Draft pushing for Women Candidates could lock Raila out of top AUC job..

Law drafters at the African Union are making another bid that could lock out Kenya’s opposition leader Raila Odinga by proposing to restrict the next race for the Commission chairperson’s seat to female contenders…

Mr Odinga is the Kenya government-endorsed candidate to replace Chadian diplomat Moussa Faki Mahamat. But a proposal circulated to member states on Tuesday says only female contenders should be eligible in the next contest, even though the seat will be rotating to the Eastern Africa region.

The proposal is contained in the revised draft report — Preparations for the Election of Senior Leadership of the African Union Commission in February 2025, The report is the work of the AU’s Legal Counsel and Deputy Commission Chairperson’s Office, in conjunction with the Committee of Permanent Representatives, which must be submitted to the African Union Executive Council for approval before it is adopted by the Assembly.

It argues that the positions of chairperson and deputy chairpersons must be restricted to the principle of gender parity, meaning that holders of the two posts cannot be from the same gender at any time, a practice introduced in 2021. But it also argues, for the first time, that an incumbent of one gender should be replaced by an opposite gender at subsequent elections.

“Consequently, in accordance with the aforementioned guiding principle, the CP for the upcoming 2025 election must be female.Therefore, only female candidates will be considered for the position of CP, while only male candidates are eligible for the position of DCP,” the report proposes.

In order to uphold the principle of rotational gender parity, it has been concluded that the next Chairperson of the Commission should be a female, while the next Deputy Chairperson should be male.” There has been only one-woman chairperson in the history of the African Union, South Africa’s Nkosazana-Dlamini Zuma, who served one term between 2012 and 2017. Until 2021, there was no restriction on who becomes deputy, even though the rotation practice was often that the deputy did not come from the same region as the chair.

Dr Zuma was deputised by Kenya’s Erastus Mwencha while Faki’s deputy in his first term (2017-2021) was Ghana’s Thomas Kwesi. He is currently deputised by Rwanda’s Monique Nsanzabaganwa, The election for the next African Union Commission is due next February and this report is supposed to design rules to be followed, based on the 2018 AU institutional reform structures as proposed by Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his team of experts.