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| The African Union and Challenges of Economic Integration in Africa |
Abaneme, Ambrose O. & Oddih, Mike C. PhD
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Abstract:
The unsatisfactory attempts by the African States to foster formidable Economic integration through the instrumentality of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in the 1980s and early 1990s via the Lagos Plan of Action(LPA) and the African Economic Community (AEC) in addition to the challenges of globalization gave rise to the establishment of African Union (AU). The launching of the African Union (AU)in 2002 was a bold step towards the economic and political unification of Africa in a bid to fast track its integration process given the robust content and context of the Constitutive Act establishing it. Despite the structural and institutional reformations, AU's responses on African integration seem not to have yielded the desired results. It is more worrisome that after a decade and seven years of AU's establishment, Africa is still grappling with problems of economic and socio-political developments The study was designed to evaluate the African Union's activities on African integration process. Specifically, the study investigated the fundamental problems that undermined the economic integration of Africa under AU's watch. The study predicated the evaluation on the basic propositions emanating from the Dependency theory. Basically the paper contextualized the major concept of the study which is the Economic integration. Being qualitative in nature, secondary sources of data collection via documentary method was adopted. The paper argued, inter alia, that though there were many challenges to AU's integration economic integration process, the decisive obstacles to African economic integration are rooted in her subordination of sovereignty and dependence on different European countries for protection and development. The study concluded that though there were challenges to African economic integration under AU's watch, however, Africa still parades huge potentials in human and material resources for synergistic economic integration and development of the continent.
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