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High hopes and cynicism greet birth of African Union
AP - Durban

African leaders have launched their new union with a blaze of optimism, hoping the organisation will be the first step in bringing prosperity and good government to the world’s poorest continent.

“We have reached a proud, but a challenging moment...I declare the first session of the summit of the African Union open,” South African president Mr Thabo Mbeki said with a slam of his gavel.

Critics, however, fear leaders are replacing the organisation of African Unity with another bureaucracy with no real power to control some of the despots and corruption-riddled governments that plague the continent. The OAU was created 39 years ago as the wave of post-colonial liberation swept across the continent. Many have complained the toothless organisation did little more than prop up dictators and give them a lavish summit to attend each year.

The 53-nation African Union, by contrast, is billed as a new organisation for a new era - that links a commitment to democracy and human rights to economic development. “To achieve these objectives, and therefore give hope to the hundreds of millions of Africans who necessarily carry the deep scars of centuries of the humiliation of the peoples of Africa, today’s leaders of these masses will have to convince themselves that they have to exercise their stewardship in a new way,” Mr Mbeki wrote in his party’s newsletter. Inspired, in part, by the European Union, it will have a security council, a legislature, and an economic development plan. The Union’s muscle is to be the peace and security council, whose 15 rotating members will be able to authorise a proposed peace keeping force to intervene in cases of genocide and war crimes.

The first summit of the AU adopted the founding acts for the four main organs of the AU — 13 others will be formed later — and Mr Mbeki announced that the body would “hold its first extraordinary summit within six months to consider suggestions of the executive council” on the running of AU.

The Union’s other key element is the new partnership for African development, which seeks billions of dollars of international investment in Africa in return for stable democratic governance and fiscal responsibility. The world’s wealthiest nations embraced the programme at last month’s G-8 meeting in Canada.