AU Meeting in Johannesburg

At the AU’s summit in Malabo, capital of Equatorial Guinea, last year then newly elected Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was the big draw, receiving rapturous applause as Egypt returned to the continental fold following its suspension a year earlier.

Sisi had just kicked off a storm of international controversy with the jailing of Al-Jazeera journalists a week back. And after the 2013 coup he engineered, Egypt’s first democratically elected Mohamed Morsi had been thrown in prison.

But Sisi had also started a crackdown against extremist violence that threatened to tear Egypt apart; won an election that was marred by an opposition boycott; and looked like the iron-fisted enforcer the AU so loves. Despite all that, there still was a palpable sense that someone who could re-impose order in Egypt had taken the reins. The summit just loved him.

Buhari’s moment

This week’s summit was to be Nigerian president Muhammud Buhari’s debut party. Buhari, who was sworn-in just over two weeks ago, had just returned from the G7 meeting in Berlin with US president Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British prime minister Tony Blair & Co. to push his vision of how Africa might defeat terror.

The kind of former general beloved by the AU, Buhari won a resounding victory in March elections, becoming the first Nigerian opposition candidate to defeat a sitting president.

Defying cynicism about Nigeria, incumbent Goodluck Jonathan graciously conceded defeat, and the country pulled off a transition many probably hoped they would never live to see it do.

On both sides of the African leadership aisle, the militarists on one side, and the democrats on the other, Buhari offered something.

But Buhari didn’t really get his moment, as this summit  was overshadowed by the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) case against a sitting African president, in this case Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir.

Wanted by ICC

The ICC asked South Africa to arrest Bashir as he arrived in the country for the summit on June 13. The Sudanese president is wanted by the court over charges of war crimes against humanity and genocide during the conflict in the western Darfur region of his country.

But the drama hit a high point when a South African judge on Sunday ordered authorities to stop Bashir from leaving the country, pending a decision on whether to detain him as the ICC had requested.

From then on, the summit became a big international story, not for its deliberations, but over whether South Africa would hold Bashir or let him go.

Omar al-Bashir

In the end, Bashir left Monday before a final ruling by the South High Court. In Khartoum, crowds gathered to give him a hero’s welcome.

The Bashir episode was an unwelcome distraction, helping feed the view that African leaders are a gang of outlaws who close ranks and don’t respect international law when its goes against one of them.