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.

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