Excellency Mr. Antoine Félix Tshisekedi Tshilombo , Chairman-in-Office of the African Union,

Excellencies Heads of State and Government,

Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, Heads of Delegations,

Ladies and Gentlemen Ministers,

Madam Vice-Chairperson of the AUC,

Ladies and Gentlemen Commissioners,

Distinguished Guests,

Ladies and gentlemen,

Here we are, finally, physically reunited here at the headquarters of our organization in Addis Ababa, this hospitable city, teeming with culture, art and historical and evocative heritage attractions of a beauty never tarnished by time.

Excellency Mr. President Antoine Félix Tshisekedi, as you are going to hand over the baton to your successor, allow me to express my heartfelt thanks and to send you my warm compliments for the immense work carried out at the head of our continental Organization throughout throughout the past year.

I salute the excellent friendly, fruitful and intense work experience we had with you and under your leadership.

Excellency Macky Sall, President of the Republic of Senegal and incoming President-in-Office of our union, I welcome you and wish you every success for your mandate.

Your pragmatism, your sense of method, your determination and your ambitions for Africa raise real hopes that the enterprise launched by your predecessors will gain new momentum despite the difficult economic and health circumstances. Full success to your presidency!

Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,

The Covid-19 pandemic has challenged mankind to the depths of their being and their conscience. We cannot, when we meet physically for the first time since the onset of the pandemic, escape our part of the questioning, about ourselves, our doubts, our anxieties, our concerns for our organization and for our Africa. . To the two major scourges of the hour, which are Covid-19 and terrorism on the scale of the Continent, are added our intrinsic fragilities that the two scourges expose.

On Covid-19, the champion in the field, President Cyril Ramaphosa will present to you the essence of our efforts over the past two years as well as the guidelines of our strategy of resistance and future triumph against the devastating pandemic. Two major players will be called upon to play a leading role in this strategy. Africa-CDC whose operationalization is in progress. It will occupy in our institutional landscape the status of a specialized agency endowed with the autonomy of action dictated by the nature of its mission while remaining firmly anchored within the continental organization.

The African Medicines Agency (AMA) is preparing to play its part in this fight to promote public health, existence and the well-being of Africans. The acquisition of vaccines and their manufacture in Africa seem to be the high points of this strategy.

The impact of Covid-19 resulted in a 2.1% contraction in growth in 2020 and an increase in the debt ratio by 10 points of GDP. Africa, due to the insufficiency of external financing to compensate for the low rate of its savings, will not be able to regain the dynamics of its growth before the onset of covid-19.

Active in the mobilization of financial resources in favor of the continent both by the reduction, even the cancellation of the debt and by the mobilization of the special drawing rights, our strategy will focus on the identification, even the invention of other innovative sources of financing and reducing the harmful effects of the pandemic on our economies with their well-known structural weaknesses.

Our great challenge is and remains, in this area, the acquisition of autonomy in the financing of our own development through an energetic fight against illicit capital flows, through the reform of our fiscal policies and through the acceleration of implementation of African financial institutions.

On the expansion of terrorism, no one is now unaware that this scourge is taking on an unequaled scale on the scale of the continent. Formerly located in two small areas, the north of the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, it now extends its tentacles to the south of the Sahel in the center, even to the northern regions of the continent.

The continent's security situation today is deeply marked by the metastasis of terrorism and the dangerous resurgence of unconstitutional changes. Moreover, the two phenomena establish causal links known to all. One often finds its pretexts in the significance and expansion of the other, and the necessary struggle against the latter produces the illusion that the second is the response to proven failures in the struggle against the first.

The security situation of the Continent now calls for a real new approach which should question our peace and security architecture and its correlation with the new destabilizing factors in Africa. In the absence of this burst of intelligence and decision, I have serious questions about the future of our flagship project to silence the guns on a fixed date. The dangerous expansion of evil requires stronger international mobilization and more fruitful, more concrete, more active inter-African solidarity; It is particularly disconcerting to see, here and there, the vague desire for non-African commitments to support the African countries under attack, while the tenuous ray of African solidarity only allows us to see the immensity of the African paralysis vis-à-vis neighboring houses set ablaze.

The context marked by these two scourges would have made it possible to glimpse glimmers of hope if the world were not one where national selfishness, withdrawal into oneself and the collapse of the values ​​of solidarity and generosity, fruits of our common humanity visibly fade. The profound and irrefutable truth, however, is that no section of international society can be reassured about its fate when all the other sections are not. The crisis of multilateralism is there, real and significant.

Obviously, there are many attempts to approach Africa and this no doubt indicates an increased interest in the continent, but this interest has not yet frankly translated into a substantial developmentalist consideration in favor of Africa. The idea, a mirrored time of a Marshal plan in favor of the continent, gradually flew away. I am not far from thinking intensely that such a plan, however necessary, will never come from the outside. Here, more than ever, the African leadership is strongly challenged for a surge in the mobilization of endogenous resources revealed by the continent's immense potential. There is no salvation except in this African direction for Africa.

Excellencies,

Ladies and gentlemen,

The context fairly depicted in broad strokes is nevertheless the framework in which we have, with the support of most of you, been able to deploy ourselves by making, to the best of our ability, use of the assets at our disposal. The redeployment in such a context allowed us to put our finger on areas of pain that I considered useful to expose you without detours, without make-up. In doing so, I trust your wisdom, your sagacity and your immense experiences to listen to me on this, and to take the appropriate decisions, those that all the actors of the continent hope that you would take.

