Gambia shames AU

WHILE billions of people around the world were glued to their TV screens of Friday, watching the peaceful transfer of power in Washington DC, many on the African continent were anxiously watching events in the Gambia, which at some stage appeared to be on the brink of war.

It is an indictment of the continent and its political leaders that what is taken for granted in many parts of the world — the stepping down of a head of state defeated in an election — is still not a certainty here.

Yahya Jammeh’s attempts to remain the Gambia’s president after he lost to his rival, Adama Barrow, is just the latest incident to show that democracy is still not firmly entrenched in some parts of the continent. It also exposes the AU, which professed to be a custodian of good governance and democracy when it was formed over a decade ago, for its ineffectiveness.

When Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma was elected chairwoman of the AU Commission, there was hope that the institution was going to be more proactive in dealing with problems.

But sadly, not much has changed. That Jammeh finally ceded power on Friday night was not thanks to Dlamini-Zuma and her team at the AU. They largely stayed out of the conflict, leaving it to the Gambia’s neighbours Senegal and Liberia to find a solution. At best, what the AU did was issue statements of condemnation.

It has taken a similar approach in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where President Joseph Kabila has used every trick in the book to stay in power way beyond his term. Unfortunately for the Congolese, Southern Africa isn’t run by the kind of leaders found in West Africa — where antidemocratic tendencies are no longer tolerated. It is run by politicians who, just like Dlamini-Zuma’s AU, prefer a hands-off approach to problems.