Africa holds ‘silence the guns’ summit

African heads of state yesterday gathered at the headquarters of the African Union for a summit meeting due to focus on how the body can play a more prominent role in resolving conflicts proliferating across the continent. The two-day summit has taken as its theme “Silencing the Guns”, yet AU officials are well aware of their failure to achieve the goal adopted in 2013 of ending “all wars in Africa by 2020”. In remarks to African foreign ministers ahead of the summit, AU Commission Chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat painted a bleak picture of the continent’s security situation, citing extremist threats stretching from the Sahel to Somalia. Though some progress has been made recently in Central African Republic and Sudan, long-running conflicts in places like Libya and South Sudan have been joined by new crises from Cameroon to Mozambique.