When Cameroon’s 92-year-old president, Paul Biya, declared victory recently in his eighth election, the African Union issued a blandly worded statement of congratulations, largely passing over credible claims of irregularities and making no mention of the way that Biya has hollowed out democracy by clinging to power for more than 40 years.

Around the same time, the AU put out a similar message congratulating another longtime incumbent, Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara, who—like Biya—has repeatedly changed his country’s constitution and electoral rules, allowing himself to stay in power since 2010. In last month’s election, Ouattara racked up an official tally of more than 90 percent of the vote, but only after barring top opposition candidates from the race.

When Cameroon’s 92-year-old president, Paul Biya, declared victory recently in his eighth election, the African Union issued a blandly worded statement of congratulations, largely passing over credible claims of irregularities and making no mention of the way that Biya has hollowed out democracy by clinging to power for more than 40 years.

Around the same time, the AU put out a similar message congratulating another longtime incumbent, Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara, who—like Biya—has repeatedly changed his country’s constitution and electoral rules, allowing himself to stay in power since 2010. In last month’s election, Ouattara racked up an official tally of more than 90 percent of the vote, but only after barring top opposition candidates from the race.

Meanwhile, the AU mustered only tepid reservations last week about Tanzania’s election, which was marked by strong signs of irregularity, followed by the violent suppression of protests that killed as many as 1,000 people, as well as a temporary internet shutdown.

Lest one think that the AU’s near irrelevance is limited to questions of electoral democracy or even domestic governance, recent weeks have turned up equally abundant signs of the feebleness of the body’s voice in questions of international relations and global order.

It has had little to say, for example, about the White House’s recent announcement that, out of all of the continent’s people, it will only prioritize accepting refugees who are white South Africans. Nor has it adopted a strong position about U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to deport undocumented people from the United States to African countries, regardless of whether they are from Africa. And similarly, it has not forcefully rebuked Washington’s sharp restrictions on travel visas that affect numerous countries on the continent.

Arguably worse, the AU has not taken a strong stance against Trump’s recent threat to mount military strikes against Nigeria, where he claims—falsely—that there have been targeted mass killings of Christians by Muslims. Like several of its neighbors in the Sahel region of West Africa, northern Nigeria has long been ravaged by Islamist insurgencies that have terrorized and killed Muslims as indiscriminately as Christians.

One may be tempted to ask why any of this matters, given the tableau of grave and unresolved problems that have bedeviled Africa in the decades since the huge wave of independence that swept the continent, largely beginning with Ghana in 1957. Yet what one might call Africa’s crisis of emergence, or the ability to stand strongly on its own two feet politically and economically, is far more than a matter of failed or underperforming national leadership alone.

Of equal, or perhaps even greater, significance than national politics is the fact that Africa has never managed to build a continental system of governance, security, and economic cooperation that would not only help boost the continent’s prospects internally but also represent and defend its interests much more strongly on the international stage.

The unique circumstances in which Africa entered the international community as a collection of independent states help explain why the continent is in need of such a system today. Although all African countries were endowed with presidential or prime ministerial systems at independence, with their own flags, currencies, and national anthems, for historic reasons, African countries were unusually weak and fragile from the outset.

To understand this, one must go back to the very design of Africa’s nation-states. With few exceptions, these borders were traced early in the imperial era—not by Africans, who were granted no say, but by the European powers that formalized the carving up of the continent in order to exploit them, at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85.

This lack of African participation in the continent’s political configuration was the first of a series of debilitating wounds whose impact lingers strongly today. As European powers undertook colonial rule, they focused on building systems of extraction far more than development. Initially, this meant using forced labor—a halfway house between slavery and freedom—to produce fibers, tropical oils, minerals, foodstuffs, and other commodities to fuel European industrialization and consumption, as opposed to generating income to reinvest in Africa itself.

Not only did colonial powers do little to boost African prosperity, but the scant infrastructure they built was also generally aimed at meeting Europe’s needs, not the continent’s. Roads and rails went more or less directly from places where goods for the West were produced to ports that would evacuate them to these distant markets. Connecting African population centers in these colonies was, at best, an afterthought. What was neglected altogether was connecting African colonies across imperially drawn borders.

By independence, what this left was a collection of several dozen mostly small, poor, and mutually isolated countries, many of them landlocked, with little opportunity to trade with each other or build larger, stronger markets that would facilitate industrialization and greater wealth creation through economic integration and regional trade.

Some of Africa’s early leaders understood this dilemma well and saw the need to build the powerful Organization of African Unity (OAU)—the precursor of today’s AU—as an engine of economic growth through integration and a means of articulating and defending the continent’s interests in a world that had long exploited it economically and dominated it politically.

The strongest advocate of such an approach was Ghana’s first independence leader, Kwame Nkrumah, who articulated this vision at the OAU’s founding conference, which was held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1963. This is a story that I tell in my new book, The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide. But Nkrumah’s vision of accelerated continental integration—one driven by a powerful supranational body that would draw inspiration from the United States’ Constitutional Convention, which had allowed 13 British colonies to eventually form a single country—was rejected by his fellow heads of state.

Many of them considered Nkrumah’s vision impractical, and some suspected that his true motivation was a play for power in which he could lead the continent. The most fundamental reason that Nkrumah’s ideas were rejected in my view, though, had to do with the irresistible lure of the many perquisites that came with leading a newborn state. Building an effective supranational body to defend Africa’s interests on a continental level would have required governing elites to surrender some of their newly won power and opportunities for wealth—ones that often came through graft and corruption, including by tapping extraction-based revenue streams that once went exclusively to the West.

The results for Africa have been fateful and overwhelmingly negative. Instead of defending African interests on the world stage, the OAU and, later, the AU instead became a back-scratching club of heads of state. On the one hand, the body has never been able to develop a meaningful voice on the issues of democracy and human rights, including by articulating standards of its own that it is prepared to defend. This has led to it accepting rulers who perpetuate their power through hollow or rigged elections and doing little more than emitting a “tsk tsk” when civil societies are violently suppressed as regimes slide toward dictatorship, as has recently happened in Tanzania.

The AU’s inaction means that African crises of violence are allowed to fester, as has long been the case with the war in eastern Congo, where Rwanda has supported rebel militias in what is widely understood to be a bid to control some of its neighbor’s vast mineral wealth. The same is true with the lack of any meaningful continental response to the alarming spread of Islamic insurgencies in West Africa or the ongoing civil war in Sudan.

It also means that Africa continues to be woefully lacking in integrated markets and international infrastructure, such as a continental highway system and energy grids. Both of these weigh heavily on the continent’s economic performance.

And it means that Africa is almost voiceless on the international stage, as seen in the examples above involving refugees, access to international travel, and freedom from bullying.

Perhaps the strongest evidence of a need for a strong continental organization, though, comes from outside of Africa. The European Union, a collection of rich and relatively prosperous states, came together and expanded out of an understanding that the continent needed to defend its interests in a world of much larger and more powerful states—notably, the United States, Russia, and China. It seems self-evident that if Europeans felt a need for integration and supranational representation, even with their high relative state of development, then African countries—which are much poorer, weaker, and balkanized—need this kind of unity all the more.