Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi poses for the camera during a meeting with kings, princes, sultans and the sheikhs of various tribes of Africa in Benghazi on August 28, 2008. Qaddafi started pushing for an African Union based loosely on the EU back in 1999.MAHMUD TURKIA/AFP/GETTY
Libyan dictator Muammar
el-Qaddafi, killed by rebels in 2011,
left behind a legacy of chaos, brutality and trauma. But he also left a
surprisingly modern political vision—of a Pan-African state. In 1999, Qaddafi began to push for the creation of an African Union
(AU), modeled loosely on its European counterpart, the EU.
Over the next
decade, he urged other leaders to join his campaign to create a single
government that would act as a counterpoint to the U.S. and the EU. At a 2008
meeting of more than 200 African kings and traditional rulers in Benghazi, he
declared, “We want an African military to defend Africa, a single African currency,
one African passport to travel within Africa.”
Eight years later, the AU—the
54-member continental body launched in 2002—is taking steps toward Qaddafi’s improbable dream. This month, business leaders and
economists will press the case for uniting Africa’s economies at the World
Economic Forum, which runs from May 11 to 13 in the Rwandan capital, Kigali.
The intensified push comes as the principles of open borders and free movement
of its role model, the EU, are under tremendous strain because of a rise in
homegrown extremists’ attacks, an influx of more than 1.2 million refugees and
migrants in the past year, an economic crisis in Greece and rising hostility
within Europe about the union. (In June, the U.K. will vote on whether to leave
the EU.) The proponents of an EU-style AU know another key fact about the
EU—European unity has brought immense prosperity and peace to what was for
centuries a frequently war-torn continent.
Many African politicians and
business leaders like what they see when they look north. The EU is home to 7.3
percent of the world’s population but generates 24 percent of the world’s gross
domestic product. It is a Western superpower that has exerted global influence
through diplomacy and liberal, humanitarian values. And Europe’s open internal
borders have played a major role in those accomplishments.
There’s a growing sense among
many proponents of greater unity between African nations that now is the time
to push for a deal to form a similar bloc. In its Agenda 2063—a platform
announced in 2013 outlining policies necessary to transform the continent over
the following 50 years—the AU proposed establishing a Continental Free Trade
Area by 2017, abolishing visa requirements for African citizens in African
countries by 2018 and eventually introducing an African passport.
With sub-Saharan economies,
such as those of Rwanda and Ethiopia, booming—the International Monetary Fund
estimates the region will grow by 4.3 percent in 2016—continental bodies like
the AU and the African Development Bank are increasingly pushing for open
borders as a way to boost prosperity across the whole continent. Africa already
has eight Regional Economic Communities that have increased cross-border trade
among members.
Harnet Bokrezion, an Eritrean
market strategist who advises Africans on setting up businesses across the
continent, says the AU’s plans are promising. “We’ve had decades of misery and
war and poverty in Africa,” she says, speaking from her home in Frankfurt,
Germany. “A lot of that, in my view, was a direct result of a lack of leadership,
a lack of vision, a lack of regional integration and a lack in confidence that
we had as Africans.”
But while the move toward
realizing the vision of a borderless Africa comes at a time of growth and
opportunity in some countries, the continent has also been grappling with some
of the same challenges straining the European project: a rise in Islamist
terrorism and a surge in refugees. Public health crises, such as the 2014
outbreak of the Ebola virus, have also raised fears that passport-free travel will
exacerbate the spread of disease.
In spite of those challenges,
growing numbers of entrepreneurs—African and non-African—are starting new
businesses on the continent. In 2012, after taking a vacation in Rwanda,
Californian businessman Trevor Green founded a construction company named
Remote Group in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, with operations in East and
Central Africa. Green believes Rwanda is an example of how an integrated Africa
could prosper. The tiny, landlocked country has a comparatively relaxed policy
on visas, which are issued upon arrival to Africans. Green, whose company is
involved in building affordable housing in Cameroon and laying roads in the
Democratic Republic of Congo’s war-torn North Kivu region, says he often runs
into difficulty trying to coordinate and move his workforce across the
continent. “It’s complex. The requirements are different. The amount of
paperwork and the time it takes you [to get visas] is frustrating sometimes,”
says Green, adding that more countries adopting visa policies like Rwanda’s
would be “tremendous for business in Africa.”
Two decades after the 1994
genocide that claimed the lives of some 800,000 people, Rwanda has made
significant economic progress, averaging real GDP growth of about 8 percent
every year between 2001 and 2015. It is ranked as the second-easiest place to
do business in Africa, just behind Mauritius. “Here’s a country that has, in
theory, every disadvantage possible,” says J. Peter Pham, director of the
Africa Center at the Atlantic Council. “But it has attracted a lot of
investment and is a regional hub within an otherwise somewhat unreliable
neighborhood.” In addition to its visa-upon-arrival policy, since January 2014
Kenyans and Ugandans have been able to travel through Rwanda by simply showing
a national identity card (and tourists can buy a single three-country visa)
rather than a passport, a measure that has increased cross-border trade by 50
percent between these three countries.
Continentwide, however,
Africans still aren’t doing business with each other. A 2015 U.N. report found
intra-African trade constituted just 14 percent of the continent’s total trade,
compared with 61 percent of intraregional trade in the EU. In December, Anabel
Gonzalez, senior director of the World Bank Group Global Practice on Trade and
Competitiveness, said that intra-African trade costs are the highest of any
developing region, about 50 percent higher than in East Asia. She noted that
supermarket delivery trucks crossing southern Africa sometimes need up to 1,600
permits and licenses just to cross borders, and they can end up spending tens
of thousands of dollars on them.
Some analysts say Africa has a
long way to go before free movement or an African passport could be introduced.
“Many African countries still don’t have anything close to an identity card,”
says the Atlantic Council’s Pham. “We’re really at the symbolic stages.” And
while the AU is keen to speed up the process of integration, it’s sure to be
some time before the continent realizes the dream set out in “Hail! United
States of Africa,” an influential 1924 poem by black nationalist leader Marcus
Garvey: “There is no state left out of the Union- / The East, West, North,
South, including Central, / Are in the nation, strong forever, / Over blacks
in glorious dominion.”
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