When Africa turns on itself: What the AU must confront before AfCFTA can deliver

By Maame Darkwaa Twum Barima

A two-hour flight from Accra to Dakar costs nearly the same as flying to London. A Ghanaian trader crossing into Burkina Faso spends more time at the border than on the road. A Cameroonian shop owner who has built his business in Durban for twenty years can have it dismantled in an afternoon by a mob while the state watches.

These are not isolated inconveniences. They are symptoms of the same structural failure. And from June 24 to 27, 2026, when African heads of state convene for the African Union’s (AU) Mid-Year Coordination Meeting in El Alamein, Egypt, they will spend considerable time celebrating the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) as the continent’s most promising vehicle for shared prosperity. They will not be wrong. But they will be incomplete.

Because AfCFTA cannot deliver what it promises if Africa keeps attempting to move goods without moving people. And right now, the continent is not only failing to move people freely; it is turning on itself.

What AfCFTA Promises and What It Requires

The African Continental Free Trade Area is, on paper, one of the most consequential economic agreements in the world. Fully implemented, it would create a single market of 1.4 billion people, the largest in terms of the number of participating countries in history. The AU estimates that free movement under AfCFTA could increase intra-African trade by more than 50 per cent. The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa projects it could lift 30 million people out of extreme poverty by 2035.

Those projections are real. The potential is real.

But every serious analyst of regional integration knows what Africa’s leaders are reluctant to say aloud: trade agreements do not work in isolation. They require the free movement of people to function. Entrepreneurs, traders, professionals and workers need to cross borders to build the supply chains, service networks and business relationships that make trade come alive. The European Union understood this instinctively. The 1985 Schengen Agreement did not follow economic integration; it accompanied it. People and goods moved together because that is the only way integration works.

Africa is trying to do it the other way around. It is building the trade architecture while leaving its people behind checkpoints, visa queues and, now, in some cases, the threat of violence.

The Mobility Gap at the Heart of AfCFTA

The numbers are unambiguous. According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), more than 21 million Africans already live in another African country, making intra-African migration one of the largest internal migration systems in the world. Nearly 80 per cent of all African migration occurs within the continent, not towards Europe or North America. Africa is already a continent in motion.

Yet the 2025 Africa Visa Openness Index recorded a significant setback. The share of trips requiring a prior visa rose from 47.1 per cent to 51.1 per cent, exceeding half of all travel scenarios for the first time in years. Visa-on-arrival availability fell to its lowest level yet. Four countries that previously granted visas on arrival shifted to requiring prior applications, moving in the opposite direction from AfCFTA’s logic.

Meanwhile, the AU’s Protocol on Free Movement of Persons, adopted in 2018, has been ratified by only four countries. It needs fifteen ratifications to enter into force. The African passport, launched with much ceremony in 2016, remains limited to diplomats and senior officials. A decade after its symbolic debut, ordinary Africans cannot use it.

Some countries are showing what is possible. Benin, The Gambia, Rwanda and Seychelles welcome all African passport holders without visas. Ghana implemented full visa-free entry for Africans in January 2025. These are not small gestures. They are demonstrations that the political will exists somewhere on the continent, even when it is absent at the continental level.

But AfCFTA cannot be built on the leadership of four countries while major economies, including Egypt, Algeria and Kenya, rank among the least visa-open countries on the continent. A free trade area in which people cannot move freely is not a free trade area. It is a series of bilateral arrangements dressed up as continental ambition.

The Human Cost That the Trade Agenda Cannot Ignore

What makes the mobility gap more than an economic problem is what has been happening in South Africa. Because AfCFTA’s promise rests on the assumption that African migrants and traders will find safety, dignity and legal protection in the countries where they live and work. That assumption is being tested and failing.

In April and May 2026, a citizen-led movement called “March and March” organised demonstrations against undocumented migrants across Pretoria, Johannesburg and Durban, with violent and, in some cases, fatal consequences. The movement targeted African and Asian foreign nationals, while police and state authorities faced criticism over what many viewed as an inadequate response. Nigeria threatened retaliatory measures and began repatriating hundreds of its nationals. Ghana repatriated more than 1,000 citizens and provided them with psychosocial support.

