Comment: OAU and conflicts in Africa. (1995, 20 Marks)
The Organisation of African Unity, founded at Addis Ababa on 25 May 1963, settled the argument between Kwame Nkrumah’s call for immediate continental union and the gradualists’ preference for sovereign equality. The gradualists won, and the Charter enshrined non-interference, territorial integrity and peaceful settlement. Those principles shaped the OAU’s record on conflict: real success against colonial and inter-state threats, near-total failure in conflicts inside states.
What the OAU achieved
- Decolonisation: its Liberation Committee at Dar es Salaam channelled funds, training and recognition to movements in the Portuguese colonies, Rhodesia, Namibia and South Africa, and made the isolation of apartheid effective.
- Freezing borders: the Cairo Resolution (1964) committed members to the frontiers existing at independence (uti possidetis). Arbitrary as the colonial lines were, reopening them risked continent-wide war, and wars of territorial conquest between African states stayed rare.
- Inter-state mediation: it helped secure the Bamako ceasefire in the Algeria–Morocco Sand War (1963) and, later, brokered the Algiers Agreement (2000) ending the Ethiopia–Eritrea war.
Where it failed
- Civil wars made invisible: non-interference meant no civil war reached the agenda without the government’s consent. In Biafra (1967–70) the OAU backed Nigerian unity and could not protect civilians.
- Division, not settlement: admitting the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic led Morocco to leave in 1984; it returned only to the AU, in 2017.
- No capacity: its one peacekeeping force, in Chad (1981–82), withdrew within months for want of money and mandate. The 1993 Cairo Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution had no standing force.
- Rwanda, 1994: despite observer missions and its role in the 1993 Arusha Accords, the OAU could do nothing during the genocide.
- A “club of heads of state”: consensus and mutual protection shielded incumbents; Idi Amin chaired it in 1975–76.
Explaining the record
Robert H. Jackson calls post-colonial African states “quasi-states”, sustained by negative sovereignty: international recognition rather than internal capacity. The OAU was the institutional guardian of that sovereignty, so it could not act on what states did to their own people. Ali A. Mazrui’s hope for a Pax Africana, Africans keeping their own peace, foundered on the same principle. Sub-regional bodies filled the gap: ECOWAS’s ECOMOG entered Liberia in 1990 without OAU direction.
The reversal and its limits
The African Union (2002) answered the OAU’s failure. Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act gives the Union a right to intervene in grave circumstances (war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity), applying Francis M. Deng’s idea of sovereignty as responsibility before the UN endorsed the responsibility to protect in 2005. Yet the clause has never been applied: in December 2015 the Peace and Security Council authorised a protection force for Burundi, and the January 2016 summit dropped it when Bujumbura refused consent. Old habits persist. Sudan’s war, now in its fourth year, is being pushed towards a 90-day truce by Washington; the DRC–Rwanda agreement of June 2025 was brokered in Washington and Doha, not Addis Ababa; Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger left ECOWAS in January 2025. India, which backed the OAU’s liberation agenda, secured the AU’s permanent G20 seat in 2023 and co-convened the fourth India–Africa Forum Summit with the AU in New Delhi (May 2026), endorses African solutions to African problems, but the capacity gap persists.
Conclusion
The OAU succeeded at the task it was built for, ending colonial rule and protecting new states from each other, and failed at the one its principles forbade. Its legacy is the AU’s shift from non-interference to non-indifference; the gap between that norm and the means to enforce it remains Africa’s central security problem.