Covid-19: Continental Emergence Requires More Inclusive and Organized African Union (Ambassador)

The emergence of the African continent in the context of the global health crisis linked to the Covid-19 pandemic, requires a more inclusive and organized African Union, said Youssef Amrani, Morocco’s ambassador to South Africa, for whom bygone ideologies must give way to pragmatism by making law and action prevail over all other political considerations.

In a column published by the magazine “Jeune Afrique”, the Moroccan diplomat questions the issues linked to health systems on the African territory and suggests better coordinated actions in order to better counter the effects of the health crisis.

According to Youssef Amrani, the Covid-19 exposed institutional shortcomings of multilateral governance, worsened by bureaucratic redundancies and operational failures. Therefore, it is clear that an overhaul is necessary, with a view to strengthening the mechanisms and procedures of international institutions, he said, pleading for “placing diplomatic action within the framework of a multilateralism of complementarity which is based on a common base of values, visions and strategies”.

For the Moroccan ambassador, world governance must gain in flexibility without losing credibility: “It is not a question of imposing the will of the strongest on the weakest, but of finding the consensus of a global coherence where each party would assume its obligations”.

He said, in this regard, that the balance of power should give way to the “relationship of interdependence”, because “unilateralism has no coherence in a world of invulnerability”.

In this context, “the challenge for African diplomacy will be to equip its international deployment mechanisms to convey the same message and pursue the same ambition”. For this, “the African Union of tomorrow must be more inclusive, more coherent and more organized”, and its diplomacy should be stronger and more competent, underlined Amrani.