Thursday, June 11, 2009

An Ineffectual REC: Arab Maghreb Union

With Libyan leader al-Qaddafi focussing his interests in the African Union and CEN-SAD, you kind of wonder how much effort he would want to put into the Arab Maghreb Union.

Here's a five-member regional organisation that is twenty this year, yet has made scant effort to re-formulate its vision.

I took the liberty of reading the African Union's Status of Integration
, and was profoundly shocked by the fact that of the 8 major RECs on the African continent that had write-ups of them (ECOWAS/CENSAD/East African Community/IGAD/AMU/SADC/COMESA/ECCAS/AMU), AMU had nothing about it. The report suggests that it did not participate.

Elsewhere on the AU website, another report--the Minimum Integration Programme--indicates that in the matrices that have been set up to monitor progress of RECs, this-same REC had failed to deliver on them.

Surely, it's time to disband the Arab Maghreb Union from the AU's established RECs?