African Unification Front
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23 November 2005
FOURTH SESSION IS DECISIVE TURNING POINT IN AFRICA'S HISTORY
African Parliament Opens Session Over Konare's Objections
Article by Dan Kashagama
The African Parliament in its fourth Session is clearly a bolder, more independent and more assertive parliament. The session opened on 21 November at Midrand, Africa's second capital, and got down to serious business...beginning by addressing the need to engage more with the conduct of state and local electoral politics in order to protect human rights. The current session of parliament will also always stand out as a historic moment...especially because in this session it has overcome the first overt challenge to its prestige and authority.
AU President G.I. Mongella
 As usual the AU Commission chair overstepped his authority and tried to prevent the parliament from conducting normal business, by demanding Mongella's resignation. AU President Getrude Mongella chaired the PAP opening plenum as expected, after rightly dismissing Konare's neocolonial remarks. This is the first time that Mongella has publicly disgreed with Konare. Up until now she has tried to placate Konare by covering over his mistakes and divisive politics.
Oumar Konare, who is not a member of the PAP, tried to depose the president Mongella, and to force the PAP parliament's hand, claiming that AU President Getrude Mongella has no right to chair the PAP session because the state parliament in Tanzania has been prorogued in preparation for local elections.
Konare claimed Mongella was no longer a member of the PAP and tried to get her to stay away from the fourth session...in spite of the fact that Mongella has not lost elections in her constituency in Ukerewe Island. Up until this session, Mongella has avoided clashing with Konare and has generally gone along with his plans, in fear of offending him. Konare's friends in Tanzania have been helping him make his case against Mongella from the day she was elected by the majority of PAP members.
Konare has many powerful allies, in Africa and abroad, who have been propping up his campaign to make himself the supreme leader of Africa. In Tanzania and across Africa, Konare's group has worked to diminish Mongella's presidency and to sabotage the parliament's effectiveness and undermine its status. In the weeks leading up to the charge against President Mongella, Konare was shuttling across Africa corraling heads of states and trying to drum up support for himself and the commission as the government of the AU, clearly undermining the authority of the African parliament and the legitimacy of AU President Gertrude Mongella.
The PAP of course has the power to decide what rules they will operate under regardless of Konare's wishes. But members of parliament are frustrated by Konare's unending obstructionism and the bureaucratic paralysis in the AU Commission. Konare, an ex-communist turned neo-conservative bourgeois capitulationist, is losing the battle of public opinion in a struggle that has seen the PAP emerge as the most important stabilizing institution and popular force in African politics.
The AU commission, which was designed only as a caretaker government during the transition as the African Economic Community was transformed into the federation that is the African Union, has been hijacked by Oumar Konare. According to the Act of Union, the AU Commission was supposed to have become the secretariat of the PAP. But Konare, a former head of state with grand ambitions, has refused to submit the commission to the Parliament's authority. Consequently the PAP was compelled to establish a separate secretariat, as well as a parliamentary trust fund because it can not rely on the impartiality and professionalism of the commission.
It is clear now that the AU commission should have been dissolved as soon as the PAP was established at the beginning of 2004. Attempts by the PAP to reform the AU Commission have been frustrated by the commission's most senior bureaucrats. Key PAP leaders have expressed frustration with Konare and see Konare's bureaucratic blundering as an impediment to African integration.
Oumar Konare, and his cohort of big wigs, practice a brand of presidentialism that thrives on retrograde colonial formalism in which imitation of colonial masters and assimilation of Africans by the French, the British and the Americans is considered a great accomplishment. This is a group of people who propagate western bureaucratic credentialism, and other anti-people institutional formulations.
They despise parliamentary power, and have no intention of allowing the PAP to carry out its normal legislative function. They want the PAP to be stunted, with a high turnover of disoriented representatives who are in awe of their credentials. They have no intention of challenging the West's dominance over Africa, and are content to pursue every tactic and personal advantage that will allow them to impress each other and their adopted foreign masters.
Until recently it was near to impossible to understand the extent of Konare's crimes against Pan Africanism, not only because he was so powerful, but because he rallied insecure old-guard colonial bureaucrats and heads of states around him. He pushed Amara Essy out of the commission, undermined the independence of the NEPAD secretariat, nearly succeeded in maiming the parliament by colluding with Thabo Mbeki to move it out of Addis Ababa while tying up its funding sources, and then tried to usurp the title and functions of the President of the PAP, even going so far as to arrogate himself the responsibility of assigning PAP members their duties and titles. Yet none of Konare's abuses seemed to dent his credibility at home or internationally. It seemed that he would smother and suffocate the PAP indefinately.
However, Alpha Oumar Konare's credibility suffered its first major blow in 2004 when the PAP rejected his curiously-worded white paper on Africa's future. The white paper was allegedly the product of "brainstorming" sessions that were supposed to provide a "vision" of Africa's future. The paper deliberately ignored to mention the PAP or its importance to Africa, and was unduly concerned about bureaucratic minutia. Konare's paper also allocated money to institutions according to some unknown criteria, and it allocated a presidential "cabinet" of Konare to which cabinet members of the PAP would report, and it contained organizational flow charts that were incomprehensible even to reasonable people.
The commission, and Konare, took another mortal blow when he colluded with the state government of Ethiopia to recognize an election that was clearly fraudulent. The controversy over the commission's conduct in Addis Ababa exploded in a puplic furor when commission Vice-Chair Patrick Mazimhaka made remarks blaming victims of a massacre for provoking the state troopers to open fire and kill dozens of unarmed civilians.
When the election violence in Addis Ababa was linked credibly to the permissive and unethical relations between Meles Zenawi and Oumar Konare's commission, Said Djinit, one of the most respected bureaucrats at the commission initiated a token process of internal commission reforms to appease the stunned African public.
Finally, Konare may have inflicted on himself the worst blow...and it is not entirely clear what Djinit can do to repair the self-inflicted damage, or the damage to the credility of a suddenly impotent commission that set out to depose a president and has failed to make its case. Mongella commands the respect of the vast majority of the PAP members. Most PAP leaders are opposed to other institutions imposing of rules on the parliament, especially if they would result in the PAP president being prematurely deposed on the excuse that she lost in some local election that had nothing to do with her competence as the leader or member of the PAP.
By attacking president Mongella impulsively, and needlessly demanding her retirement regardless of the damage that would cause the parliament, Alpha Oumar Konare has betrayed himself and Africa. If the members of the AU parliament felt that President Mongella had to go, they could have passed a vote of no confidence...they don't need Konare to attack her or diminish her prestige on their behalf. It is obvious Konare didn't consider the effect of deposing the leader of the PAP. He also doesn't realise that deposing a leader on some bureaucratic technicality would be morally wrong.
AU President Mongella has done nothing wrong in to provoke this attack by Oumar Konare. Mongella has the support of all those state leaders who declined to nominate Konare for the position of AU commission chair, and those who thought the premature removal of Amara Essy was engineered by Konare. Besides the support of a large segment of the bureaucracy in Africa, the local and international media, Mongella has won massive support among grassroots pan-African organisations.
It seems so far, that by attempting to discredit the PAP's chosen leader, Konare has only succeeded in exposing the strength of parliament. President Mongella, a polite and amiable leader given to compromising in order to advance consensus among African leaders, refused to back down and so helped to win the first real challenge to the authority of the PAP. Due process and democracy have emerged, in the fourth session of the African parliament, as the dominant allies of the Pan Africanism. This particular event will stand out as one of the decisive turning points in the history of the parliamant and the Pan African struggle.
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