Cai Nebe
Saturday February 22, 2025
The African Union Commision has new leadership in Djibouti's Mahmoud Ali Youssouf. But how will the AUC handle deepening continental and global crises?
Pushed to the peripheries of the world's news agenda, the recent African Union (AU) summit in Addis Ababa still delivered a tectonic shift in the continent's most prominent multilateral body.
Mahmoud Ali Youssouf was elected head of the AU's executive commission to replace the outgoing Moussa Faki from Chad. Youssouf is the first person from the East Africa region to lead the AU Commission, or AUC. Djibouti's foreign minister since 2005, there are few who can match Youssouf's experience.
Still, Youssouf was given an outside chance to win against veteran Kenyan politician Raila Odinga in an election with the mandate that the new leader would come from East Africa,
"The competition was between a politician and a diplomat, and it was very tough. It went to the seventh round of voting," explained DW's Solomon Muchie, who covers the African Union in Addis Ababa.
But Youssouf won the required support of two-thirds of the region's leaders to secure the post and represent some 1.5 billion Africans across the continent. Algeria's ambassador to the AU, Selma Malika Haddadi beat out competition from Egypt and Morocco.
Youssouf, who speaks Arabic, English and French, now faces the unenviable task of serving an African continent that is seeing as much armed conflict as it did in the post-Cold War era of the 1990s.
"If they are united in thought, they might be able to develop a common agenda, but it's a tall order," says Kenyan analyst Macharia Munene, a professor of history and international relations.
AUC a prize position for Djibouti
"Djibouti is a small but very critical state in this region," Muchie says, pointing out that the United States, China, France, Italy and Japan all have military bases in Djibouti.
"This is also the corridor for Asia, Europe and Africa trade routes," he adds.
For AU host Ethiopia, having a Djiboutian at the helm could also be advantageous.
Asked if host Ethiopia had a dilemma in choosing between Youssouf and Odinga, Dareskedar Taye, an Ethiopian analyst at the Institute of Foreign Affairs, told DW it was good that Youssouf is from the Horn of Africa.
"If effort and desire is added in improving Ethiopia's relationship with Djibouti from its current level, I think this can be good," he told DW.
Taye added that although Ethiopia maintains ties with Kenya, "Djibouti is our only way-out country in terms of port access."
Munene said it was "no surprise" that Youssouf defeated veteran Kenyan politician Raila Odinga. Aside from concerns of about working with Kenyan politicians or Odinga personally, Macharia says the positions that Kenya has taken recently are contrary to AU interests.
"The fact that Kenya is hosting the rebel side of the Sudanese civil war, of course, will make some other countries very unhappy," he told DW, referring to a meeting held this week in Nairobi, where Sudan's rebel group, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), are preparing to establish a rival administration. The meeting caused Sudan's government, controlled by the Sudanese Armed Forces, to recall their envoy to Kenya.
Severe headwinds expected
While the AU summit was ongoing, many leaders in Western democracies were dismayed at the events unfolding at the Munich Security Conference. Since the end of the Cold War, the US had been the North Star for ideals around multilateralism, democracy and rules-based diplomacy. But then a string of statements from American officials came, implying that Europe would have to take care of its own security. This, added to the Trump administration pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, the World Health Organization and skipping the G20 summit in South Africa, means Western democracies will likely turn inward.
"It is expected that the aid and support provided to the African Union from Western countries will decrease significantly," Dareskedar Taye told DW. For context, the European Union provides more than half of the AU's annual budget, and the AU relies on external funding for two-thirds of its budget. In 2022, the EU's European Peace Facility allocated €600 million to the AU for peace missions.
Often criticized as an organization for African leaders rather than African people, the AU battles for legitimacy despite being the only body of its stature in Africa.
"The AU requires institutional reform, because the African Union is not doing much for Africans. For example, the financial capacity is weak. Now, new leaders have come forward; maybe they can improve it," Dareskedar Taye said.
Munene told DW the AU's ineffectiveness lies not just in weak funding: "It first needs to resolve internal divisions, some of them ideological, others simply personal disputes."
Without solving these problems first, Macharia says it is hard to see the AU effectively addressing "big problems right now, like Sudan and the DR Congo."
Widening conflicts and reparations
There are serious armed conflicts across Africa that show no signs of stopping. There is a two-year civil war in Sudan between the Sudanese Army and the RSF, and continued Islamist insurgencies in the Sahel region. Fighting in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and gains made by the Rwanda-backed M23 threaten to spark a regional war comparable in scale to fighting last seen in the late 1990s. And this is before problems like economic instability and the increasingly devastating effects of climate change get attention.
The AU also made 2025 a year of focus for "Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations."
"The issue of reparations has been around for a long time and it's a good PR issue. The implementation of it, of course, is a big problem," Munene told DW.
He sees challenges in getting European countries, which have seen a surge in far-right popularity, agreeing to any form of reparation. The United States, where many of the African diaspora, whose ancestors were enslaved by European and American businessmen, live, has also been "cutting, cutting, cutting" aid, Munene says.
The gutting of USAID has already left a severe funding gap in many programs across Africa. And while some observers have questioned the timing of the AU's call for reparations, others have said now is the right time for European countries looking for allies in the wake of the Trump administration's America First foreign policy to strike deals with former African colonies. It is believed forms of reparations or compensation might make this process easier.
Edited by: Sarah Hucal