African leaders to bury OAU, launch new organization
African leaders to bury OAU, launch new organization
LUSAKA (Reuters): African leaders gathered in Zambia on Sunday for the final summit of the Organization of African Unity -- the last of 37 annual meetings stretching back to the era of Africa's decolonization from European masters.
Dozens of presidents and prime ministers will bury the OAU with full honors and assist at the birth of a new African Union (AU), modeled on the lines of strong regional groupings in Europe, Asia and the Americas.
Africa's towering political figure, former South African President Nelson Mandela, arrived in Lusaka on Sunday. He will grace the summit along with former Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda, Zambian government officials said.
Mandela will press ahead on the margins of the summit with his peace drive for Burundi, one of the broken pieces on the ethnic and political chessboard in the Great Lakes region of central Africa.
The AU, which in time will have a parliament, central bank and a commission to run it with extensive powers, will hold its first summit next year in South Africa, Africa's economic giant.
"The OAU was formed in 1963 to ensure that no country was left in the hands of the colonial masters," Zambian President Frederick Chiluba, host of the valedictory OAU summit which opens on Monday, told Reuters.
"Africans realize that we can't leave a loose body like the OAU to run the affairs of the continent in a world where strong regions are coming together," he said before welcoming Libyan leader Moamar Qaddafi, an architect of the AU structure and a financial sponsor of many OAU summits when they are held in cash- strapped nations such as Zambia.
The ambitions driving the AU concept far outstrip the material resources available to make the vision work. Its budget must be hugely increased from the pin-money used to run the 53-member OAU.
"There must be a reversal of the OAU budget because 80 percent of that budget goes to salaries and only 20 percent to programs," South African Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma told Reuters.
"Yet the OAU was not set up just to pay staff salaries," she said.
Debtors
The OAU secretariat noted with satisfaction that only six members were now in arrears after six states -- all among the poorest in the world -- settled their debts to the organization on Friday, just in time to participate fully in the summit.
The OAU said the payment "augured well for the transition to the African Union because it serves as guarantee that the African Union's solvency from the outset would be assured".
Unsurprisingly, many of the bad payers are involved in Africa's plethora of intractable armed conflicts. T he Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone are among those marooned in poverty as investors stay away, military expenditure eats into government budgets and millions of refugees struggle to survive on a diet of despair.
"For the African Union to work, armed conflicts will have to be resolved... Africa is a rich continent inhabited by poor people and it is up to us to wake up to the challenge," Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher said in Lusaka.
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan flew in on Sunday. He made no comments on arrival.
Chiluba was upbeat about peace hopes for the war in the Congo, calling them "simply fantastic". But like other leaders he was pessimistic about the 26-year civil war in Angola, one of the conflicts born in the Cold War and which have outlived tension between East and West.
In parallel with the move to a more solid and institutional body like the AU, key nations led by South Africa, Nigeria and Algeria have fashioned a wide-ranging "Africa Recovery" plan, called MAP, with hugely ambitious targets: peace and democracy, education, investment in IT, communications and infrastructure.
South African President Thabo Mbeki has already promoted the plan -- which would require decisive backing from wealthy nations -- in Europe and the United States and wants a formal endorsement at the OAU summit, South African officials said.
Mbeki was expected in Lusaka on Sunday but a spokeswoman said his arrival had been postponed until Monday.
Zambia's pride at hosting the summit has been eclipsed by the killing of top politician Paul Tembo in Lusaka last Friday.
The opposition says Tembo was eliminated by agents of the state to prevent him spilling the beans in a corruption probe into three government ministers. The accusation was rejected by Chiluba who told Reuters it would be "stupid" of any government to commit such an act just before a summit.