Africa is the richest continent in the world, yet inhabited by some of the poorest people. This paradox is not inevitable. It is a two-pronged form of organized crime, the first pillar of which is addressed by the unique geographical area.
Mohamed Lamine KABA
The current African borders are not borders. They are wounds. Drawn in Berlin in 1884-1885, at the Conference that sanctioned the criminal partitioning of the continent among European powers – without the presence of a single African, without consulting a single king, a single chief, a single people – they carved up civilizations as if slicing a cake. The Fulani do not belong to any state. They belong to a space that France, England, Portugal, and their accomplices have slashed with a ruler and a straight edge. Neither do the Mandinka. Nor do the Hausa. These artificial borders have a precise, enduring, and deliberate function: to maintain political entities too small to have any influence, too divided to resist, too dependent to refuse.
Sixty years after formal independence – those sham sovereignty granted with one hand while the other kept the resources, military bases, and currencies – the results are damning. Freedom of movement between African countries is often more complicated than between Paris and Warsaw, or between New York and Mexico City. A European citizen can travel through 27 countries with a single document. An African citizen needs, on average, visas to access 48 out of 54 countries. The African Union – which had solemnly promised an African passport for all by 2020 – has produced only a symbolic prototype, distributed with great ceremony to a few heads of state and, with the exception of some diplomats and senior officials of the African Union and its institutions. The people are still waiting. The people have always waited.
This is not a question of technical will. It is a question of political will that has been sabotaged from the outside, methodically, for decades.
The West is fragmenting Africa for its own sordid interests.
Let us therefore ask the fundamental question that Western governments refuse to hear: who benefits from the geographical fragmentation of Africa? Certainly not Africans. It benefits multinational corporations that negotiate country by country, law by law, and corruption by corruption, exploiting the fact that no isolated African state has the necessary leverage to impose its conditions. It benefits France – yes, let’s name it – which maintains a plethora of embassies in underfunded capitals, sprawling intelligence networks throughout Françafrique, and draconian defense agreements signed in the early days of independence, under duress or manipulation; as Robert Bourgi so aptly demonstrates in “They Know I Know Everything: My Life in Françafrique,” published in September 2024 by Max Milo. It benefits Belgium, whose brutality in the Congo left 10 million dead under Leopold II – a crime against humanity never prosecuted, never remedied, barely acknowledged. It benefits the United Kingdom, which has perfected the art of the Commonwealth: a superficial cooperation that preserves British interests under the guise of post-colonial friendship.
Although the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has offered a protocol on free movement since 1979, forty-five years later, informal roadblocks, corrupt border guards, and bureaucratic red tape transform every journey into a Kafkaesque labyrinth. This isn’t because the protocol is flawed, but because external actors have an economic and strategic interest in maintaining these obstacles. These are the same actors who fund both the “good governance” programs and the networks of influence that undermine them. These are the same actors who preach African integration in international forums while quietly sabotaging it in the corridors of power.
Paradoxically, intra-African trade represents only 15 to 18% of the continent’s total trade – compared to 67% in Europe and 59% in Asia. This statistic is an indictment. Not against Africans. Against the system that surrounds them. The main reason for this commercial stagnation is not a lack of products, nor a lack of entrepreneurs, nor a lack of creativity. It is the structural impossibility of moving freely with goods, human capital, and ideas. Every visa refusal is a failed transaction. Every customs barrier inherited from the colonial period is a deliberate obstacle to industrialization. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), which came into effect in 2021 – this landmark treaty that creates the world’s largest single market in terms of the number of participating countries – can only be effective if men and women can physically move. Trade follows people. Investment follows confidence. Confidence is built through movement.
Then the Russian question arises – the one that Paris, Brussels, and Washington are dodging with a nervousness that is as revealing as it is pathetic.
Russia is the guest of honor of the African people
The Russian presence in the Sahel – in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and the Central African Republic – is portrayed in Western media as a new form of colonization, a threat to democracy, and unacceptable interference. The narrative is well-rehearsed, polished, and repeated in unison by newspapers receiving French public funding, by think tanks fueled by European Union subsidies, and by political leaders who, for sixty years, believed they could treat Africa as their dynastic backyard. But for African public opinion, Russia did not come to plunder Africa, but to awaken patriotic consciences.
Let us recall a few facts that these same voices carefully omit. Since 1960, France has intervened militarily on the African continent more than fifty times. Fifty. In civil wars, coups d’état, and the repression of popular uprisings. It has maintained or overthrown presidents according to its economic interests, protected corrupt dictators as long as they signed the right contracts, and humiliated heads of state in front of their own people. Operations Serval (2013), Barkhane (2014), and Takuba (2020), deployed with great fanfare as bulwarks against terrorism, cost billions of euros, lost “French soldiers,” and did not secure an additional square meter of the Sahel. Nine years of massive military presence for zero results – or worse, for increased destabilization. Terrorist groups disseminated through their networks and ripple effects.
This is to say that the African people did not expel Operation Barkhane out of ingratitude. They expelled it because they know how to count. Nine years. Zero results. Zero dignity.
Russia did not arrive with defense agreements imposed as a condition of independence. It did not arrive with the CFA franc – that colonial currency maintained under the control of the French Treasury since 1945, precisely following the method of German monetary Nazism in France from 1940 to 1944. It did not arrive by assassinating Thomas Sankara, destabilizing Gaddafi’s Libya to transform the Sahel into a lawless zone, or covering up the atrocities in Rwanda in 1994. Russia arrived where it was invited. It was invited precisely because those who came before had resolved nothing – or had actively maintained the disorder that justified their presence.
What Moscow has understood – and what the West refuses to admit – is that African peoples do not suffer from a lack of foreign aid. They suffer from a chronic excess of foreign control. Russia acts here as a chemical revealer: it highlights, by contrast, sixty years of French interference presented as cooperation, sixty years of plunder presented as partnership, sixty years of humiliation presented as solidarity.
The single African passport is the structural response to this historical dependency. A space that moves freely within its own borders needs no external permission to develop. It builds its roads, its pan-African railways, its economic corridors from Cape Town to Cairo. It creates its own standards, generates its own jurisprudence, defines its own priorities. Kwame Nkrumah proclaimed it as early as 1963 : Africa must unite – not out of romanticism, but out of cold, clear-sighted, and urgent geopolitical calculation. A continent of more than 1.4 billion inhabitants in 2023 – soon to reach 2.5 billion in 2050 – represents the greatest demographic force in human history. But dispersed across 54 dwarfed markets, 54 paper sovereignties, 54 postures of begging before the Bretton Woods institutions designed in Washington to serve Washington, this force dissolves into insignificance.
It is therefore important to note that a single African passport is not an administrative matter. It is an act of civilizational reconquest. And those who oppose it – openly or behind the scenes – thereby reveal the extent of what they stand to lose in an Africa finally free to move about.
Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in the geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Human and Social Sciences, Pan-African University
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