---
title: "African politics and the widening distance between power and consequence"
description: "The African Union’s decision not to intervene in Burundi’s 2016 crisis reveals a deeper pattern in continental politics: authority is often furthest from consequence, while responsibility falls on those with the least power. From Burundi to contemporary debates on migration and xenophobia, leadership emerges less as a question of rhetoric than of who is expected to carry the costs of political failure."
type: "OpinionNewsArticle"
publisher: "Daily Maverick"
site: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za"
section: "Maverick Citizen"
author: "Sipho Mthathi"
author_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/author/sipho-mthathi/"
canonical_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2026-08-03-african-politics-and-the-widening-distance-between-power-and-consequence/"
published: "2026-08-03T13:17:28"
lang: "en-ZA"
word_count: 2439
---

# African politics and the widening distance between power and consequence

> The African Union’s decision not to intervene in Burundi’s 2016 crisis reveals a deeper pattern in continental politics: authority is often furthest from consequence, while responsibility falls on those with the least power. From Burundi to contemporary debates on migration and xenophobia, leadership emerges less as a question of rhetoric than of who is expected to carry the costs of political failure.

By Sipho Mthathi · Published 3 August 2026, 15:17 SAST

## Content

![Image](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/ToEp388PygKxbVnnboBpUQ3buys=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/dailymaverick/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/label-Opinion.jpg)

A man stands up and begins to shout. It is January 2016, inside the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa. I cannot make out what he is saying. The room turns towards him. Security moves quickly, lifting him under his arms and carrying him out, as though the interruption, rather than whatever has provoked it, requires a response.

Marie-Louise and I reach for each other’s hands. For a few seconds, we consider standing too. Then the calculation arrives. What would it cost the organisations whose accreditation has brought us into the room? How quickly would two women be dismissed as reckless and unserious? Would we become the spectacle, lose our access and achieve nothing except the satisfaction of having acted?

We stay seated. So does everyone else. The session resumes.

Robert Mugabe enters the summit as the sitting chairperson of the African Union, thanked in the opening speech for the “excellent cooperation and guidance” offered during his term. There is an irony in a man who has spent nearly four decades refusing to leave power presiding over a summit that will end with the assembly declining to deploy a protection mission to Burundi. Pierre Nkurunziza’s disputed third term has pushed Burundi into protest, repression and an escalating crisis.

But the irony is not the most important thing in the room. The people who will live with the decision are.

### Exhaustion

In the days before the assembly session, a group of us sit in a conference room listening to Burundian women describe what is happening in their country. I notice a flatness in their voices — the exhaustion that comes from explaining an emergency so many times that the explaining itself has become another form of labour.

“There is a war in Burundi,” one says. “We don’t care if you call it genocide or not. People are being killed.”

Another says: “We are on our own.”

Then comes the sentence that has stayed with me longest.

“We cannot claim to be sovereign when I am not accountable to my people. We need to revisit this notion of sovereignty in Africa.”

Their urgency carried a terrible history. Burundi’s 1993-2005 civil war had killed at least 300,000 people, and by January 2016 UN officials were warning that an ethnic dimension was beginning to re-emerge.

They are not speaking into an absence of policy. The AU’s Peace and Security Council has authorised the African Prevention and Protection Mission in Burundi, envisaging up to 5,000 military and police personnel alongside human rights observers and military experts. Article 4(h) of the AU’s Constitutive Act gives the union, pursuant to a decision of the assembly, the right to intervene in a member state in grave circumstances. It marks a break from the doctrine that sovereignty can shield a government from scrutiny, whatever it does to people inside its borders.

In the weeks before the summit, the commission had described the mission as part of the AU’s commitment to “African solutions to African problems”. The old phrase has been given a practical meaning: African institutions accepting responsibility for African lives.

That morning, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, then chairperson of the AU Commission, opened the assembly by invoking Haile Selassie’s warning about inaction, indifference and “the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most”. After listening to the women from Burundi, I did not hear it as ceremony. I heard her placing the meaning of the coming decision directly in front of the people who would make it.

They declined to deploy the mission. They choose further consultation and a high-level delegation instead.

