From left: Candidates for the African Union Commission Chairperson Raila Odinga (Kenya), Richard James Randriamandrato (Madagascar) and Mahmoud Ali Youssouf (Djibouti).
It is now official. Africa has its sixth Chairperson of the African Union Commission who was elected by the heads of state annual summit held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on February 15-16, 2025. Although a total of eight (8) senior leadership positions at the Commission were open for election — including the Chairperson, the Deputy Chairperson, and six commissioners — the election of the AUC Chairperson stole the limelight.
Ring-fenced for Eastern Africa, the position attracted three candidates: Kenya’s former Prime Minister, Raila Odinga (80), the foreign affairs minister of Djibouti Mahamoud Ali Yousouf (59) and former Finance minister of Madagascar, Richard Randriamadrato (65). The winner is required to have 33 out of 49 votes after six countries were suspended following a recent spate of unconstitutional takeover of governments.
AU elections
Merit, not passion, is expected to determine AU elections which are guided by the principles of equitable regional representation, gender parity and merit-based selection to ensure that only Africa’s best and ablest are elected. The campaign process even involved a televised African Leadership Debate, dubbed MjadalaAfrika. But the question still remains: What does the election of a new chairperson of the AU Secretariat mean for Africa?
The 2025 election of the Chairperson was the 6th since the launch of the African Union in 2002, replacing the Organization of African Unity (OAU) (1963 and 1999. The first is Amara Essy, the last Secretary-General of OAU and the former Foreign Minister of Côte d'Ivoire (2002-2003). The second is Alpha Oumar Konaré, former President of Mali (1992-2002) who was elected by 35 out of 45 votes to become the second Chairperson (2003-2008). Third is Jean Ping, former Foreign Minister of Gabon who got 31 votes to clinch the seat (2008-2012).
The fourth is Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, former Foreign Minister of South Africa who won 37 votes to defeat Jean Ping and become the first female chairperson of the Commission (2012–2017). The fifth is Moussa Faki Mahamat, former Foreign Affairs of Chad who got 39 votes after seven rounds of voting to defeat Kenya’s Amina Mohamed and Senegal’s Energy Minister Abdoulaye Bathily in 2017 and re-elected in 2021 with 51 votes.
But was the campaign for the AUC Chairperson — elected by the Assembly for a four-year term, renewable once — much Ado About Nothing, as William Shakespeare would put it? A Chadian intellectual colleague agreed. He could not see what the big deal was in electing “a simple note-taker for African heads of state.” The AUC chairperson, essentially the head of the AU secretariat, is the chief executive officer, legal representative, chief accounting officer and AU’s top diplomat. But real power rests with the Chairperson of the African Union who is elected by the Assembly for a one-year term. In 2025, the new Chairperson of the African Union is the President of Angola, João Gonçalves Lourenço, elected to replace President Mohamed Ghazouani of Mauritania.
As the head of the AUC Secretariat, the new Chairperson is expected to appoint and manage Commission staff, manage the day-to-day activities of the 55-member country bloc, serve as a depository for all AU and OAU treaties and legal instruments and to consult and coordinate with the Union’s Chairperson, major AU organs, Member States, Regional Economic Communities (RECs), Development Partners and other stakeholders.
Working from the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the new Chairperson is also expected to lead the organisation out of its myriad current challenges. The AU’s most crucial agendum is the long-overdue administrative and financial reforms.
Besides enhancing AU performance, the new AU chief executive also needs to find new effective strategies for advancing and popularsing key AU’s objectives and programs. Foremost is the execution of the Second 10-Year Implementation Plan of Agenda 2063, a bold and ambitious roadmap for Africa's transformation, also dubbed as the decade of acceleration (2024-2033).
An ever-elusive agenda for past AUC Chairpersons is achieving the financial autonomy of the African Union. While institutional reforms could make the AU attractive to external partners, the organization needs to wean itself from over-dependence on external funding and get member states to contribute more and promptly towards the AU budget.
De-escalating rising tensions
Continentally, the Chairperson has to silence the guns across the continent. This includes ending the complex conflict in the Great Lakes and averting an Africa-wide war, breathing new life into the mediation in Sudan, strengthening the new AU Support and Stabilisation Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM) that came into force in January 2025, exploring innovative ways of calming the volatile Sahel region, stabilising South Sudan and find a common and most beneficial position for Africa on climate security.
The Chairperson has to be unequivocal about the status of Somaliland and defend the sovereignty of Somalia while finding effective ways of de-escalating rising tensions over Western Sahara between Morocco and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, both members of the AU.
The new AU CEO has to gird up his loins to make Africa’s partnerships across the world benefit its citizens. Besides managing extant traditional partnerships with Western partners like the European Union, three new partnerships are particularly important.
One is the ongoing rollout of the 10-point Action Plan (2025- 2027) of the September 2024 Beijing Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). So far, China is, undoubtedly, the largest and most consequential Africa-plus one partner!
Two, the Chairperson has to diligently coordinate the African agenda in the BRICS, formally launched by Brazil, Russia, India, and China in 2009, but which now includes three pivotal African states as members: South Africa, Egypt and Ethiopia.
Other African pivotal states are joining the bloc that accounts for around 42 per cent of the global population and 25 per cent of global GDP, higher than that of the G7. On January 17, 2025, Nigeria was formally admitted as a partner country, and Kenya is actively seeking membership in the grouping.
Finally, the new Chairperson has to coordinate the African agenda and maximize on the benefits of the African Union becoming a full member of the Group of Twenty (G20) — comprising 20 countries and the European Union, which represents the world's largest economies and account for most of the world's GDP and trade. It is a new dawn for Africa.
Professor Peter Kagwanja is the Chief Executive at the Africa Policy Institute (API)
