted further, however, that ‘there were also, and still are, fears and doubts that the optimism might well be misplaced, given the numerous serious challenges of the African Union, and obstacles which the new organization would inevitably have to contend with, and which for the past several years, have hindered Arica’s development aspirations’ (ibid., p.77) Ambassador Shinkaiye’s observations are still valid as of today, that is, 20 years after.
Explained differently, is it the process of political governance that is the problematic or the attitudinal and behavioural disposition of African leaders? There may be some things wrong with the AU peace and security frameworks. Is it the framework or frameworks that is or are faulty? Whatever is the answer, the attitude displayed in the political governance of Africa cannot be ignored if the efforts at the review of the peace and security frameworks are to have any meaningful impact in the foreseeable future.
Africa that is known as a land of rich mineral resources and blessings has become a land of fear and sorrow. Children were traumatized in the Central Africa Republic by violence and confrontation between armed groups and the government forces in February 2021. The confrontation, which began in 2020, led to the displacement of more than 180,000 people and various stories of summary executions, pillaging and unending cases of rape (icrcnewsroom.org). Who can imagine that the Central Africa Republic does not have psychiatric services or that the country can only boast of one psychiatrist? Can this situation be ascribed to problems of peace or security process?
The BBC has also talked about shock and fear amid South Africa cannibalism case. Villagers in South Africa’s KwaZuluNatal region lived in great fear when it was discovered that there was truly a case of cannibalism on 28 August 2017 (https://www.bbc.com). Another fear and loathing reportedly took place in South Africa, prompting foreigners to live in fear. There were xenophobia and crimes. The violence that followed the court condemnation of former President Jacob Zuma for contempt of court and imprisonment on 26 December, 2021 is another sorrow story entirely (ibid.). The intrepidtimes.com similarly talked about African fears in the context of politics, weather, water, use of local transport, eating food and being killed by a hippopotamus and disease (https://intrepid.com).
Nigeria is not at all exempted from these fears. While S. Musisi talked about studies carried out by the Institutes of National Health, he raised the issue of mass trauma and mental health in Africa. An overview of sorrow, tears and blood resulting from Nigeria’s security crisis was posted on 8 March, 2024 by Adewale Maja-Pearce. While the https://www.nrc,no said on 1st June 2022 that ‘the world’s ten most neglected crises are all in Africa,’ the https://the baffler.com says that the Amnesty International has documented not less than 82 cases of torture, ill-treatment, and extrajudicial killings since 2016 at the hands of the SARS (Special Anti-Robbery Squad), which was created in 1992 to contain crimes associated with robbery, motor vehicle theft, kidnapping, cattle rustling, and firearms in Nigeria.
Two other major sources of sorrow and fears in Africa are terrorism and climate change. Records have it that many countries are losing between 2 and five percent of their GDP and diverting about 9% of their budgets to cope with climate change adaptations. The prescriptions for the next decade are more troubling: adaptation costs are expected to reach US 30-50 billion annually or about 2-3% of the region’s GDP.
As regards terrorism, the top 5 most terrorized countries, and most dangerous in Africa and in the order of ranking are South Africa, with a crime index of 74.6, followed by Angola with 66.3%. The Democratic Republic of Congo is placed third with 66.2% while Nigeria occupies the fourth position with 66.1%. Cameroon is placed in the fifth position with 65.5% (businessinsider.com). The war in Sudan has displaced more than 12 million people and left 30.4 million, which is more than half of the population of Sudan, in need of humanitarian assistance. In fact, as of 24 July 2025, Sudan became the largest and fastest displacement crisis country in the world.
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It is against the background of these sorrow and fears that the importance of the need for policy review of the processes of governance, peace and security frameworks should be appreciated and commended.
The involvement of Nigerian participants in the Panel of Eminent Experts is befitting. True enough, there have been many High-level Panels with different mandates. There is, for instance, the AU High-level Panel on Sudan (HLP-Sudan) of which Dr. Mohammed Ibn Chambas was the Chairman and Dr. Specioba Wandira-Kazibwe and Ambassador Francisco Madeira were members. There has also been the AU High-Level Panel on Emerging Technologies (AMET) of which Professor Abdallah Daar, Professor Berhanu M. Abegaz, Professor Francine Ntoumi and Dr Karim Maredia were members. The AU High-Level Panel of Eminent Experts on AU governance, peace and security frameworks is particularly noteworthy because it has a mandate to carry out a comprehensive review of the AU’s governance, peace and security frameworks. The frameworks cover the existential essence of the AU.
For Nigeria, the appointment of Professor Ibrahim Gambari clearly reflects the recognition and relevance of Nigeria and her professionals in the conduct and management of AU affairs. For Uganda, the appointment of Ugandan former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sam Kahamba Kutesa, is equally significant. He had served as UNGA President and as Member of the High-Level Panel of Eminent Experts. The significance is better explained by The INSPECTOR. For the News That Adds Value. As it puts it, ‘Kutesa’s appointment is significant to Uganda as it marks the first-ever appointment of an individual from this banana republic since H.E. Mohmoud Ali Youssouf’s reign as the head of the African Union Commission came into force.’ This also explains the importance attached to any appointment of individual professionals like Professor Gambari. It is a feat for him and for Nigeria.
It is important to note however, that Africa’s cases of fear and sorrow are not only intimidating and thought-provoking, but also beyond the question of reviewing the process of governance and security architecture that are largely defined by Aspirations 3, 4, and 7 of the AU Agenda 2063. If peace and security means and includes human security for the African leaders, the review of processes of governance can be understandable. What necessarily makes the processes of good governance difficult and at times unworkable are very attitudinal in character. For instance, to what extent can any comprehensive review process be helpful to leaders that have a sit-tight agenda? What can the review do to stop leaders that want to die in power?
Is sit-tight syndrome not a function of constitutional maneuverings? In terms of democracy, what is responsible for people’s coups d’état as it is the case in the ASS countries? The peoples believe that their former colonial master, France, is using their leaders to recolonize and exploit them. In reaction, they opted to support unconstitutional changes of government. Besides, how do we explain the equation of one Africa as the equivalent of one European or Asian country in such a way that one country like Japan, the United States, or France that kick-started the practice will be holding summits with 55 countries? At the level of the UNSC, the Five Permanent Members represent their own countries but African leaders are content with two Permanent Seats for 55 African countries. The AU Eminent Experts should not ignore these concerns in their mandate.