The African Union and African youth: A ‘zero-sum game’?

The African Union will hold its 17th Heads of States and Governments Summit in the last two weeks of June 2011 in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea. The theme of the summit is ‘Accelerating youth empowerment for sustainable development’. The summit theme is very appealing to convene any kind of gathering at any corner of the world given it has the terms ‘empowerment’, ‘youth’ and ‘sustainable development’ as its major signals. I think people both in academia and activism would find the theme catchy as well, not to mention the interest of government bureaucrats. This short reflection is intended to share my personal ideas towards any planned action to influence the decisions and outcomes of the summit – the advocacy and lobbying efforts, in other words. The June 2011 summit is a culmination point of a decision-making process which will start well ahead of the summit through the ministerial and permanent representative committees meetings. Hence, any effort to influence the decision or communicate a message to the ‘leaders’ in an effective manner needs to consider the timing and the right channels of decision. For the sake of having a structured reflection, I will take the widely circulated concept note document of the 2011 African Youth Forum, planned to be held from 4–6 April as part of the pre-summit event towards the main summit.

As mentioned earlier, the theme of the summit is loaded with very catchy terms (concepts) and can trigger one to have a nuanced insight on it. To start with, the term ‘youth’; though the ‘African reality’ clearly shows that it is a culturally and historically constructed social location/position within the societal system, it is not uncommon to see its simplified categorisation into a mere age and demographic group. Not denying that it has obvious age and demographic features, other elements also require equal, certainly more, focus in addressing issues of youth. The gender element, socio-economic status, generational relations and the like are hardly considered in an age-based understanding and conceptualisation of youth. For that matter, I have also a serious reservation in using the terms ‘young people’ and ‘youth’ as synonymous and interchangeable words, especially if we are considering them in the framework of ‘empowerment’ and ‘development’.

The other catchy concept ‘empowerment’ also needs sober attention. Though I’m not a linguist, I think the word can be divided into its prefix, suffix and the root word: ‘em’, ‘power’ and ‘ment’. As I understand it, the prefix ‘em’ entails an action or effort making/putting/getting (something) into, whereas the suffix ‘ment’ has a connotation of process-oriented action. The root word, ‘power’ has a complex definition beyond its dictionary-based definition, mainly within a social process as well as in a context of (sustainable) development.

Needless to mention the works of big scholars like Michel Foucault and Max Weber, I prefer to understand power as a relational concept whose manifestations and exercise are barely perceptible. Indeed, this does not necessarily ignore the common-sense understanding that it is also a capacity to coerce and influence. Then how is the term/concept ‘empowerment’ understood? What about ‘youth empowerment’? It sounds that there is someone/an actor who will do the empowerment in terms of a lengthy and planned programme or activity. Indeed, there can be also a ‘self-empowerment’ in many instances, but in our case, if we take the terms ‘accelerating empowerment…’ together it doesn’t give enough room for ‘self-empowerment’. Rather, it implicitly conveys a message that there is one who does the ‘empowering’ in an accelerated manner and the other that is being ‘empowered’.

I won’t dare to make a deeper analysis on the discourse of ‘sustainable development’. Briefly as usual, the fact that the African Union is a very mainstream-oriented institution means I can definitely say that it is following the classic definition of sustainable development, i.e., ‘addressing the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. In a continent where a huge tract of arable land – sometimes larger than some European countries – is sold out/leased to multinational companies and other governments at a very cheap price (there is a case in Ethiopia where a hectare of land is leased 99 US cents for 99 years), in a continent where the sea offshore is used as damping site for industrial waste (the real initial cause for the Somali ‘pirates’), in a continent where dictatorial regimes manipulate state and public resources outrageously and in a continent where multinational oil companies exploit natural resources by having a military power beyond a state (the Cabinda region in Angola), talking about ‘sustainable development’ is totally unacceptable!

