Revisiting ECOSOCC

Charles Mutasa—The African Union desire to have the grassroots’ voices heard in the regional organization through its economic, social and cultural council (ECOSOCC) is likely to be frustrated and remain a mirage if the current process for civil society elections into its substantive ECOSOCC assembly goes ahead without the popularization of the institution among ordinary citizens.

Since the razzmatazz and fanfare that went with the inauguration of the interim ECOSOCC in March 2005, not much have been done to see that the institution is popularized at both the national and sub regional levels. Not a single penny of the African Union has gone into any member state in the name of popularizing and promoting ECOSOCC chapters among the African citizenry. The current fast track and short cuts to have a substantive ECOSOCC in place by end of December 2007 are just but a mockery to the spirit and letter of popular participation. ECOSOCC without a strong popularization strategy is bound to create a bunch of elitist civil society representatives who have no clue or link to the grassroots. At worse, in the capital cities of many African states ECOSOCC is likely to remain unknown and unheard of.

The ECOSOCC process represents a historical opportunity for the formulation of a new social contract between African governments and their peoples. The setting up of ECOSOCC national and regional chapters prior to elections is key as these form the building blocks of such a contract. Elections for ECOSOCC leadership positions are supposed to be a manifestation or outcome of local structure building and synergy. Anything short of this demeans the strategic role of civil society organizations within ECOSOCC and its fundamental interaction with the African Union leadership.

In March 2005, the interim ECOSOCC was mandated for two years with the responsibility of organizing and coordinating the engagement of civil society members with the African Union (AU). That is, mobilizing and conscietizing civil society in the formation of a fully fledged ECOSOCC. This involved setting up Africa Union civil society chapters within each member state and sub-region through campaigns and a number of consultations. Although members of the Interim Standing Committee for ECOSOCC managed in April 2005 to draft a comprehensive work programme for the two year mandate, only a quarter of that programme has been implemented. The April 2005 ECOSOCC plan and budget spelt out how the interim ECOSOCC Standing Committee was to reach out to the African citizens within the 53 member states and the Diaspora. This programme never got implemented as African Union funds for ECOSOCC were not available at least the first nine months from the day of the interim ECOSOCC’s inauguration. It was only in January 2006 that a budget was availed by the African Union Summit for the ECOSOCC activities.

Mayhem within the ECOSOCC set-up

The interim ECOSOCC is headed by a bureau. The members of the bureau are the Nobel Laureate, Prof Wangari Maathai (Presiding Officer and East Africa representative) and Deputy Presiding Officers Maurice Tadadjeu (Central Africa), Ayo Aderinwale (West Africa), Fatima Karadja (North Africa) and Charles Mutasa (Southern Africa). Although ECOSOCC was created to be an independent CSO forum, the nomination of, rather than the election of, Prof. Wangari Maathai to the chair, while serving as a minister in the Kenyan government, was the first problem encountered. Many critics viewed this as a mockery of the civil society-rooted raison d’être of ECOSOCC as well as violating the spirit and letter of the ECOSOCC Statues and the African Union’s constitutive Act article 22. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem was quick to point out:

…the AU bureaucrats wanted high visibility, somebody that was more amenable to their own control and agenda and acceptable and recognizable to the heads of states … the whole process leading to the formation of the ECOSOCC was engineered, controlled and managed at every stage – even the elaborate consultative process .

Prof Maathai’s nomination to head ECOSOCC faced resistance from many civic quarters. The civic voices were incomprehensible as reason and hope was in having a person of her caliber bridging the gap between CSOs and some government leaders known to be indifferent to civic concerns. Nevertheless, the great question that remained lingering in many CSOs minds was how much time out of her busy schedule she could allocate to the cause of pushing ECOSOCC’s agenda by dealing with the African Union leadership and donors. This is not the subject of this write-up but in discussing ECOSOCC one cannot overlook such nitty-gritty laid for the institution’s future. Serious observers or skeptics of the process will always revisit this to see if it worked or not.

