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INTRODUCTION
The 2016 Summit of the Assembly of the African Union (AU) in Kigali, Rwanda, marked the start of the Human and Peoples’ Rights Decade in Africa. In the formal Declaration following the meeting, the AU recommitted itself to a progressive realisation of human rights in Africa between 2017 and 2026 and the development and adoption of a pan-African action plan. The Pan African Lawyers Union (PALU) was eventually appointed to lead the crafting of a 10-year action plan that would deliver on the human rights-related provisions contained in the AU's ambitious ‘Agenda 2063: an Africa of good governance, democracy, respect for human rights, justice and the rule of law’ (AU 2015).
In June 2018, PALU produced a draft human rights action plan for Africa (AHRAP) that draws on a variety of sources such as state reports with the AU Commission, national human rights institutions, civil society, monitoring bodies and the media. Many of the concerns identified by previous studies were cross-referenced by consulting stakeholders, particularly civil society actors. The AHRAP is organised under five themes: human rights education; the obligations of states to fulfil existing human rights-related commitments; institutional strengthening; the enforcement of rights pertaining to development and African integration; and leadership (AU 2018: 9).1 The plan contains 10 goals meant to deal with the challenges and obstacles hindering the implementation of human rights on the continent (AU 2018: 22).2
This article views the AHRAP through the lens of its relationship to capital, or the lack thereof. As used here, ‘capital’ is both a descriptor and a term of art. In the first, Marxist sense, it refers to both the ownership and/or the control of the means and networks of production, both at a transnational level and at a local level. (Since local economic interests remain key to this narrative, ‘global capital’ on its own would have been an inaccurate descriptor.) In its second and third senses, respectively, ‘capital’ absorbs elements of Sklair's ‘transnational capitalist class’ (TCC) and further applies these insights to locally owned capital. In Sklair's original formulation, ownership and/or control of the means of production is not the sole criterion for TCC membership; those who serve the broader interests of capital (for example, bureaucrats or media professionals) also...