Africa Day: The AU's Struggle to Silence the Guns

Zamikhaya Maseti 

2025 marks 61 years since the founding of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), a historic convergence of visionaries and revolutionaries on May 25, 1963, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

This day has since become no ordinary one. It is a ritual of remembrance, a collective drumbeat for the dream of African unity, a dream rooted not in geographical proximity, but in spiritual and political solidarity. 

In 2001, the OAU shed its skin and emerged as the African Union (AU), not as a betrayal of its founding ideals, but as an adaptation to a new global order. The torch passed, but the fire remained. In its early reconstitution, the AU sought to move from rhetoric to resolution, symbolism to structure.

In an assertion of Continental will and unity of purpose, the African Union ushered forth a landmark vision, Agenda 2063, as both a philosophical compass and policy blueprint. This 50-year vision is not a mere catalogue of developmental aspirations, but rather a strategic architecture crafted to catalyse Africa’s renaissance.

One of the most consequential embodiments of this vision has been the historic establishment of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), a cornerstone in the architecture of continental economic reintegration.

As member states increasingly operationalise and harness the AfCFTA, what emerges is a palpable shift in the patterns of intra-African trade from fragmented, externally dependent economies to a more harmonised, internally networked market. The African continent is undoubtedly charting commendable waters on the frontiers of economic integration.

However, to mistake economic consolidation for holistic development would be a perilous fallacy. The work is not complete. It is not yet Uhuru.

Despite the rhythms of trade liberalisation and industrial corridors emerging in the headlines, a silent catastrophe haunts many parts of the continent. The very soil that cradles the Nile and once nourished civilizational brilliance is today the stage of starvation. The recently released Global Report on Food Crises, a collaboration by the Food Security Information Network and UNICEF, casts a glaring light upon this contradiction.

According to the findings, more than one-third of all people globally facing acute food insecurity are located in sub-Saharan Africa. We must confront the uncomfortable truth: Africa cannot trade its way out of famine unless it feeds itself first. Economic integration without agrarian transformation is an illusion.

If hunger is the symptom, then conflict is the wound that refuses to close. It bleeds across the map of Africa, an old affliction wearing new uniforms. The persistence of war and armed violence across regions of the continent has not only undermined the gains of economic integration, but it has also eviscerated the foundational promise of Agenda 2063: an Africa at peace with itself.

As we stand well into the third decade of this century, the drums of war have not ceased; they have only shifted theatres. From Sudan to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), from the Cabo Delgado region of Mozambique to the Sahel, the spectre of instability continues to unravel the threads of development, deepen humanitarian crises, and rob the Continent’s youth of their futures.

The once hopeful promise of civilian-led governance lies buried beneath rubble and charred ministries.

Peacekeeping forces once lauded as the moral presence of global solidarity are now constrained, fatigued, and in retreat. The international community watches impotently, inert, ensnared by geopolitical fatigue and donor disillusionment.

South Africa, Africa’s economic heavyweight and long considered a regional stabiliser, has not been spared the costs of its commitments. The recent loss of 14 soldiers in a deadly engagement in the DRC marks not only a human tragedy but a brutal reminder: African peacekeeping is increasingly paid for in African blood.

And the African Union? Once conceived as the moral heir to Pan-Africanism's dreams, it finds itself shackled by the limits of its diplomatic instruments. Conflict resolution mechanisms remain reactionary, underfunded, and often perceived as politically compromised. The result is a tragic irony: the very institution entrusted with “African solutions to African problems” is itself engulfed in a crisis of credibility.

Africa is bleeding. And peace has become a deferred dream.

Africa's path to peace is jagged, riddled with contradictions, ambiguities, and unfinished transitions. If conflict is the fire, then constitutional fragility is the smoke that darkens the skies of continental progress. And nowhere is this drama more starkly performed than in the resurgent wave of coups d’état, particularly across the Sahel region.

The return of military rule is not merely a political regression. It is an ontological crisis.

Is democracy delivering legitimacy or merely legality? Are elections an expression of the people’s will or a ritual masking elite consolidation? When the poor are dying, and the elected are feasting, what meaning do Constitutions carry?

It calls for a new grammar of legitimacy in Africa. One that measures success not in GDP or ballots, but in bread, safety, and sovereign dignity.

If democracy is to survive, and it must, it cannot do so by prescription. It must earn its place in the African psyche through performance. Through food on the table. Through justice in the Courts. Through leaders who fear the people, not foreign donors.

As we commemorate Africa Day not as a ritual of nostalgia, but as a moment of continental reckoning, the task before us is not celebration alone, but interrogation. The drums may beat, the flags may fly, and the speeches may echo from Addis to Accra, but the soul of Africa will not be serenaded by ceremony. It demands substance.

* Zamikhaya Maseti is a Political Economy Analyst with a Magister Philosophiae (M. PHIL) in South African Politics and Political Economy from the University of Port Elizabeth (UPE), now known as the Nelson Mandela University (NMU).

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.