The funding of the ECOSOCC process seems to be one of the major stumbling blocs to its success. The delay in getting African Union funds allocated to this new institution was further aggravated by bureaucratic inertia on the part of ECOSOCC’s secretariat-the Citizens Directorate (CIDO) that dragged its feet and ultimately failed to disburse the much needed funds for local mobilization work. By December 2006 the ECOSOCC allocation was returned to the African Union coffers as money that an organ within the Union failed to utilize as per specific timelines and plans. The reasons given by the CIDO director, Jinmi Adisa for the failure to use the funds was that no one in the interim ECOSOCC was authorized to sign for its disbursement and the only person authorized to receive the funds, that is, the ECOSOCC presiding officer – Wangari Maathai - had never asked for the funds. Besides, he argued, the CSOs were not prepared to be held to account for inter-governmental funds in their countries and regions. To their displeasure, many civil society organizations were shocked to learn that funds meant for ECOSOCC popularization went unutilized the whole year despite their numerous requests to have it released.

As others have pointed out already, it is no secret that one of ECOSOCC’s problems is that of the institutional arrangement in which it is operating under or the location of ECOSOCC secretariat within the African Union commission’s citizen’s directorate (CIDO) that forces it to rely heavily on its cooperation. Many observers have expressed sentiments pointing to the anomaly of placing the ECOSOCC secretariat within the AU commission, which ‘makes it an organ within another organ’. The obvious argument has always been that ECOSOCC cannot advise the AU commission because it is already placed within it. As a secretariat and stewards of ECOSOCC financial resources, CIDO to a large extent determine the pace of CSOs in setting up ECOSOCC. CIDO has the power to make ECOSOCC a success or sabotage it. The interventionist tendencies of CIDO in civil society work are not only worrisome to civil society in general but even to serious and resolute members of ECOSOCC’s interim leadership. It is crystal clear that the ECOSOCC bureau or its standing committee can not proceed with any plan without CIDO’s consent. Currently ECOSOCC seems to be “owned” by civil society and driven by CIDO. This to a large extent has generated conflict and a loss of confidence in the ECOSOCC process among CSOs.

Current observations are that CIDO, instead of being a secretariat to ECOSOCC, appears to have its own vision of what is best for AU-CSO relations and thus it seems to run its own programme as a competitor to ECOSOCC. Pre-summit and Diaspora meetings, which are supposed to be run by ECOSOCC leaders as specified in the statues, have been drafted and coordinated by CIDO. Since CIDO is basically AU staff and enjoys more proximity and access to the AU commission structures and CSO donor funds donated to the AU, the department seems to use its advantageous position to circumvent the cash-strapped interim ECOSOCC leaders. As Irungu Houghton of Oxfam predicted, “CIDO should not in any circumstances try to be a gatekeeper. Because after a while you get a classic management response-I can’t copy with these demands, and therefore, I am going to start prioritizing’. Consequently, people start feeling excluded, marginalized and so on. The point is that in successful institutions such as the UN, the role of a CSOs unit is to facilitate and leave NGOs to deal with the substantative departments, document and profile the collaboration as they wish.

So far, ECOSOCC interim standing members have not been successful in raising complementary funds – apart from the much-awaited AU budget – to undertake national and regional consultations. The only members of the standing committee (apart from the Bureau Presiding Officer, Wangari Maathai) who have raised funds independently, and undertaken some national and regional consultations in their regions, have been the deputy presiding officers from Southern Africa, Charles Mutasa, and West Africa, Ayo Aderinwale. Thus, the mandate to promote the popularization of ECOSOCC at national and regional levels, as well as elect representatives from such structures, has not be achievable within ECOSOCC’s two-year mandate even with the extension running into end of December 2007.

Elections without popularization of the ECOSOCC Concept

In March 2007, during the ECOSOCC Interim Standing Committee meeting in Cairo some vociferous members of the Interim Standing Committee pushed the idea of fast tracking the ECOSOCC by proposing that all those willing to be in the substantive ECOSOCC should through the internet and other forms of media submit applications to a credential committee-whose credibility is a subject for debate. Even though, a large section of the committee strongly criticized the idea it was not stoppable as CIDO backed it and ensured that it sails through. The support or rejection of the idea was mostly informed by regional experiences of the members present at this meeting. This new election before popularization approach pushed from the Cairo meeting, to a large extent brought in confusion for regions that had started the regional and national consultations. A case in point is that of the Southern Africa region ECOSOCC consultations process that had taken off with the financial support of Action Aid International, Southern Africa Trust (SAT) and the American Friends Service Committee (ASFC). In Southern Africa, two regional consultations and 10 national ECOSOCC launches were done and many CSOs were keen in following up this process as it gave them a chance to know ECOSOCC better and cross-examine certain tenets of its statues. Such a privilege was not afforded many CSOs in other regions. One would not think that CIDO would deny funding and block such a noble process in favour of a short-cut approach that is a rash to elections and thus undemocraticize the whole ECOSOCC process.

