In 2025, Africa faces a range of challenges, opportunities, and uncertainties. Amid the campaigning for upcoming elections for African Union Commission Chairperson set for February 2025, it seems some candidates are more focused on the possible symbolic victory rather than the opportunity to build African continental unity and challenge Western global dominance.
Candidates are vying to succeed the outgoing chairperson and former Prime Minister of Chad, Moussa Faki Mahamat. He is stepping down in February after two terms. Candidates for the upcoming race “are from Djibouti, Kenya, Madagascar, and Mauritius.
The stakes are high as Africa faces critical issues that require visionary leadership, but the campaign dynamics are also highlighting divisions that historically continue to plague the AU in the run up to every election,” reported peoplesdispatch.org, in an article.

“African Union 2025 elections are a contest of prestige and clout, not continental vision,” written by Nicholas Mwangi. Mwangi is a historian, member of Ukombozi Library of Kenya and co-founder of Dagoretti Social Justice Center.
Established in 2002 to replace Kwame Nkrumah’s Organization of African Unity (OAU), the mission of the AU has fallen short of “strengthening integration, self-determination, and cooperation across Africa,” his article noted.
In some of his other writings, Mwangi noted that the AU is meant to encourage policies, “across economic growth,” and that the AU’s Commission and its Pan-African Parliament are meant to promote policy across economic growth, political stability, and conflict resolution.
Instead, the AU appears more beholden to its European Union and United States funding sources, Mwangi added. The organization’s “neoliberal economic policies reflects … compromise,” he noted.
“Instead of promoting self-reliant, people-centered development, it pushes for foreign investment, privatization, and market liberalization, aligning itself with global capital rather than the welfare of African people.”
Adding insult to injury, the AU elections have taken on remnants of Africa’s colonial past, with Francophone and Anglophone countries each vying for supremacy over the other.
In looking at the continued disruptions in Africa’s regional organizations, examine the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) as a case in point. Established in 1975 to improve economic and political integration in West Africa, you discover 2025 offers more of the same.
Countries with transitioning military regimes, Burkino—Faso, Mali and Niger—broke away from ECOWAS and united under the Alliance of Sahel States (AES).
ECOWAS, whose countries have the right to live and work in member states, while goods can circulate freely, responded by giving AES six months to reconsider. In the meantime, negotiations led by Senegal’s President Bassirou Diomaye Faye and Togo’s Faure Gnassingbe will continue.
In a statement, AES chairman, Mali’s military ruler Assimi Goïta, said the right of ECOWAS citizens to “enter, circulate, reside, establish and leave the territory” of the new bloc would be maintained, reported the BBC.
Faye is Africa’s youngest head of state on the African continent. At age 44, he went from prison to president-elect of the West African nation. For many, he carries the hopes and aspirations of a continent with the fastest-growing youth population in the world. In Faye, they see a new beginning and a break with Africa’s many aging presidents and military leaders.
Many of the old-guard heads of African states come from global financial backgrounds, and will never go against the grain of “the interest of western global finance,” noted Senegalese economist Dr. Ndongo Sylla.
While Faye is negotiating to keep AES members inside of ECOWAS, he joins them in ousting French troops from West Africa. This follows the ousting of French forces in recent years by the governments in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso.
“Where local sentiments turned sour following years of French forces fighting alongside local ones in the face of stubborn … extremist insurgencies,” reported defensenews.com.
While Paris was devising a new military strategy which would sharply reduce its permanent troop presence in Africa, two of its closest allies, Senegal and Chad, struck a double blow.
“The government of Chad, considered France’s most stable and loyal partner in Africa, announced on its Independence Day announcement it was ending defense cooperation to redefine its sovereignty,” reported chronicleonline.com.
In an interview published by the French publication Le Monde, Faye said it was “obvious” that soon French soldiers wouldn’t be on Senegalese soil. “Just because the French have been here since the slavery period doesn’t mean it’s impossible to do otherwise,” he told the publication.
An article in Medium, written by Adebayo Adeniran, explained that without Africa, France would be a third-world country without its colonial and neocolonial captive nation-states.
Against that backdrop, France voiced its angst at Africa and its expulsion of French forces.
French President Emmanuel Macron is being accused of “contempt” for his African remarks, saying that the Sahel States “forgot” to thank France for its role, amid continuing withdrawal of French troops from West Africa, reported the BBC.
According to Gilles Yabi, head of the West Africa Citizen Think Tank, “The countries of Francophone Africa want a change in the nature of this relationship,” reported chronicleonline.com. It remains to be seen if the new head of the AU in 2025 can help usher in this change.