Africa's leaders and peoples had to overcome the inertia that bound them to the past and make a "new beginning", South Africa's President, Mr Thabo Mbeki, said yesterday in an address that heralded the dissolution of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) nearly 40 years after its foundation in 1963.
As the head of state of the host country, Mr Mbeki, who talks of an African renaissance that will make the 21st century the "African century", presided over the last session of the OAU before taking over as the chairman today of new pan-African organisation, the African Union (AU).
It was not enough to meet and pass resolutions, he told representatives of more than 50 African states, the majority of whom were presidents, though one, Col Moamer Gadafy of Libya, prefers the title "Brother Leader". African leaders, acting through the AU and the associated New Partnership for Africa 's Development (Nepad), had to "aim for measurable advances" against the impoverishment of the continent, Mr Mbeki declared.
As if to buoy his fellow leaders for the task ahead, he cited recent African successes in ending conflict and bolstering or establishing democracy in the Comores, Lesotho and Sierra Leone as evidence that Africa had the "will and the capacity to take responsibility for its own renaissance".
Unlike the OAU - which for most of its existence was wedded to the principle of non-interference in the affairs of members states- the AU and Nepad are committed by their founding charters to upholding democracy and human rights.
Whether they have the will to do so was put in doubt by a decision not to confine the AU to democratically elected governments and to expand the size of Nepad's implementing committee from 15 to 20 members, including Col Gadafy, in whose country political parties are banned.
The UN secretary-general, Mr Kofi Annan, used the last session of the OAU yesterday to sound a warning to African leaders that Africa's image as a continent plagued by wars did little to commend it to international investors. Africa had to resolve the conflicts, Mr Annan said. "I do mean resolve them," he emphasised. "Managing them is not enough."
Mr Tony Leon, leader of South Africa's largest opposition party, warned that fine sentiments were not enough to guarantee the success of either the AU or Nepad. He noted that the OAU had not stinted itself in the past on "fine-sounding declarations", citing the 1997 Monrovia Declaration which purported to protect "human rights and democratic freedom".
The failure of the AU and Nepad founders to take firm action against President Robert Mugabe's government in Zimbabwe, which was in power after an election that was "neither free nor fair" did not augur well for the future.
Observing that the AU was modelled on the European Union, Mr Leon compared the EU's forthright condemnation of Mr Mugabe's "counter-productive and corrupt land appropriations" with the silence of delegates at the AU founding conference (one of who was Mr Mugabe himself).