The process in Southern Africa had promised CSOs that the African Union will use a transparent process of electing members to the substantive ECOSOCC and that this will be done within their region and in-country supervised by some visible (not unseen and unknown to them) credentials committee. The call for applications to a Credentials committee that they do not know who constitutes it did throw-in confusion to the whole process. It defied the hopes for ownership of the process and the whole concept of participation. The credentials committee vetting process raised questions of legitimacy as the three CSO members on the credentials committee also have an interest in being elected. CIDO has facilitated the submission of applications into the substantive ECOSOCC assembly. This has been vetted by the Credentials Committee during the sidelines of the African Union Summit held in Ghana in June 2007. However, the approach is not devoid of its own stumbling blocks as certain individual interests seem to have overridden that of many as the mammoth task of electing CSOs to the ECOSOCC substantive assembly can not be left to few individuals as heard in the Ghana ‘credentials’ report.

A critique of the current ‘application and vetting’ approach

CSOs hoped that the ECOSOCC process will give them an opportunity to select and discuss their own nominees within their region and within their countries with minimum supervision from the AU secretariat and the ECOSOCC Interim Standing Committee. However, a number of problems have been created by the current application online and vetting approach;

1. Applying straight to CIDO in Addis Abba takes the process away from the national stakeholders as they would not know who is applying, how they qualify or get disqualified.
2. An election before popularizing the concept of ECOSOCC and the African Union to the African Citizens is tantamount to denying them the right to know the continental body and asking them to bless its work anyway.
3. CSOs that do submit applications to CIDO do not know who constitutes the body that is vetting them as a Credentials Committee and later alone what makes such a committee eligible to qualify or disqualify them. This raises the question of legitimacy. CSOs been familiar with the catchwords-accountability, participation and ownership will obviously need to have confidence in those vetting them before they are vetted.
4. Asking CSOs to check websites for applications and other documents have excluded those without access to internet and other technical means of information from applying to be in the ECOSOCC.
5. What seems to puzzle many CSOs is the fact that although the interim ECOSOCC was set up two and half years ago, in most countries the word ECOSOCC is yet to be heard. For those elected to be ordinary members of the ECOSOCC general assembly, the last time they ever heard of ECOSOCC was during its inauguration in March 2005. No cent has been released from the African Union‘s CIDO (citizen’s directorate) to go towards the popularization of ECOSOCC national ECOSOCC chapters- which by obvious definition should be the building blocks of such an important organ of the African Union.
6. As others have pointed out already, it is no secret that the first ECOSOCC problem is that of the institutional arrangement in which it is operating .i.e. the location of its secretariat within the African Union commission’s citizen’s directorate (CIDO) that forces its leadership to rely heavily on that Directorate’s cooperation. As a secretariat and stewards of ECOSOCC financial resources, they to a large extent determine the pace of CSOs in setting up ECOSOCC. They have the power to make it a success or sabotage it.

Other AU institutions such as the Pan-African parliament have been so luck to have countries such as South Africa hosting them and taking care of their needs. ECOSOCC’s confinement to the AU secretariat poses a threat to CSOs’ ability to move forward both now and in the future. Unless the AU leadership looks at this seriously we are likely not to have a powerful and meaningful ECOSOCC.

Conclusion

A people-centered and democratic AU will require sustainable resources to make the AU ECOSOCC significant to the ordinary citizen and, especially, the poorest of the poor. The need to ensure that the under-represented and vulnerable groups within society such as the disabled, the youth and children are adequately integrated cannot be over-emphasized. Finally, the AU needs to invest more resources in ECOSOCC and possibly entrust one of its member states to host ECOSOCC and its administration rather than leave it to the Addis Ababa-based AU Commission’s CIDO.

CSOs by their very nature will find it extremely difficult to endorse shortcuts to progress, but would always insist and expect full commitment from the Africa Union in terms of resources, time and energy to be put in the process if it is to pass the litmus test of legitimacy and not be a mere window-dressing exercise.

Recommendations on concerns with the process

1. Member states must insist on CSOs popularizing the process before elections to the substantive assembly are held.
2. The process needs more resources and time and taking short cuts is problematic in terms of ensuring legitimacy and accountability of the process.
3. A clear mandate and terms of reference needs to be developed for CIDO and it must be clear where CIDO starts and ends as a secretariat.

Mr. Chales Mutasa is AFRODAD Executive Director and ECOSOCC Deputy Presiding Officer.

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