While we are here struggling with the price of unga and unpredictable power bills, our “Champion for Institutional Reform,” President Ruto, is up in Addis Ababa pitching another dream. He wants five - just five - so-called “foreign policy experts” to draft a common African foreign policy. It’s the classic Nairobi play: when things are falling apart, form a committee and call them experts. They’re supposed to deliver this magic document by the 40th Ordinary Session in 2026, as if a piece of paper can stop 54 different presidents from chasing their own secret handshakes with Beijing or Washington.

The report talks about Africa being a “coherent and influential actor” in the G20 and the UN. It’s cute, really. We’re being told that “fragmented bilateral channels” are costing us leverage. No kidding. But let’s be real: those “fragmented channels” are exactly how our leaders buy their new motorcades and keep their Swiss bank accounts healthy. You expect a leader who just signed a lopsided mining deal for personal kickbacks to suddenly care about “pan-African collective interests”? That’s not optimism; that’s a hallucination.

The reality is that the “Scramble for Africa” 2.0 is already over, and we lost. While the AU spends years “reorganizing and reimagining” its representational offices, major powers are already deep in our pockets for critical minerals. It’s the same panic we see locally; just look at The Starlink War: Why Safaricom is Panic-Screaming. When a global force actually arrives to disrupt the status quo, our institutions don’t innovate - they just make noise and try to protect their own lunch. The AU is doing the same thing on a continental scale, trying to build a fence after the cows have already been exported.

The report admits that adopting a policy is “necessary but not sufficient.” That’s polite speak for “this is going to fail because nobody actually wants to follow the rules.” You can’t institutionalize political will. You either have the spine to stand up to predatory external actors, or you don’t. Right now, most of our leaders are just happy to get the crumbs - the “fleeting benefits” - while the “five experts” bill the AU for business-class flights and five-star hotels in Addis.

In the end, this “Common Foreign Policy” will just be another PDF gathering digital dust on a server somewhere. It’s a strategic imperative on paper, but a joke in practice. Until the AU can actually stop a single member state from selling out the neighborhood for a quick loan, all this talk of “shielding African states from predatory tendencies” is just high-level gaslighting. We’re not being repositioned; we’re being rebranded while the same old extraction continues.