At the forefront of the constraints experienced are the legal and political limits. We have, of course, launched the institutional reform of our organization. It has enabled significant progress towards improving our internal management and efficiency. This is the place to pay a deserved tribute to President Paul Kagame, who was its champion and architect, as well as to the men and women, including the head of the Reform Unit, who supported him in this company.

Despite this undeniable progress, the reform remained silent on the situation of notorious legal fragility of the Commission and its President. Their powers and competences remained identical to those before the reform. How do such powers and competences reduce the leadership role of the Commission?

Two major questions constrain the Commission to a rather modest role in the African decision-making process. The first is the reductive reading of the concept of subsidiarity. We certainly need to better clarify the relationship of subsidiarity and complementarity between the regional economic communities and the continental organization. Beyond, however, to declare, here or there, that the decision of an organ of the AU, in this case the Peace and Security Council on Mali, should be suspensive of the decisions of a regional organization, namely ECOWAS, there really is a big gap. It is important that our Summit brings here the necessary clarifications to avoid any detrimental drift to the functioning of our political and security architecture.

The second problem to consider is the question of state sovereignty. This is a protective shield against all sorts of abuses occurring in a member country. A restrictive, even dogmatic reading of the intangible principle of the sovereignty of the Member States raises an iron wall against any intervention by the continental organization, either as a preventive measure through early warning, or as a remedy when the crisis breaks out. We should not be surprised in these conditions to see the commission treated here or there like a simple secretariat of the States.

Sovereignty is not unique to our organization. I know it. All international or regional organizations are dealing with it, but its force and the restrictive readings to which it is subject at the AU remain excessive and are detrimental to the organization's full capacity for initiative and action.

This double handicap has had something to do with the conduct of the commission in the face of the unconstitutional changes of which a disastrous wave has swept in recent times, and not only in West Africa.

It was however very clear that such situations were almost inevitable if a certain number of measures and political initiatives were not undertaken with the desirable speed. Subsidiarity and state sovereignty made any proactive action by the Commission impossible. This situation can only result in a gradual slumber of the role of leader of the organization at the political and diplomatic level.

On this Twentieth Anniversary of the African Union, a day of rebirth, remembrance, assessment, meditation and projection into the future. I call for more inventiveness and creative spirit to give back to the operational body of our union more possibility of action and influence on the political future of our States, in particular when these are in real need for care. In this effort to awaken the organization through an inventive reflection of the best modes and models, how can we not question our democratic systems and our peace and security architecture? Have these been able to promote operations ensuring the minimum of good governance, the fight against corruption, nepotism, mismanagement, exclusion? have they made it possible to realize our dream of an Africa where the guns have fallen silent? Have we been determined enough to reform our Peace and Security Council? Have we mobilized enough efforts in view of the reform of the United Nations Security Council by opening, when the time comes, a credible corridor for Africa's entry into this body in charge of peace in the world? In a word, have our models made it possible to meet the expectations of hundreds of millions of young people and African women burned by the unbearable turpitudes of the political classes with their efficiency and ethical values ​​in continual collapse? In other words, have they made it possible to build the dikes necessary for the easy populism which makes the bed of coups d'etat and rebellions? There is certainly here

In the constellation of political constraints, how not to deplore the shortcomings in the application of the dual principle of speaking with one voice and the solution of African problems by Africans? One wonders, in many cases, what purpose our decisions serve in this sphere and in many others. In how many situations have we been brought to the bitter observation, sometimes more humiliating than embarrassing, of the lack of the imperious need to speak with one voice on our own problems and on those which bring us together with our international partners?

Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, don't blame me for having perhaps abused your precious time. My understanding of my duty and of the responsibilities which you have honored me with, dictates to me the obligation to always speak to you with frankness and sincerity while at the same time entrusting myself, ultimately, to your supreme wisdom.

Of course, our agenda has a series of questions on its agenda, to which I will return in due course. The Palestinian question and the granting of observer status to the State of Israel is one of these specific questions. I would like, just at this stage, to emphasize two aspects. The first is the need, for a serene debate, far from any attempt to exploit the issue for political purposes, to become aware, clearly and clearly, of the relationship between the African Union's unchanging position on the cause of the Palestinian people and the recognition of observer status for Israel.

The second aspect is my intimate conviction that the observer status granted to Israel, in full compliance with the Sirte criteria, which govern the matter, makes it possible to give our organization more latitude and the possibility of playing its role in the promotion of our decisions on the issue, exactly like the Afro-Arab countries, which have made the recognition of Israel an instrument in the service of peace and the search for the best ways and means for the consecration of the principle of the two Palestinian and Israeli states, living in perfect harmony.

The second specific question relates to our partnerships. The proliferation of these partnerships, a sign of interest in Africa and of the dynamism of our continent and its organization, no longer allows us to engage in them without a real visit to our approaches to such partnerships.

It is imperative to focus them on concrete, transformative and integrating projects in the five priority areas of peace and security, infrastructure and energy, climate change, innovative financing for development, training of youth and women's empowerment.

These projects, currently being implemented, require the mobilization of substantial financial resources to achieve the structural transformations of our economies. This is the only way to achieve inclusive and sustainable growth capable of cushioning the impact of shocks such as financial crises, the effects of climate change and pandemics.

I hope that the summits we are planning this year with our partners will be decisive moments for the implementation of our vision of Africa's international partnership with the rest of the world. Such a redefinition of our strategic partnerships constitutes, in my view, a decisive lever for Africa's role in the design of a new world order in harmony with our hopes.

Thank you.

Chairperson of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat