Liberal commentators miss the point entirely when they treat the Pan-African Parliament (PAP) as a weak institution waiting for reform. They speak of protocols, procedures, committees, direct elections and governance standards as though Africa suffers from poor administration.
Africa suffers from stolen power.
The PAP held its Extraordinary Session of the Seventh Legislature in Midrand from 28 to 30 April 2026 and elected Algeria’s Fateh Boutbig as president of its new Bureau. The African Union (AU) presented the moment as institutional renewal, regional rotation and continental maturity. The newly elected Bureau now carries the language of reform, representation and revitalisation. The words sound familiar because African people have heard them for decades. Every summit promises renewal. Every declaration invokes unity. Every protocol gestures towards liberation while the material life of the continent remains trapped inside the colonial architecture that produced Africa as an extraction zone.
The Malabo Protocol sits at the centre of this discussion. It promises to move PAP from advisory weakness to legislative authority. PAP’s own reporting places ratifications at 15, while 28 ratifications are required before the protocol enters into force. That delay reveals a political truth. African heads of state invoke Pan-African unity while guarding presidential power from continental accountability. They praise African people while keeping African people outside the structures that claim to speak for them.
The Sahel forces this contradiction into the open.
Ibrahim Traoré’s Burkina Faso lays bare the coloniality problem inside the AU and PAP far more powerfully than the endless promise of reform papers does. Burkina Faso remains an AU member under suspension from participation in AU activities after the 2022 coup, pending what the AU calls the restoration of constitutional order. It has also left Ecowas alongside Mali and Niger, with the three states consolidating the Alliance of Sahel States as a direct rejection of the regional order that sought to discipline them.
This is the political test that PAP cannot avoid. Does Pan-Africanism mean obedience to inherited colonial state forms, creditor discipline and regional bureaucracies that protect Western-aligned regimes? Or does it mean African sovereignty over land, minerals, borders, currencies, armies, food systems, law and knowledge?
Traoré speaks from a wound that liberal commentators prefer to manage through the vocabulary of coups, democratic backsliding and constitutional restoration. Their language protects the old order. It leaves intact the long democratic fraud in which African people vote while France, the United States, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, mining houses, military partners, embassies and policy consultants decide the limits of policy.
A ballot alone will not decolonise a state. A parliament is unable to liberate a people when creditors write fiscal discipline into national budgets and foreign military structures define security. A continental institution cannot claim African unity while African governments trade sovereignty through mining contracts, debt instruments, military agreements and donor-funded governance programmes.
The problem worsens when commentators lacking critical thinking skills, grounding in African politics and any serious education in decolonial theory reach for a Frantz Fanon quotation as a disguise for weak analysis. One line from The Wretched of the Earth cannot substitute for political literacy. It cannot conceal the absence of historical method, class analysis, anti-imperial training or any real understanding of the postcolonial African state. Quoting Fanon while defending the inherited colonial grammar of governance turns revolutionary thought into gobbledygook.
Traoré’s Burkina Faso unsettles that shallow rhetorical politics. It exposes the emptiness of a continental order that can suspend a state for unconstitutional change while remaining largely timid on the deeper unconstitutional condition imposed on Africa by empire. What constitutional order exists when foreign creditors discipline national budgets, foreign armies define security, foreign companies control minerals and foreign policy consultants script the vocabulary of reform?
Burkina Faso’s internal political questions must be read from the ground of African sovereignty rather than from the vocabulary of Western approval. The Sahel break did not emerge from abstraction. It emerged from failed security arrangements, French influence, resource extraction, regional intimidation, debt discipline and the exhausted legitimacy of governments that performed constitutional order while African people remained exposed to hunger, violence and foreign command. The question, then, is not whether Burkina Faso satisfies the liberal checklist written for African states by those who benefit from African obedience. The question is whether a state under siege by empire has the right to reorder its political life in defence of land, people, resources and sovereignty.
Yet those failures give liberal commentators no licence to defend a civilian order that has already failed millions. They speak as though constitutional form has protected African people from hunger, extraction, debt, displacement and foreign command. They treat Western-recognised democracy as the highest political achievement while African resources continue to leave the continent and African youth inherit austerity, unemployment and humiliation.
Africa’s external public debt surpassed $1 trillion in 2023, and debt-servicing costs have almost tripled since 2010. This is where the PAP question lives. It lives in budgets disciplined by creditors. It lives in mineral contracts signed away by national elites. It lives in villages displaced by extraction. It lives in borders inherited from Berlin. It lives in military partnerships that call themselves security while preserving foreign access to African territory.
PAP either confronts this machinery or becomes part of the farce.
