African Union and the Developmental Transformation of Africa: Challenges, Achievement and Prospects

Abstract

Over the past decades we have witnessed developmental growth across Asia and the rise
of emerging economies like China, India, Singapore, and Malaysia thus giving birth to the
epithet; the “Asian Tigers”, but Africa has suffered from relative economic stagnation and
poor development. This paper evaluates the activities of AU with respect to these
specificities in tackling past and present challenges facing the continent in the wave of
Afro-pessimists’ argument that Africa cannot claim its place in the 21st century. The paper
identified the challenges facing the AU in coordinating African developmental
transformation but recognised the fact that Africa of the end of the first decade of the 21st
century is not exactly the same as the Africa of the early sixties in term of developmental
improvement. The study recommended that AU focus on issues such as the high mobility
of African people, and its consequences in terms of citizenship rights; the issue of natural
resource management and food security; the recurrent problem of African integration with
a focus on the issue of common borders and most importantly, the issue of competing
regionalism especially on the polarisation of the continent along Anglo-francophone
delineation. The paper adopted qualitative methodology.

Keywords: Colonialism, Good Governance, Economic Growth, Decolonisation, Slavery,
Conflict Management