The AU’s Statement Will Age Like All Its Others — Badly, Soon, another crisis will erupt. Another dictator will brutalize another region. Another election will be rigged in broad daylight. Another military takeover will happen. The AU will again issue a statement. Nothing will change.
A Kemi Ashu The Independentist contributor.
The African Union (AU) has gone back to its favourite hobby — issuing statements that mean absolutely nothing.
This week’s condemnation of the Guinea-Bissau coup is a masterclass in African bureaucratic theatre: long paragraphs, recycled diplomatic clichés, and the trademark AU confidence that collapses the moment real action is required.
Reading the statement, you would think the AU is a continental guardian of democracy. In reality, it is a continent-wide mattress for dictators — soft, accommodating, easily bent, and always ready to absorb their worst excesses.
The African Union Condemns Coups But Nurtures Tyrants
Let us not pretend. The AU has never stopped a coup. It has never prevented a crisis. It has never held a single tyrant accountable. Instead, it specializes in: Blessing fraudulent elections. Turning its back on genocides. Praising stability while citizens drown in instability. Defending the same presidents who brutalize their own people.If hypocrisy needed a headquarters, it would be in Addis Ababa. Where Was The AU When Ambazonia Bled?
The AU that is “shocked” by the coup in Guinea-Bissau is the same AU that watched: Entire Ambazonian villages erased. Babies killed in their sleep. Women burned alive in houses. Religious leaders assassinated. Journalists jailed or disappeared. Refugees pouring into neighbouring countries. And it was total Silence. Not a whisper. Not even a symbolic slap on Cameroon’s hand.
The AU only remembers “democracy” when soldiers overturn the table — never when presidents cheat, jail, torture, rig, and murder to keep the table. The AU Hides Behind Documents It Cannot Enforce The AU’s statement quotes every doctrine in the archives — Constitutive Act, Lomé Declaration, Ezulwini Framework — as though listing documents will impress anyone.
The saddest part.
The AU cannot enforce a single one. These documents have become ceremonial relics. They are waved around like charms by men who know they hold no power. This is not governance. It is continental cosplay.
Guinea-Bissau Is Not An Exception — It Is A Warning
What happened in Guinea-Bissau is not an anomaly.
It is the political physics of a continent where: Elites rig elections with impunity, “Independent” commissions obey sitting presidents, Observers rubber-stamp whatever keeps the peace, And regional bodies pretend everything is fine. Coups do not fall from the sky. They grow in the dirt created by failed institutions. The AU has fertilized that dirt for two decades.
Africa Is Changing; The AU Is Not
From the Sahel to Central Africa, people are waking up. Old regimes are collapsing. Colonial alliances are cracking. Citizens are refusing to be governed like obedient cattle. But the AU remains stuck in its favourite role: The last defender of political dinosaurs. Instead of reforming, it has become the continental hospice for dying regimes.
Ambazonia Owes The AU Nothing
Ambazonia sees clearly: The AU never cared about our people. It never cared about justice. It never cared about truth. And it definitely never cared about the British–UN betrayal that created the Ambazonian tragedy in the first place. We are done expecting salvation from the sleeping watchdog of the continent. We will take our freedom the only way freedom is ever taken — by insisting on it, fighting for it, and demanding it until the world adjusts.
The AU’s Statement Will Age Like All Its Others — Badly, Soon, another crisis will erupt. Another dictator will brutalize another region. Another election will be rigged in broad daylight. Another military takeover will happen. The AU will again issue a statement. Nothing will change.
Meanwhile, the people of Africa — especially Ambazonia — continue charting their own path, far away from the hollow applause of toothless institutions.
Kemi Ashu
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