The farce lies in the performance of Pan-Africanism without power. It lies in institutions that speak of unity while African economies remain exposed to rating agencies, foreign currencies, creditor punishments and donor instructions. It lies in regional bodies that discipline disobedient states while tolerating client regimes that sell their people into permanent dependency. It lies in summit language that praises sovereignty while foreign corporations price African minerals, ship African wealth and litigate against African states in legal systems built to protect capital.
PAP cannot answer this crisis through better committee work alone. It needs legislative authority, direct election and proper funding, but these measures will change little if the institution merely imports the managerial grammar of global governance. Africa needs a parliament capable of producing African standards from African history, African injury, African resistance and African material need.
A decolonial PAP would ask hard questions.
Who owns Africa’s minerals?
Who writes the contracts?
Who trains the economists?
Who funds the civil society language of reform?
Who controls ports, rail corridors, data systems, food chains and security arrangements?
Who decides which African wars matter and which serve imperial strategy?
Who benefits when the AU condemns unconstitutional change while ignoring constitutional obedience to foreign power?
A decolonial PAP would summon presidents, ministers, mining executives, regional bodies and AU officials to account. It would investigate illicit financial flows. It would review foreign military agreements. It would examine debt illegitimacy. It would hold public hearings in mining-affected communities, borderlands, informal settlements, rural areas and campuses. It would hear from workers, peasants, students, traders, displaced families and the youth who have lost faith in the choreography of official politics.
Traoré lays bare the coloniality problem because Burkina Faso drags the hidden argument into public view: Africa cannot claim sovereignty while its economies, armies, currencies, minerals and political vocabularies remain disciplined by empire. The AU can suspend Burkina Faso from participation. Ecowas can mark the departure of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. Liberal commentators can describe the Sahel as a democratic problem. None of this cancels the historical rage that produced mass support for anti-imperial defiance across the region.
That rage comes from memory. It comes from the memory of French military presence, resource control, CFA discipline, failed security partnerships, externally managed development and postcolonial elites who speak independence while administering dependency. It also comes from the young African recognition that the language of democracy often arrives with sanctions, military threats, donor pressure and media narratives that discipline any state that attempts to exit Western command.
PAP must decide whether it wants to serve that generation or manage it.
The AU order becomes part of the farce when it treats anti-imperial defiance as a procedural problem while leaving the deeper architecture of dependency untouched. PAP becomes part of the farce when it speaks in the name of African people while lacking the courage, mandate or appetite to confront the forces that structure African poverty. Liberal commentators become part of the farce when they mistake institutional tidiness for liberation.
The continent needs a stronger PAP. It needs the Malabo Protocol ratified. It needs a parliament elected by African people rather than routed through national political machines. It needs committees that function as centres of investigation, law-making and continental accountability. It needs adequate resourcing. It needs public visibility. It needs a relationship with communities rather than only with states.
Yet all of that must serve a larger project. PAP must become an organ of African sovereignty or accept its place as a ceremonial appendage to a captured continental order. Its work must reach debt, extraction, land, food, war, borders, law, language and knowledge. Its authority must flow from African people rather than from the goodwill of presidents who benefit from its weakness.
The new Bureau inherits more than an administrative mandate. It inherits the unfinished struggle over the meaning of African unity. Fateh Boutbig and his colleagues can manage procedure, or they can force a continental confrontation with power. They can treat the Malabo Protocol as paperwork, or they can turn ratification into a mass political campaign that exposes every government that praises Pan-Africanism while blocking the institutional conditions for it.
Africa has no shortage of declarations. Africa has no shortage of learned panels, solemn speeches and diplomatic photographs. Africa has a shortage of institutions willing to confront the material organisation of dependency. PAP will remain weak for as long as it depends on the permission of those who fear its strength.
Traoré’s Burkina Faso exposes this contradiction because it speaks the language of sovereignty in a continental order trained to fear sovereignty when it becomes material. The task now requires political discipline. Defend African sovereignty against empire. Defend African people against any state that invokes liberation while closing public life. Reject the liberal lie that Western-approved procedure equals freedom. Reject the military temptation that substitutes command for popular power.
PAP can still become a site of continental struggle. It can still carry the demand for African law, African accountability, African economic control and African political imagination. It can still help return the continental project to the people in whose name it speaks.
Until then, it remains a chamber of deferred sovereignty. Liberal commentators will continue to call for reform while missing the point entirely. The continent does not need better ceremony. It needs power returned to African people, African land, African economies and African futures.
Gillian Schutte is the editor-in-chief of The Counterhegemon. She is also a filmmaker and political analyst specialising in African politics, geopolitics, multipolarity, media power, Western imperialism and the unfinished question of African sovereignty in post-apartheid South Africa.
The farce lies in the performance of Pan-Africanism without power. It lies in institutions that speak of unity while African economies remain exposed to rating agencies, foreign currencies, creditor punishments and donor instructions. It lies in regional bodies that discipline disobedient states while tolerating client regimes that sell their people into permanent dependency