Ministers to Revive Union Government Plan

(PANA)--African leaders have agreed to save the process of forming a Union government from collapsing and asked their foreign ministers to meet within three months to fine-tune the outstanding sections that delayed the final formation of the African government.

African Union (AU) Chairman Muammar Kadhafi said Wednesday African foreign ministers would meet to discuss and fine-tune the planned transformation of the African Union Commission into an African Union Authority, with a stronger mandate comparable to those of any government. ‘The African Union Authority is a government of the Union. The Authority means government. There would be secretaries and coordinators of defence and foreign policies that are still divergent,’ Kadhafi told the press at the end of the four-day meeting to discuss a government for Africa.

‘The Executive Council of the African Union would meet within the next three months to discuss the Union Authority and submit a report to the assembly. Measures would be taken to complete the process before the final assembly,’ Kadhafi told a rare news conference on his first week in office.

African Union Commission Chairperson Jean Ping said the agreement to set up the Union Authority as a step towards the United States of Africa was a major milestone and would put to rest three straight years of debate on the formation of the federal government for Africa. ‘We have been discussing this issue and the members are divided. The decision to form the Union Authority was reached by consensus. This puts to an end three years of debate. We should implement the decision. The heads of State would look into the matter and take practical solutions,’ Ping said.

The AU chief spoke hours after a deal on the federal government failed to go through. The leaders disagreed on the modalities of setting up the authority without direct backing of the supreme law setting up the AU.

Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete said the African leaders agreed to form the Union Authority instead of the Union Government because a government must have sovereign rights, which would have been tricky for the African leaders to tackle. African leaders insisted that the Constitutive Act, forming the AU, must be amended as a first step to institutionalise the Union Authority, changing the name of the AU Commission into an Authority.

African leaders were cautious to use the word government, but Chairman Kadhafi reiterated that the Authority would be a government whose mandate would transcend the borders. ‘We have to build Africa step by step, stage by stage,’ Kadhafi said, in a message that seemed to reach out to his critics who accused him of seeking an overnight African federal government.

He said under the AU, Africa had gone through a transformation and a liberalisation phase, which eliminated the issue of coups for a while, but had been faced with a recent resurgence because the of failures of the multiparty system, which, he said, did not take into account Africa’s socialist nature. ‘The governments were weak and unable to lead their societies. That is why there have been coups after coups because people wanted change,’ Kadhafi told journalists.

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