Asking the AU to condemn South Africa is the easy one part, here’s why nothing might follow it
When President Bola Tinubu, through Vice President Kashim Shettima, urged African leaders at Sunday’s ECOWAS summit to unite in condemning South Africa over attacks on Nigerians, he was making a request the African Union was never structurally built to fulfil. The problem isn’t political will alone, it’s that the AU’s own founding rules make an outcome beyond a statement of condemnation almost impossible for this specific category of incident.
The AU’s Constitutive Act, the treaty establishing the organisation, encodes respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of member states and non-interference in their internal affairs as a foundational principle. The Assembly can only set that principle aside in specific, narrowly defined circumstances written into Article 4(h) of the Act: genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Xenophobic mob violence, no matter how many people are killed, has never been formally classified by the AU as meeting that threshold. That simply means that South Africa’s own government retains sole formal authority over how it responds to the attacks. The AU has no legal pathway to compel action beyond issuing a statement.
It’s not that the AU lacks a toolkit entirely. It has a functioning three-tier sanctions regime, cautionary, intermediate, and comprehensive penalties, ranging from losing speaking rights to full suspension from Union meetings. But that regime was built almost exclusively for two triggers: member states falling behind on their financial contributions to the Union, and unconstitutional changes of government, such as coups. There is no comparable mechanism for a member state failing to prevent or adequately respond to violence against foreign nationals on its own soil. South Africa isn’t at risk of any of the AU’s actual enforcement tools over this because none of them were designed to apply here.
Why consensus makes it worse, not just harder
Even setting aside the sovereignty barrier, the Assembly’s decision-making process compounds the problem. Decisions are made by consensus, or, failing that, a two-thirds majority of the Union’s 55 member states. South Africa is one of the continent’s largest economies and a major regional power within the Southern African Development Community it has both the diplomatic weight and every incentive to resist or dilute any resolution directed against itself. Getting 37 of 55 states to vote against a fellow major economy, on an issue the AU’s own founding treaty treats as a domestic matter, was always going to be a steep climb even before South Africa’s own lobbying is factored in.
What “condemnation” can actually achieve
None of this means Tinubu’s request is meaningless. A formal AU statement carries real diplomatic weight, it can shape international media coverage, pressure South Africa’s government reputationally, and give Nigeria’s position more standing in bilateral negotiations. But it’s worth being precise about the ceiling: under the AU’s current legal architecture, condemnation is very likely the maximum outcome available, not a first step toward sanctions, suspension, or any binding consequence. The most the process can realistically produce is what Ghana and Nigeria are already asking for, not enforcement.
What would actually have to change
If Nigeria wanted a mechanism with real teeth, it would need the AU to either reinterpret Article 4(h) to cover systemic xenophobic violence — a significant and politically fraught expansion of the Union’s intervention doctrine that would worry many member states wary of setting a precedent that could be used against them — or build an entirely new sanctions category specifically for state failure to protect foreign nationals, which would require the same consensus or two-thirds threshold currently standing in the way of any single resolution. In other words: the structural obstacle isn’t just this case. It’s the absence of any legal category the AU could invoke here at all.
