The Africa Union's Ambitious Agenda

Africa keeps breaking my heart. And I keep letting it.

I'm afraid it's about to happen again.

On Tuesday, in Durban, South Africa, representatives of 53 African nations gathered to midwife the birth of a new organization, the African Union, with an ambitious new agenda.

The AU replaces the OAU, the Organization of African Unity, created in the 1960s to provide a united front in the fights by indigenous Africans for independence from their colonial overlords.

The OAU's work has long been done, and there has been nothing more awkwardóparticularly in the era since the end of the Cold Waróthan to watch African leaders trying to adapt this instrument of another era to the exigencies of this one.

The African Union, if it can be made to work as intended, ought to eliminate that awkwardness. It would commit every nation on the continent to the fundamental democratic principle that governments exist to serve their people, not to be served by them. And it would give to all the right to intervene to end gross violations of human rights and the democratic principle in any.

"This is a moment of hope for our continent and its people," South African President Thabo Mbeki said at Tuesday's ceremony in Durban. "Africa has convened to decide what to do about itself."

And not a moment too soon.

Early in my newspaper career I aspired to be a foreign correspondent in Africa. I remember talking about it with Daryle Feldmeir, the editor of the old Chicago Daily News, shortly after I went to work there in 1973.

The indigenous African leaders of that time, I said, were their nations' equivalents of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Feldmeir had the grace not to laugh.

That was at a moment when the egregious Joseph Mobutuóor was he already Mobutu Sese Seko?óalready was busy plundering and impoverishing his nation, the former Belgian Congo, while enriching himself.

Idi Amin was outraging the world with his brutality and buffoonery in Uganda.

Angola still was under the bootheel of the Portuguese and its eternal waróa war of liberation that became a civil waróhad not yet begun. Rhodesia remained defiantly white-dominated. And South Africaówell, change there seemed simply out of the question.

In some respects, things are vastly better today. The entire continent has been liberated from colonialists. And over the last decade, according to The New York Times, 42 of the 48 sub-Saharan nations have held multiparty elections, compared with only four in the early 1980s.

But in other respects, Africa is worse off. By some measures, the continent as a whole is poorer than before the surge to independence began in the 1960s. AIDS is laying waste to whole nations, distorting social systems and threatening to break national budgets. In countries like Congo and Angola, constant warfare has resulted in the jungle's reclaiming roads and other facilities that were among the desirable legacies of the colonial era.

Maybe worst of all, Africa appears to the rest of the world as a perpetual mendicantóalways needy, always helpless, always carrying a begging bowl. That, as much as anything else, needs to change.

Africa needs to present itself to the world as a place to invest, and where investment will produce a return, social or economic. It may be a somewhat risky investment at the startóthere are an awful lot of deficits to make up foróbut it must be a place of investment, not just a bottomless pit for charity.

"We have to take ourselves seriously if we want the world to take us seriously," Kenya's President Daniel arap Moi said in Durban.

Moi, Mbeki, UN Secretary General Kofi Annanóall said the right things in Durban about the new African Union. My head tells me not to have any great expectations for this new venture. My heart tells me to embrace the promise.

Here comes another heartbreak.