Burundi had already said it would not consent.

It got statements of concern, not civilian protection.

### A warning

There had been testimony, evidence, an institutional recommendation and a warning from the commission chairperson. A man had stood and shouted. The rest of us had remained seated.

The problem was not that the room had not heard. It had heard enough.

Looking back, there is a version of this story in which Dlamini-Zuma becomes its lone heroine, a woman speaking truth to men who would not listen. That version would be both too easy and untrue.

She was not a tragic figure trapped at a podium, but an experienced political actor who understood what the office gave her and what it did not. The chairperson of the commission could advocate, persuade, warn and place the moral meaning of the decision on the public record. She could not bind the Assembly of Heads of State and Government or overturn its refusal.

Her speech did something more precise than heroism. It made it impossible for the decision-makers to later present their choice as a failure of information. They knew what inaction meant. They knew that everyone else in the room knew it too.

That mattered. It did not change what happened next.

I was not only a witness to other people’s calculations. My organisation had chosen what we called the inside game. We believed there was value in gaining access, building relationships and being present in rooms from which civil society was often excluded. That was not a foolish strategy. Shouting from outside is not the only form of political work.

But access disciplines. Once entry into the room becomes part of the strategy, the possible loss of it begins to shape what you are prepared to do inside. The invitation needs no explicit conditions. You begin enforcing them on yourself.

### Calculation

That was the calculation I made when the man stood. I have told myself several stories about why staying seated was defensible. Some of them are true. Yet a defensible decision is not the same as a costless one.

Even so, it would be false to make everyone in that room morally equivalent. Marie-Louise and I both stayed seated, but our silences did not cost the same. I would fly home to South Africa, to a life the Burundi crisis did not organise. She would return to it. The Burundian women carried risks I could not fully see. Dlamini-Zuma spent the authority available to her knowing she could not decide the outcome.

The people with the greatest formal power to change that outcome faced the least personal cost for refusing.

That is the pattern I did not understand clearly enough at the time – and it is still the pattern now.

The crisis is not simply that leadership is absent. It is that authority and responsibility have been pulled apart. Those with the authority to shape events are often furthest from their consequences. Those who live closest to the consequences are left carrying responsibilities they have neither the power nor the resources to fulfil.

The authority remains in the chamber. The consequences arrive at people’s doors.

A decade later, South Africa is now the country being called to account. Ghana asked the African Union to treat xenophobic attacks against African nationals in SA as a matter of urgent continental interest, proposing stronger monitoring, a fact-finding mission and a continental conversation about protection. SA replied that any such debate should also confront the forces driving migration, including governance failures, economic disparity and the erosion of the rule of law.

By late July, the current AU Commission Chairperson, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, was still saying the matter should be placed before the next summit.

Both positions contain a truth. Ghana is right that SA’s duty to protect people inside its borders cannot be diluted by an argument about where they came from. SA is right that migration is produced by conditions extending far beyond the country in which a displaced person eventually arrives.

> But each truth can also become a shield. A destination country can invoke failures elsewhere to evade its immediate duty. A country of origin can demand protection for its nationals abroad while refusing to examine how its own choices make some citizens unsafe at home. Global powers whose emissions, trade rules, financial decisions or support for conflict shape the conditions of movement can disappear from the argument altogether.

Responsibility then moves sideways between states and down towards communities. The people whose lives are being argued over remain outside the room.

Migration and displacement make visible how rarely a country’s problems remain inside its own borders. Someone may leave because drought has emptied a livelihood, because debt and unequal trade have hollowed out an economy, because a war is armed across borders, or because a government is sustained or ignored by others.

By the time someone reaches a clinic, a pavement, or a rented back room in another country, none of that history is visible any more. Only the body is. And we call the body the problem.

Ghana’s parliamentary push to intensify the criminalisation of LGBTQ+ people is a stark reminder that a country need not undergo total collapse to make some of its citizens unsafe at home. A state can legislate people out of belonging while still being celebrated as stable. Whether such a bill becomes law or remains caught in procedure, the fear it generates can begin driving people from home long before the ink is dry. Responsibility does not stop neatly at a border simply because political authority does.

