The AU has made a “big breakthrough” by adopting a plan to drastically reduce its dependence on foreign funders within five years.

AU commission chairwoman, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, said African leaders had agreed at their summit in Addis Ababa, which ended on Saturday, to raise about $600 million (R6.9 billion) a year to fund itself.

Because this was such a huge amount, it would be phased in over five years.

By then it would be paying 100 percent of its own operating costs, 75 percent of its programme costs and 25 percent of its peace and security costs.

She said peace and security were the primary responsibility of the UN Security Council, but the AU would also contribute.

According to South African officials, the new plan would quadruple the country’s contribution to AU funds, but AU officials could not confirm this.

South Africa is among a group of the continent’s five largest economies which now pays 75 percent of African governments’ dues to the AU.

Dlamini Zuma said a new formula had been agreed upon whereby those countries whose economies represented more than 4 percent of Africa’s total GDP would fund 60 percent of the total, and that smaller economies would pay less.

The AU had examined various alternative sources of funding, such as taxes on oil revenue or air transport, but met resistance from some African governments to all of them.

Eventually it proposed that member countries could decide for themselves how they raised their share of the total.

“It’s important that we do what we want to do and not what other governments pay us money to do,” she said.

But she added that the AU was not trying to isolate itself from the international community and would continue to need some funds from donors.

In his closing speech at the summit, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who had just been elected to chair the AU, welcomed the self-financing plan and said it was “unacceptable” that 70 percent of the AU’s budget now came from foreign sources. This was a threat to the AU’s security.

Mugabe, 90, put his stamp on the summit by having his usual digs at colonials, Westerners, whites, women and homosexuals.

According to a tweet from someone in one of the summit’s closed sessions, he told Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta “you made us sad” by agreeing to appear before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague on charges of having committed crimes against humanity after the 2007 elections.

The ICC dropped the charges against Kenyatta in December for lack of evidence and Kenyatta proposed to the summit that the AU should turn its back on the ICC and focus instead on its own African Court which is being given criminal jurisdiction so it can try the same sort of crimes as the ICC.

According to a tweet, Mugabe suggested to the summit that “bloody whites” should appear before the African Court. He also said at a press conference that women could not be on a par with men because of their biological differences.

“Some things women can do, men cannot do… you can’t suckle babies can you?” he said to a male journalist. “Not even the gay ones can.”

The theme of the summit was women’s empowerment and development, but it was overshadowed by security crises, especially the reign of terror which the Islamist militant group, Boko Haram, had inflicted on northern Nigeria and its neighbours.

The summit adopted a plan to deploy a beefed-up regional force of 7 500 troops from Nigeria and four other west African nations against Boko Haram.

The conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) also preoccupied the summit, especially after the DRC government announced that it had launched its long-awaited offensive against the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) rebels in the east.

But confusion soon arose about whether the UN peacekeeping force, Monusco, would join the DRC army in the battle against the FDLR.

Diplomats said Monusco’s tough Force Intervention Brigade - which includes more than 1 000 South African troops - would not support the DRC army until it replaced DRC General Bruno Mandevu who had just been appointed last Sunday to head the operation against the FDLR.

This was because Mandevu had been accused of scores of human rights violations in past operations.

The diplomats said they believed that Mandevu would soon be removed.

The civil war in South Sudan also figured at the summit as the country’s President Salva Kiir and his arch-enemy, Riek Machar, conducted face-to-face talks.

Regional mediators had hoped they could nail down a power-sharing deal which would be announced at the summit, but the two rivals could not agree on how to divide the power between them.

The AU leaders accepted South Africa’s offer to host the next AU summit, in June/July, replacing Chad which pulled out because of the proximity of the Boko Haram threat.

There was some speculation that the summit would take place in Durban, but Dlamini Zuma said that had not yet been decided and that she was officially neutral, though she would favour a city “which is warm in winter”.