AfCFTA and Regional Integration in Africa: Is African Union Government a Dream Deferred or Denied?

ABSTRACT

The concept of regional integration is not a new phenomenon; it has been raging since the 1960s when many African countries gained political independence from their erstwhile colonial masters. In essence, there were two blocs which had different views on how to integrate Africa, and the pace and veracity through which this was to be done. The first bloc was the Casablanca bloc under the leadership of Dr Kwame Nkrumah, the second was the Monrovia bloc which was led by Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first President of Nigeria. The former argued for a wholesale and once-off comprehensive political and economic unification of Africa, from Cape to Cairo, the Horn of Africa to the West of Africa. The latter insisted that Nkrumah’s approach was not feasible; therefore, a gradualist and more cautious approach was necessary, first by forming regional economic communities, then later an African Economic Community, with a politically integrated Africa emerging as the last step. The Monrovia bloc won the debate. The central argument of this paper is that almost all of these regional integration efforts and agreements (from the Lagos Plan of Action 1980, the Abuja Treaty 1991, the Tripartite Free Trade Area (TFTA) 2015, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) 2018, and the eight official Regional Economic Communities (RECs) in Africa, etc.) disproportionately focused on trade and economic integration while saying very little about the crucial integration aspect concerning the political unification of Africa in the form of a centralised union government.

KEYWORDS:

• Regional integration
• TFTA
• AfCFTA
• African Union Government
• RECs
• African Union
• migration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See Image A and B respectively under Annexures for detailed information on AfCFTA coming into force with a list and map of countries that had ratified it by 30 May 2019.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Moorosi Leshoele

Moorosi Leshoele holds a PhD in Development Studies from the University of South Africa (UNISA), a Master’s degree in Public Policy Management from Wits University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Psychology from the University of Cape Town (UCT). This academic background influenced him to adopt a multi-inter-transdisciplinary (MIT) research prism. Moorosi is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Study (JIAS), based at the University of Johannesburg. His research interest areas include but are not limited to political philosophy termed ‘Sankarism’, Pan Africanism, pre-colonial African history, Afrocentricity, and Regionalism.