AU leaders should be accountable to citizens

While I am trying to digest the article on the injustices and malpractices going on in the Pan African Parliament (PAP) and the window dressings, it will be good to let you know that I am just back from Accra, Ghana where I join others on an awareness campaign of the need for the voting right of all the 850 million citizens of the AU member states to the AU Commission chairperson.

This clip gives a brief picture of what we did. In fact the attachment centres on this concern, as this was what destroyed the OAU that was run in an irresponsible and unaccountable manner. Bureaucracy and personalising of public issues is becoming the order in the PAP, which tends to be the case when public officer holders take up office without the mandate by those they are representing.

Who is in charge of what and who appoints who? Who is financing the whole PAP activities than the ordinary citizen of the AU? Who is going to be the final victim if it all goes wrong than the ordinary AU member state citizen? Then why is he/she not being the one to decide who will head the Union administratively for every four years by the ballot box? How many AU member states citizens even know what is happening in the PAP or the AU Commission? How many AU member states citizens even knew that there was a lady PAP president and that it is a new male president by the name Hon. Dr Idriss Ndele Moussa? Who is having the final say when things go wrong in the AU of which the PAP is serving as a legislative arm? As the PAP continued in its effort to play its legislative role, is the AU Commission going to continue as a mere secretariat of civil servants instead of public servants and its the Commission chairperson Dr Jean Ping as its chief errand boy rather than the chief public servant that he is supposed to be? The PAP and the Africa Court of Justice will continue to be useless until we have all started our voting directly to choose the AUC chairperson.

As far as I am concerned, we have all created an atmosphere of irresponsibility, nepotism, favouritism, bureaucratic, elitism, kleptocracy, injustice, inequality, individualism and self-centeredness, etc, and what are we getting than that? That is what all the article is all about and this can only go by everyone’s participation in a common AU election! Democracy is about accountability that starts with the voting of every AU member state’s citizens under the principle of universal adult suffrage. That is what we stand for and for it, we shall lay our lives!

* Kofi Ali Abdul is coordinator of the Action Group of Africa.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.