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Viewpoint
Letters to the editor
Adding beef to the Pan-African Parliament
07/2005 |
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Adding beef to Africa’s parliament
A year ago the African Union founded its Pan-African Parliament, the performance of which has been mixed so far. While the parliamentarians agreed to send peace missions to Côte d’Ivoire and Congo, and made recommendations on the Darfur conflict, they missed opportunities to exercise a crucial function of parliaments: that of oversight. The assembly needs brave representatives to prevent it from becoming a mere talking shop.
[ By Ayesha Kajee ]
The Pan-African Parliament was launched in 2004 when leaders vowed to improve governance and alleviate poverty in Africa. Its members can use it as a platform to demand that governments deliver on this promise by investigating and publicising poor management at both continental and national levels. Oversight makes the vital difference between an effective parliament and an assembly of talking heads who do little more than endorse executive decisions. Although the fledgling parliament has no legislative power during its early years, it can debate issues of continental importance and make recommendations to the African Union Commission and the Heads of State.
Among the key issues on the agenda of the last parliamentary session in March was the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), a voluntary appraisal of national governments’ economic and political performance by fellow Africans. The assembly did pass a resolution, calling on national parliaments “to urge their governments to accede to APRM as a demonstration of their commitment to democracy and good governance in Africa.”
But the Pan-African parliamentarians did not go as far as they could. The APRM requires that each country’s review report and recommended plan of action be publicly tabled in the parliament. At every successive sitting, the assembly should compel MPs from APRM countries to report on their government’s progress in implementing the national action plan in the five-year period between the reviews.
Courageous national legislatures have illustrated the authority that parliaments which choose to exercise their oversight role can wield. Even in instances where leaders refuse to follow through on investigations initiated by parliaments, the publicity generated by such investigations has led to civic pressure on the executive and ultimately contributes to more accountable governance. The Pan-African Parliament should scrutinize the budgets of AU organs such as the AU Commission and the Peace and Security Council, and make recommendations to streamline bureaucracies and improve efficiency.
Of course, this presupposes that Pan-African parliamentarians will have the bravery, or even temerity, to engage with issues that may discomfit executives and potentially embarrass presidents who misuse their country’s resources. The assembly passed resolutions commending the AU’s prevention of an unconstitutional takeover of power in Togo, but was conspicuously silent on widely-reported abuses of election guidelines in Zimbabwe’s March election, failing to challenge transgressions that are tacitly backed by many African governments.
The mechanism by which MPs are selected to represent their countries in the Pan-African Parliament merits scrutiny. If parliamentarians are intended to represent their nation’s citizens, MPs from countries such as Uganda, to all intents a one-party state, surely lack credibility. Libyan MPs are even less representative of their population, as Libya has no national assembly. Yet the parliament elected a Libyan as its vice president for North Africa, symbolically endorsing an undemocratic government. Even South Africa, with a relatively robust multi-party democracy, has been criticised for failing to include a member of the official opposition in its delegation.
The Pan-African Parliament has had over a year in which to set up structures, nominate office bearers and organize itself. It’s time to focus on pertinent issues that can improve governance in Africa.
If the parliament is to evolve into more than a talking shop, the elected representatives of states with better records of democracy must dare to raise the level of debate. MPs at both national and continental levels can use the APRM to transform their role from “rubber-stamping” of executive decisions to steering the governance agenda in the interests of citizens. Unless they rise to this challenge, the Pan-African Parliament – or PAP – will be lumbered with comparisons with South Africa’s staple food - the soft and malleable “pap”.
Ayesha Kajee
works as a researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) in Johannesburg. Her comment was first published in May in eAfrica, an electronic newsletter by SAIIA.
kajeeai@saiia.wits.ac.za
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