People who run African affairs: staffing and recruitment in the African Union Commission

Abstract

This study contributes to the field of International Public Administration (IPA) and the emerging area of Informal International Relations (IIR) by examining the politics of staffing and recruitment of the African Union Commission (AUC). Although the AUC has become a major political player in international affairs, there is a dearth of knowledge about the civil servants who work for the AUC and who run this paramount pan-African executive body. To address the void, this paper draws on a survey of 137 AUC staff, archival studies and interviews to explore recruitment of AUC staff. Combining organisational theory and informality as analytical lenses, the study demonstrates that, first, many informal international practices (IIPs) are embedded in AUC recruitment processes. Second, the AUC is composed largely of short-term, contracted staff. Finally, it shows that the AUC is dependent on lower-ranked personnel or that it is bottom-heavy. Many of these lower-ranked officials are intimately involved in the making of AUC policies and decisions, putting into question the assumption in existing scholarship that decision-makers of IOs are primarily reliant on top-ranked A-level officials (senior management).

The organisational dimension of executive authority in the Global South: Insights from the AU and ECOWAS commissions

“…Although 60% of ECOWAS officials report being permanently employed, only 35% of AU staff have permanent positions. As shown elsewhere, the AU Commission (AUC) is rather ‘bottom‐heavy’ 2 (Tieku et al, 2020) in which most staff are placed at lower levels of the pay scale. Both IPAs share a similar educational profile among the staff in which a majority report having an educational background in economics or business, followed by social sciences.…”

“…2 Most AU respondents are lower level employees because the AU is a ´bottom-heavy´ organisation. As Tieku et al (2020) have noted, more than 74% of AU staff are in the bottom half of the organisation. 3 Cronbach's alpha for the four items in Factor 1 is 0.79 and 0.83 for the three items in Factor 2.…”

“…Both the AU and ECOWAS commissions are relatively small and differ significantly in employment structure: Whereas the appointed staff of the AUC number approximately 1,700 at the headquarters in Addis Ababa and at the representative missions around the world (African Union, 2019, p. 232), the ECOWAS Commission consists of approximately 730 staff members, that is, two‐thirds of the total number of staff in ECOWAS organisations overall. ECOWAS relies on permanent contracts whereas the AUC is characterised by ‘short‐termism’ (see Tieku et al, 2020) for employment contracts.…”

Punching above Weight: How the African Union Commission Exercises Agency in Politics

“…While the above articles have not guaranteed a 100 per cent autonomy to the AUC, they have given AU staff the platform to do their work without major interferences from African public officials. Data from the first-ever survey of AUC staff demonstrate that there is little interference of the work of the AUC staff by African embassy officials (Tieku et al, forthcoming). Even though there are theoretical speculations and assumptions based on experiences of IOs in the Global North and anecdotal suggestions of the occasional personal and backroom interventions by embassy officials, overall there is little concrete evidence to show that AU bureaucrats take instructions from the African missions or even donors who provide most of the programme budget.…”

“…The pay system of the AUC, however, allows the AUC to attract considerably stronger candidates than most civil service in Africa. 5 As Tieku et al’s (forthcoming) data showed, the average AUC staff is middle-aged and holds at least a postgraduate degree. The survey data indicated that almost all the 1,720 AUC professional staff have at least a master’s degree; many of them hold PhDs in their fields.…”