Peacebuilding as governance: The case of the Pan-African Ministers Conference for Public and Civil Service

THE AFRIAN CHALLENGE IS ESSENTIALLY A CHALLENGE OF development, and the African crisis is primarily a crisis of the state. Africans therefore have to respond simultaneously to a two-pronged problematic, brought about by decades of internal misrule and externally driven wars and exploitation: governance and development. As such, the state has to be set at the very center of African politics and development. African states have since the end of the Cold War and apartheid searched for their own post-Cold War, postapartheid interstate paradigm to address the consequences of decades of African bad governance and superpower rivalries and proxy battles at the continent's expense. Since 2002 with the formal establishment of the African Union (AU), the continent's most credible and legitimate interstate body, African states have pursued an "African Agenda" that spells out four areas of dynamic cooperation, or "calabashes": peace and security; stability, or governance; socioeconomic development; and International cooperation. Many continental and subcontinental actors and forums have emerged to embrace and champion this continental African Agenda. the Pan-African Ministers Conference for Public and Civil Service, established in 1994, is one such African interstate actor that has provided indigenous intellectual support and acted almost as a lobby group in support of a governance approach to peacebuilding and statebuilding.