Coming back to the concept note of the 2011 African Youth Forum (AYF), one can easily see how the age-based understanding of youth is still the departure point in conceptualising the issues of youth. Usually, the age-based categorisation easily leads us to the demographic section where it is easy to set age boundary/cohort and put the number as a percentile. It is a fact that most African countries’ population pyramids are wider at the bottom. But it needs to go beyond this factual observation and look into the nature of the complex reality that can be drawn to address the socio-economic and political challenges and opportunities of African youth. The usual age-based conceptualisation of youth implicitly asserts that the youth are of tomorrow rather than of today and denies their agency to determine their course of action in the actual time and context. It is within such a framework that the ‘holistic approach to youth development’ is taken as a remedy to address the challenges of youth and ‘… the related factors that help shape their behaviors, such as families, communities, schools, media, the legal environment and different established systems of values and social norms’ (AYF 2011, concept note). The actual capacity of the youth in positioning and repositioning themselves within the societal system and using the social context (their families and communities) and other tools like them – media – in their own way cannot be considered within this framework. Just a couple of weeks ago, Egyptian youth achieved a phenomenal historical incident because they exercised their individual and collective agency to reshape their community, nation and, above all, the media into their own desired context.

The other rhetoric in the concept paper is about the increasing importance and consideration of issues of ‘youth development, empowerment and leadership’ to the development agendas of national governments and continental/international institutions. As is argued in the concept paper, this can be justified in the increasing commitment for youth capacity-building efforts, in ensuring youth participation in policy dialogue and decision-making processes, the launching of the year 2008 as the ‘year of African youth’ and 12 August 2010–11 as the ‘international year of youth’, the decade of ‘African youth’ (2009–18) and also the adoption, ratification and implementation of the African Youth Charter (AYC). Of course, all these efforts show the commitment of various actors at different levels, at least at a rhetorical level, and these all would not be achieved if there was not a serious engagement from all concerned actors. And the next assignment is to take the agenda further. These dedications and the AYC are not ends by themselves; they rather contribute further actions to be carried out as enabling legal frameworks. For instance, looking at the inadequate attention given to the issues of youth at the African Union level can be taken as an example.

Regardless of having a binding legal document, the AYC – and dedicating a year and then a decade for the promotion of the agenda of ‘youth development’ and devoting the upcoming summit to youth agenda – the youth division is poorly structured and financed. As far as I know, the youth section of the African Union is under the Department of Human Resources, Science and Technology and the number of permanent staff is very limited (maybe two or three). I personally had a couple of chances to meet the head of the youth division, Dr Raymonde Agossou, who is a very keen and dedicated person but highly constrained by the technical and financial limitations assigned to her mandate. The energetic and inspirational youth volunteers are maybe the real actors that keep the youth division still alive. But institution-wise, as I said before, the top AU officials and the member-state leaders are so hypocritical that their words and actions rarely match. Adopting the African Youth Charter five years ago, dedicating a decade for youth development and discussing youth empowerment as a single agenda on their summit could not even convince them to take practical action. What should we expect from them though?!

To wrap up, the 2011 African Youth Forum concept note needs a broader perspective so as to achieve the stated objectives and outcomes and to become an effective and crucial event contributing to the ‘youth development’ agenda meaningfully. I believe that, once its conceptualisation of youth is realistic enough in problematising the challenges and opportunities of African youth, the rationale, the objectives and the outcomes can be adjusted accordingly. With regard to the summit’s title, I proposed an alternative summit theme last time, given the nature of most African governments and their common behaviour of co-opting, manipulating and marginalising the youth and being dictators for being in power for more than two decades – ‘Accelerating youth disempowerment for sustainable dictatorship’ would suffice. Today, I have tried to show how the mainstream understanding of youth denies their agency of today and locates them in the uncertain tomorrow, as well as how the common definition of sustainable development does not fit into a few realities in Africa. So, how shall we address ‘the deadly equation’ of youth and sustainable development? I can confidently say that it is a zero-sum game! And finally, ‘who is ‘empowering’ whom?’ is also another question which may initiate further insights to be forwarded.

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* Eyob Balcha blogs at http://eyobafrikawi.blogspot.com/2011/03/african-union-and-african-youth-zero.html
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