ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA (AFP) - African leaders are expected to focus on the continent's Covid-19 response at a virtual summit this weekend, as well as pressing security crises that have gone overlooked during the pandemic.
The two-day African Union summit comes almost exactly one year after Egypt recorded the first case of Covid-19 in Africa, prompting widespread fears that member states' weak health systems would quickly be overwhelmed.
But despite early doomsday predictions, the continent has so far been hit less hard than other regions, recording 3.5 per cent of global virus cases and 4 per cent of global deaths, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC).
Today, though, many African countries are battling damaging second waves while straining to procure sufficient vaccine doses.
"The developed North, which has substantial financial resources, has purchased the largest stocks, while we in Africa are still struggling to get our fair share," South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor said on Wednesday (Feb 3) in remarks opening a pre-summit meeting of African Union foreign ministers.
Member states will also hold internal elections to lead a restructured executive body - the results of which will shape how the African Union responds to the pandemic and a host of economic and security challenges.
Security crises, meanwhile, include a three-month-old conflict in the African Union's host country Ethiopia and longer-running quagmires in the Sahel and elsewhere.
"We hope that the summit will present an opportunity for African leaders to refocus their attention on a number of conflicts and crises that have had attention diverted away from them, due to the logical focus on Covid in the last year," said African Union analyst Imogen Hooper for the International Crisis Group.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa will deliver a pandemic response update during the closed portion of the summit on Saturday, according to a draft programme seen by Agence France-Presse.
As outgoing African Union chairman, Mr Ramaphosa has spent the past year overseeing efforts to scale up testing and source vaccines, all while grappling with 1.5 million detected infections in his own country - roughly 40 per cent of the continent's total.
This week, South Africa received one million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, and Mr Ramaphosa's government plans to inoculate 67 per cent of its population by year's end.
Continent-wide targets are less ambitious, with the World Health Organisation describing an end-of-year goal of around 30 per cent as more realistic.
African leaders are speaking out against hoarding by rich countries at the expense of poorer ones.
"There is a vaccine nationalism on the rise, with other rich countries jumping the queue, some even pre-ordering more than they require," said Mr Moussa Faki Mahamat, chairman of the African Union's executive body, the African Union Commission, in a recent interview that the Union posted online.
Mr Faki, a former prime minister of Chad, is running unopposed for a second four-year term as commission chief. He still needs to get two-thirds of the vote, overcoming accusations - which he denies - of "a culture of sexual harassment, bribery, corruption and bullying within the commission", the International Crisis Group wrote in a briefing this week.
In a separate race, Nigerian Bankole Adeoye is favoured to head the African Union's newly merged political affairs and peace and security departments, diplomats say, though African Union rules dividing top positions among Africa's sub-regions could lead to a surprise result.
Whoever wins could play a critical role, along with Mr Faki, in addressing crises the African Union is accused of overlooking.
In the online interview, Mr Faki touted his focus on conflict prevention, saying he was "pleased to note there are no conflicts between states".
But there are multiple internal crises that the African Union has done little to resolve.
Its Peace and Security Council has failed to hold meetings on the conflict between government forces and anglophone separatists in Cameroon, for example, as well as rising Islamist militancy in Mozambique.
The conflict in Ethiopia, pitting Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government against the former ruling party of the northern Tigray region, has proved especially sensitive.
Mr Faki called for a cessation of hostilities a week after the fighting started in early November.
But Mr Abiy has rejected appeals from high-level African Union envoys for talks with Tigrayan leaders, sticking to his line that the conflict is a limited "law and order" operation.
It is an example of how the African Union's sway can be limited regardless of who is in charge.
Said Ms Hooper of the International Crisis Group: "Whenever a member state has insisted that a conflict is internal, the AU (African Union) has struggled to get involved."