Ghana’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, formally called on the AU to place xenophobia on the summit agenda, describing it as a direct threat to continental unity, trade and human rights.

This is not a new story in South Africa. It follows the 2008 attacks that killed more than 60 people and displaced 100,000 others. It follows the 2015 violence that required military intervention. It follows incidents in 2025 in which vigilante groups blocked migrants from accessing public health facilities. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights has described this pattern as a grave violation of the African Charter. The pattern continues regardless.

But the specific relevance to AfCFTA cannot be overstated. South Africa is the continent’s most industrialised economy and one of AfCFTA’s most significant anchor markets. It is where intra-African commerce is supposed to scale. It is where African traders, professionals and entrepreneurs are expected to build the supply chains that make continental trade real. If an African migrant cannot safely live and work in Durban, AfCFTA’s promise does not reach them. The trade framework exists. The safety net does not.

What El Alamein Must Actually Decide

The AU’s 2026 agenda rightly centres on water, sanitation and AfCFTA implementation. These are serious priorities, and they deserve serious attention. But implementation without addressing the conditions that make implementation possible is not a plan. It is a projection.

Three decisions would make El Alamein matter for AfCFTA in concrete terms.

First, ratify the Free Movement Protocol. Every head of state in El Alamein should leave with a binding national commitment to a ratification timeline. The protocol has existed for eight years and has secured only four ratifications. There is no technical reason for that number. There is only political reluctance. A trade agreement whose signatories will not allow each other’s citizens to move freely is a contradiction the AU can no longer afford to paper over with communiqués.

Second, establish a continental anti-xenophobia enforcement framework. AfCFTA requires that African traders and workers be protected in the countries where they operate. The AU must define xenophobic violence as a continental security and trade integrity issue, not merely a domestic law enforcement matter. Member states must face real consequences, including trade-related measures, when they fail to protect African nationals on their soil. Ghana’s Foreign Affairs Minister has already made the formal call. El Alamein is where it must be answered.

Third, connect water and sanitation investment to AfCFTA’s implementation logic. This year’s AU theme on water and sanitation is not separate from trade. The communities most dependent on AfCFTA’s expansion—smallholder farmers, cross-border traders and women-led market enterprises—are often the same communities without reliable access to water. Investment in water infrastructure in those communities is an investment in the human foundation of trade. The AU should say so explicitly and build that link into AfCFTA implementation plans.

The Larger Question

Africa’s share of global GDP has stagnated at 3.1 per cent for two decades. Ninety per cent of its exports consist of unprocessed goods. The continent is rich in resources, young in population and increasingly connected through digital infrastructure. What it continues to struggle to build is the institutional architecture needed to convert that potential into shared prosperity.

AfCFTA is the most serious attempt to change that. Its existence is worth defending. Its implementation is worth demanding. But it will not deliver on its promise if the people it is supposed to serve cannot safely cross the borders it claims to be opening.

The European Union is not a perfect model. But on the fundamental question of whether a continent can link the movement of goods to the movement of people, create binding rules and enforce them, Europe answered yes.

Africa keeps separating the two and wondering why the sum is less than its parts.

El Alamein is not a ceremonial occasion. It is a decision-making meeting. The AfCFTA agenda gives African leaders a framework. The xenophobia crisis in South Africa and the stalled Free Movement Protocol present an urgent and specific test of whether that framework means anything beyond the documents that contain it.

The question is not whether Africa can build a continental economy. The question is whether Africa’s leaders are prepared to make the political choices that would allow it to.

That responsibility cannot be deferred to the next summit. Because the traders crossing borders right now, the shop owners building livelihoods in cities that may not protect them, and the migrants moving within one of the world’s largest internal migration systems without legal recognition or protection are not waiting for El Alamein to tell them what is possible.

They are already doing it.

The AU’s job is to catch up.

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