Unfree movement — why can’t Africans travel around Africa?

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The Nigerian industrialist Aliko Dangote and I don’t have much in common. While he oversees a sprawling empire worth billions of dollars, I spend my days here writing about business and wondering which countries will next fall prey to the whims of disgruntled putschists.

But we’re both African citizens who share a common bugbear: the maddening and often infuriating process of travelling across the continent with a domestic passport.

“As an investor, as someone who wants to make Africa great, I have to apply for 35 different visas,” Dangote said at a business forum in Rwanda earlier this year. “I really don’t have the time to go and drop off my passport in embassies to get a visa.”

Moving around Africa is not for the faint of heart. Red tape and byzantine visa requirements put off all but the most committed travellers. That’s if you can find the necessary information. Many embassies lack functional or up-to-date websites. The Nigerian embassy in the Central African Republic rarely refreshes its data. And good luck trying to find information on how to get a Burundian visa via the country’s official website.

Bureaucracy can lead to ridiculous requirements for travel that should be simple. Citizens from the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, need visas to access the Republic of Congo. Yet their respective capitals, Kinshasa and Brazzaville, are separated only by the Congo river. A journey between the two takes less than half an hour by ferry.

Ethiopia does not guarantee visa-free travel to all citizens of the continent despite housing the headquarters of the African Union.

Behind closed doors, I have heard many more stories from African businesspeople unable to attend events in neighbouring countries as a result of red tape. The head of a development lender, for example, had difficulty getting hold of a visa to a southern African country despite receiving an invitation from that country’s president.

To make matters more bizarre, European and US citizens can often travel across the continent more freely than African nationals. There is a booming trade in wealthy Africans seeking second citizenships partly to solve this problem. Citizenship and residency firm Henley & Partners has opened up shop on the continent to take advantage of the situation.

Simplifying travel is important if the continent is serious about building deeper internal trade and cultural ties. It is not just people who find it hard to move between countries. Intra-African trade made up only 15 per cent of the continent’s trade in 2023, according to the African Export–Import Bank, at $192bn.

The African Continental Free Trade Area was borne out of a desire to foster more deals. A key tenet of the agreement, modelled on the EU’s single market, is the free movement of people. The Free Movement of Persons Protocol of the African Union was codified in 2018 to allow African citizens to move visa-free across the continent for up to 90 days, a reasonable amount of time. Yet half a decade after the agreement, only 32 of Africa’s 54 countries have signed up to it and a measly four — Mali, Niger, Rwanda and Sao Tome and Principe — have ratified it. This falls short of the 15 nation-minimum required to bring it into force.

At present, Benin, Gambia, Rwanda and Seychelles are the only countries that guarantee visa-free travel for all Africans. It’s a poor tally for a continent whose leaders spend a lot of time pontificating about the need for better integration.

Many of Africa’s borders were drawn up by colonists 140 years ago at the now infamous Berlin Conference. After nearly seven decades of independence across much of the continent, modern-day leaders have little excuse for sticking with the status quo.

Globalisation and the free movement of people may be unfashionable elsewhere but it is essential for Africa’s growth. Regional blocs in east, west and southern Africa already have the structures in place to make visa-free travel a reality. The continent must now expand and implement those plans if it is to open up to itself.

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