Bathily, nominee for position of AU Commission chairperson, has vast experience

This photograph taken on June 23, 2015 shows Senegal's Abdoulaye Bathily, United Nations mediator for Burundi, in Bujumbura. PHOTO | AFP | MARCO LONGARI

What you need to know:

  • Senegal's Abdoulaye Bathily, nominee for position of AU Commission chairperson, is a conscious pan-Africanist and progressive intellectual.
  • He is a prolific writer.
  • His footprints in the area of peace and security in Africa are indelible

Of the current nominees for the position of African Union Commission chair, two, Amina Mohamed from Kenya and Abdoulaye Bathily from Senegal, are new. While I know comparatively little about Ms Mohamed, I have known Mr Bathily since 1997. He has vast experience as a diplomat, politician and academic and has brought this experience to bear in solving continental challenges.

He is currently the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Central Africa and Head of the United Nations Regional Office for Central Africa, a position he has served in since 2014. Before this appointment, Mr Bathily was Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General in the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in Mali, where he was in charge, among others, of political affairs and human rights issues.

Born in 1947 in eastern Senegal, he was professor in the Department of History at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, having started his career as lecturer in 1975 and proceeded to earn an MA and PhD from the University of Birmingham in the UK. He served as member of the National Assembly having been elected in 1998 and rose to various ministerial positions, including as Senior Minister to the Presidency (2012-2013), Minister for Energy and Hydraulics (2000-2001) and Minister for the Environment and the Protection of Nature (1993-1998). He also served as Deputy Speaker from 2001 to 2006 as well as Member of Parliament of Ecowas. He was also member of the Contact Group of the AU on Madagascar during the political crisis in that country. Mr Bathily has a quiet, unassuming and, indeed, self-effacing personality. His network easily crosses the dated colonial divides of Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone Africa. Even though he enjoys a high profile, Mr Bathily knows the travails of movement on the continent. After all, though holding a diplomatic passport, he was once denied transit entry into Kenya on no ground at all and forced to stay at the airport for hours on end.

A PAN-AFRICANIST

It is not by accident that Mr Bathily is a conscious pan-Africanist and progressive intellectual. He built these attributes right from his student days in the 1960s when he was an active contributor to the student movement in Senegal. He chaired the National Union of Senegalese Students and National Movement of Senegalese Youth in the late 1960s. For his engagement in student politics, he earned an expulsion from the university, expulsion that was by direct decree by President Sedar Senghor. He was consequently forcefully enlisted as a private soldier in the Senegalese army and served at the border zone with Guinea Bissau for 18 months.

Mr Bathily is a prolific writer and has over 100 articles, and papers on African history and politics. Among others, he has written on the student rebellion and the military and militarism in Africa. Mr Bathily is a former chair of the African Association of Political Science and a member of the executive committee of the International Peace Research Association. In 1992, he was a member of a team of African academics commissioned by International Development Research Centre to assess the situation of the universities in South Africa as the country moved towards the end of apartheid.

Mr Bathily’s footprints in the area of peace and security in Africa are indelible, having, among other things, served as Special Envoy of the African Union chairperson in DRC, Sudan, Central African Republic, Chad, and Cameroon on the Mbororo pastoralists. He headed a team at the invitation of the Liberian civil society to facilitate the dialogue between political parties and candidates for the general election. In 1999, he was a member of the expert team of the International IDEA in the evaluation of the democratic transition in Nigeria. In 2003, he headed the AU observer’s mission to the General Election in Nigeria and the following year was on the AU observers’ mission to the presidential elections in Algeria.

Godwin R. Murunga is senior research fellow, Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi.