Pages

Sunday, July 15, 2012

BBC News - AU chooses Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma as leader

Current AU commission chairman Jean Ping of Gabon (l) and his opponent in elections to the post, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma of South Africa (r) (combined file photo).  
 
Jean Ping and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma both failed to get an outright majority in January
 
 
 
The African Union has chosen South African Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma as its leader, making her the first woman to hold the post.

Ms Dlamini-Zuma beat incumbent Jean Ping of Gabon after a closely fought contest for the chairmanship of the organisation.
In January, neither got the required two-thirds majority, leaving Mr Ping in office for another six months.

The dispute has overshadowed other issues, especially security and trade.

Voting had been broadly split along linguistic lines, with English-speaking countries tending to support Ms Dlamini-Zuma and French-speaking countries lining up behind Mr Ping.

Senior officials had warned that failure to resolve the leadership deadlock would divide the AU and undermine its credibility.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Feel free to comment but keep it civil or your comment will be exiled to the voids of cyberspace.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.