Introduction: Essay competition about the African Union

On 25 May 2015, Fahamu together with other civil society organizations, political parties as well as individual pan-Africanists organized activities to celebrate African Liberation Day (ALD) in Nairobi, Kenya, at the University of Nairobi. As part of the commemorations we had organized an essay writing competition for students from the university. We requested the students to write an essay on any of 14 selected African Union (AU) instruments and submit it to us to review. Writers of the top essays would receive prizes, the best of them being facilitated to attend the 25th AU summit now going on in Johannesburg, South Africa.

We received over 40 essays covering almost all the selected AU instruments. (One essay included in this issue, but which was not considered for the awards, is authored by a student at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.) As could be expected, the essays ranged form well-written and argued pieces to pedestrian narrations. Some have been selected for this special issue. The winning essay was on the Maputo Protocol, written by Mukumu Wairimu Irene, a Law student.

We intend to continue to engage students in various ways. Our State of the African Union (SOTU) project’s objective is to inform and empower the citizen to act to claim their rights as guaranteed in the various AU instruments. Our broad objective, however, is to stimulate discussions and debates about African issues within student intellectual spaces and cultivate an interest from young Africans to join and energise the pan-African movement.

The essay wring competition was part of the work we are engaging in as part of SOTU. SOTU is a coalition of national, regional and continental organisations working in ten countries in Africa to influence policy development, demand public accountability and monitor states’ compliance with AU legal instruments, policy standards and decisions. The SOTU coalition also seeks to see significant positive progress in the realisation of citizens’ rights at the national level through the implementation of AU legal instruments, policy standards and decisions. Additionally, the coalition aims at empowering African communities and citizens to participate in the affairs of the AU through demands for accountability and realisation of their dreams and aspirations.

Fahamu is the implementing partner of SOTU in Kenya and over the last two-and-half years, we have organized a number of activities with our local partners to realize the objectives of the coalition campaign. Our work has been organized around three areas: informing and empowering citizens to act to claim key rights and freedoms contained in select AU instruments, working towards advocating for the Kenya government to act to ratify, popularise, monitor and implement key instruments and building inclusive national and continental platforms capacitated to popularise, engage and hold the Kenyan government accountable to its AU commitments.

Some of the activities held around these three areas include research on the level of compliance by Kenya on the select 14 instruments. The research has shown that though the Kenyan government has signed and ratified as well as promised to adhere to most of the instruments, in reality their actual implementation on has been very low. For example, the country was investing an average of 4 percent in agriculture in 2013 against the 10 percent investment requirement based on agreements under Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP).

We have also been conducting activities to inform citizens of the Kenya’s AU commitments to empower them to act to demand for implementation of these commitments. We have mostly been holding events in universities across the country and having talks about the AU during these events. The essay writing competition lies in this category of SOTU activities

Additionally, we have been able to build and promote a network of civil society actors working on different sites of struggle to advocate for citizens’ rights guaranteed by some of these select instruments. Towards this end and based on the declaration by the AU of 2015 as the Year of Women's Empowerment and Development, we published a report on the level of compliance by Kenya with the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (Maputo Protocol). Our network members and ourselves have used this report to push the agenda of respect for and protection of the rights of women and girls to the forefront in Kenya.

Finally we have recently launched the ‘Be The Voice campaign’ (http://www.fahamu.org/be-the-voice) to lend more energy and visibility to our SOTU work. Some of the activities we have organized for this campaign are debates at various universities and colleges within the country, debates and discussions on social media, concerts for musicians and other artists, radio talks and publications. All these events especially target the youth.

This special issue contains analysis on some of the AU instruments in our SOTU campaign. The selected essays are among the best that we received and reflect on the level of understanding and engagement that the writers have with African continental issues especially with regards to the AU. It should be noted that most citizens in Kenya even at the level of policy makers are not very familiar with the workings of the AU and have perhaps not even herd of any one of the over 40 AU policy standards and legal instruments. We were thus very much amazed by the quality of most of the analysis of the instruments by the participants in the competition.

However, our engagement with the youth so far has revealed that a big percentage of them are not very well informed on pan-African issues. It appears that the university curriculum even in the Arts, Literature and political courses is very limited in terms of its African themes. For example, surprisingly, common names to those familiar with the African liberation struggle such as Thomas Sankara, Amílcar Cabral and Robert Sobukwe are unknown even to university students of political science and history. Clearly much needs to be done to enable young Kenyans (judging by those we have interacted with) to begin to see and think of themselves as Africans.

Our forefathers were young men and women who in their early ‘20s understood the struggle for liberation as a struggle for all Africans against an oppressive imposed system of subjugation. Steve Biko founded the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa in his early ‘20s; Amílcar Cabral started his anti-colonial activities in his early ‘20s as well, to mention a few. There is a need for progressive organizations and other formations to draw from this rich history by providing opportunities and platforms for our youth to analyze the current situation in their different states as well as the continent and develop revolutionary ideas on how to transform and manage our affairs.

* Mwangi Maina is Programme Officer, State of the African Union (SOTU), Fahamu.

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