African Rulers Like to Copy – Do They Know How to Paste?

In 1963, 32 African countries established the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia). Twenty eight years later, in 1991, the OAU created the African Economic Community (AEC). Conceptually, the idea of an economic community was good. However, African decision-makers simply copied the name of an institution that already existed: the European Economic Community which was created in 1957. What they did was to drop the word “European” and replace it with the word “African”....