Olympio Francisco Kofi Nyaxo

• Transformation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU): A New Vision for the 21st Century, or Political Rhetoric? The formation of the OAU had three key objectives apart from the fundamental objective of decolonization - Unity, Security, and Development. In none of these objectives did the regional body lived up to expectation. The challenges ushered in by the end of the Cold War compelled African leaders to transform the OAU via the injection of new institutional spirit, which finally led to the creation of the African Union (AU). In the 1990s the institutional engineering resulted in key blueprints such as the Abuja Treaty Establishing the African Economic Community (June 1991), the Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution (1993), the Constitutive Act of the African Union (CAAU, July 2000), and the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD, October 2001), among others. This contribution argues that the OAU has been inefficient since its formative years in the early 1960s, especially in crisis intervention as exemplified by the case studies in Chad and Rwanda. The subregional organisations on which it is anchored are also saddled with capacity and functional constraints that make the realization of their objectives difficult. The AU despite its institutional finesse is also devoid of a legal framework that would help ensure coordination, efficiency, and predictability. But at the heart of the matter is that in the past African leaders have engaged the outside world (and even cooperate among themselves) without taking full cognizance of risks and perils there from. Indeed, there is more to lack of political will as a basic reason for assessing the failure of regionalism in Africa. Building on the works of others the contribution constructs a model for Integrated Political Risk Analysis as a tool for understanding the place and role of the regional body in a rapidly changing world of globalization.