There was a time, especially at the height of the African Renaissance, when “African solutions to African problems” carried enormous confidence. It was the anti-colonial answer to the idea that Africa could not govern itself. At its best, it was a claim to agency.

Burundi exposed the phrase’s unresolved question: Who is the African solution for?

If it is organised first around the sovereignty of states, it can become African governments closing ranks while African people carry the consequences. Sovereignty then protects the state more reliably than it protects the person. Continental politics becomes a macho exchange between men defending territory, office and pride, with their people as the currency of the argument.

If the phrase is to have a future, it must mean shared responsibility for African lives. It must mean leadership willing to follow the causes of displacement across borders, to ask what each state has done to make life survivable at home, and to build protection for people when home has failed them. It must make the person, not the prestige of the state, the point of continental action.

### Scapegoating

Across offices and after leaving them, Dlamini-Zuma has continued to reject the scapegoating of migrants for unemployment and social breakdown. That consistency matters. But one person’s moral continuity is not the same as a continent that holds its states to account.

I have been thinking about this while speaking to organisers working against xenophobic mobilisation in South African communities. One comrade described years of patient work to hold people together across difference, including in places once celebrated as examples of social cohesion after earlier violence.

The work no longer feels like marching towards something, he told me. It feels like standing inside a house whose walls were never built to hold, watching water enter through the cracks and holding the door shut because the alternative is worse.

*Sinqand’amanz’ engen’ endlini.*

*We are stopping the water from flooding into the house.*

A few days before our conversation, an organiser in that network was shot four times at night. People close to him believe his opposition to the anti-migrant mobilisation made him a target. I leave him unnamed because it has become genuinely dangerous to disagree publicly with what is rising around us.

His words returned me to my own early years of door-to-door organising, sitting on gomma gomma couches with parents living with problems too large for one household. What we offered was small, but behind us was a growing movement with the will and networks to act. The door was where organising began.

Long before 1994, people marched. After 1994, they marched again: for land, against privatisation, for services, work and dignity. Those movements were never uncomplicated, and unity was never simply given. But there were relationships, organisations and a shared political language through which a problem in one household could become a matter for many.

That movement has not disappeared. It is present in the organisers moving between communities, challenging those who seek to divide them, rebuilding trust after every rupture and holding alliances together under enormous pressure. What has changed is the terrain, and the amount of work required to maintain unity within it.

Organising now is not only about moving towards something. It is also about defending the conditions that make it possible for people to move together at all.

*Sinqand’amanz’ engen’ endlini*is not the opposite of movement. It names a movement carrying two tasks at once: trying to move towards something better while also stopping fear, division and violence from tearing the house apart.

These organisers are leaders. So was Dlamini-Zuma when she used the limited authority of her office to make a refusal visible. So were the Burundian women who kept explaining the emergency after explanation itself had become exhausting.

But to praise them as the continent’s real leaders and stop there would be another way of abandoning them. Community courage cannot become a reason for those with chairs to keep letting others hold the door. People should not have to prove their leadership by spending their safety, their homes and their bodies to hold together societies whose crises were generated far beyond their control.

### The final decision

Dlamini-Zuma occupied a chair from which she could speak, but the final decision was not in her hands. The organisers have their hands against the door, but no chair in the rooms where many of the forces flooding their communities are shaped. The people with the least authority carry the most responsibility. The people with the most authority retain the greatest distance from consequence.

Closing that distance would require putting resources, protection and decision-making power in the hands of the people carrying the danger. Governments, continental institutions and global actors would also have to answer for the conditions their choices help create.

It would not ask communities to solve migration. It would ask states to stop treating some of their own people as expendable, and stop turning displaced people into explanations for failures they did not cause.

I still do not know what the man in AU House shouted that January. I know the room had heard enough – from the Burundian women, from its own Peace and Security Council, from the commission chairperson – to understand what was at stake. It resumed anyway.

Across the continent, sessions keep resuming while ordinary people hold the door.

The measure of leadership is not how long they can keep holding.

It is whether they can finally let go. **DM**