The annual African Union (AU) summit opened on Sunday with leaders vowing that the group would play a more prominent role in resolving conflicts proliferating across the continent.
The theme of the two-day summit is “Silencing the Guns,” which marks a departure from years of debate centered on reforming the AU — including its funding structure — and the implementation of a continent-wide free trade area.
In his opening remarks to assembled heads of state, AU Commission Chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat painted a bleak picture of the continent’s security situation, citing “terrorism, intercommunal conflict and pre and post-election crises.”
He also said that while some progress has been made recently in Central African Republic and Sudan, long-running conflicts in places such as Libya and South Sudan have been joined by new crises from Cameroon to Mozambique.
Faki said it would take more than military action to address the “root causes” of African conflicts, namely poverty and social exclusion, and reiterated the AU’s determination to find “African solutions to African problems.”
Yet his remarks came as multiple African leaders were acknowledging the AU’s failure to achieve the goal adopted in 2013 of ending “all wars in Africa by 2020.”
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who is taking over from Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi as AU chair, announced that he planned to host two summits in May — one focused on conflict resolution and the other on implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area.
Meanwhile, East African nations said later on Sunday that there could be no more delays in forming a power-sharing government in war-torn South Sudan, despite talks between rival leaders ending in deadlock.
South Sudanese President Salva Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar, whose fall out in 2013 sparked a conflict that has left hundreds of thousands dead, face a deadline of Saturday next week to form a government.
“Further extension is neither desirable nor feasible at this stage of the peace process,” the eight-member Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) said in a statement.
Kiir and Machar met on Sunday on the sidelines of the AU summit, alongside Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and Sudanese Prime Minister Abdallah Hambok, IGAD’s current chair, but they made no breakthrough to resolve their dispute over the number of regional states.
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