Africa’s top bureaucrat wants to be South Africa’s next president

IN MANY ways the African Union (AU) is outdoing its European counterpart. It has never presided over a continental currency crisis. No member state is threatening to quit. And you could walk from Cairo to Cape Town without meeting anyone who complains about the overweening bossiness of the African superstate. But this is largely because the AU, unlike the EU, is irrelevant to most people’s lives. That is a pity.Before 2002, when it was called the Organisation of African Unity, it was dismissed as a talking-shop for dictators. For the next decade, it was led by diplomats from small countries, picked by member states precisely because they had so little clout. But then, in 2012, a heavyweight stepped in to run the AU commission. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle and a woman who had held three important cabinet posts in South Africa, was expected to inject more vigour and ambition into the AU. As she prepares to hand over to an as-yet unnamed successor this month, it is worth assessing her record (see ).