Headquarters of the Organisation of African Unity (1963) and its successor the African Union (2002). Murtala Mohammed's January 1976 'Africa Has Come of Age' speech, delivered in the OAU hall here, swung continental recognition behind the MPLA in Angola.
The OAU was founded in Addis Ababa in May 1963 with Nigeria as a founding member. The original headquarters were in Africa Hall, donated by Emperor Haile Selassie. In 2012 the AU moved to the current 100m tower complex on Roosevelt Street, funded and built by the People's Republic of China.
For Nigeria, the Addis hall has been the stage for three defining moments. (i) The 1963 founding conference, at which Tafawa Balewa was one of the principal architects of the moderate Monrovia bloc that produced the OAU compromise. (ii) The 11 January 1976 Extraordinary Summit on Angola, at which General Murtala Mohammed declared 'Africa has come of age' and committed Nigerian recognition to the MPLA — swinging the continental vote and effectively ending US/South African support for UNITA. Murtala was assassinated five weeks later. (iii) Nigeria's repeated chairmanship of the OAU/AU: Obasanjo (1991), Obasanjo again (2004–2006), and its consistent role as the largest contributor to OAU/AU peace operations.
The Chinese-built AU headquarters opened in 2012. Reports in 2018 (Le Monde) alleged that the building's data servers had been transmitting nightly to Shanghai; the AU has since renegotiated its IT contracts. The episode is a recurring data-point in Nigerian commentary on the costs of accepting infrastructure-for-influence relationships.