Political Parties in Africa: Challenges for Sustained Multiparty

• the Pan-African Parliament;
• the East African Assembly;
Political Parties in Africa: Challenges for Sustained Multiparty Democracy
• the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Parliamentary
Forum; and
• the Economic Community of West African States Community Parliament
(ECOWAS-PC).
The question that interests us is whether these state-sponsored party-to-party
arrangements have the capacity to develop into direct party-to-party partnerships.
4.6.1 The Pan-African Parliament (PAP)
Although it was established for different reasons and in order to respond to different
sets of problems, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and its successor the
African Union (AU) are close to the EU in their structure. However, because twothirds
of Africa’s states were under military rule, military socialist or ruled by civil
dictators, some observers called the OAU a club harbouring a large number of dictators
who attended its deliberations only to gain external legitimacy—in contrast to the
European Parliament, which is made up of representatives of democratic countries.
(Yet even the EU needed the European Parliament to enact Europe-wide legislation
and maintain a measure of oversight over the operations of the Union.)
One of the positive consequences of the democratization process that has swept
through Africa since the 1990s is that it has also resulted in a positive change of the
OAU’s mission—from decolonization to consolidating the democratic institutions
of the continent. The change of name from OAU to AU is a symbolic but important
step in this direction.
The factors which motivated the change from OAU to AU are outlined in article 5
of the Sirte Declaration (9 September 1999) in which the African leaders’ desire
to establish an African Union was spelt out as follows; ‘As we prepare to enter the
21st century and cognizant of the challenges that will confront our continent and
peoples, we emphasize the imperative need and a high sense of urgency to rekindle
the aspirations of our peoples for stronger unity, solidarity and cohesion in a larger
community of peoples transcending cultural, ideological, ethnic and national
differences’. This is further explained in article 6, which reads as follows: ‘Article
6. In order to cope with those challenges and to effectively address the new social,
political and economic realities in Africa and in the world, we are determined to
fulfil our peoples’ aspirations for greater unity in conformity with the objectives of
the OAU Charter and the Treaty establishing the African Economic Community’.