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Visa-free travel between African countries is vital for the continent’s economic and political development

4 Jan 2024

It is high time African countries look beyond their traditional political borders and rigid dispositions relating to concepts of ‘territorial integrity’ or ‘sovereignty’, which, if strictly embraced as eternally sacrosanct, will only hamper and delay a United Nations of Africa.

For the continent of Africa to tap into and put into operation its massive material and human resources, traditional policies of visa requirements for African citizens should be abolished by all African nation-states to realise a gigantic visa-free continent where goods, people, skills, knowledge, commerce, cultural ideas, technologies and inter-country social interlinkages can freely move and circulate.

In Europe, countries with diverse cultural, social, historical, political and economic backgrounds came together to form unified economic and political systems such as the European Union and Eurozone.

Many European countries have also abolished visa requirements for residents of other European countries by formulating a visa-free area called Schengen.

Such cross-country coalitions in Europe have inspired other regional states around the world to create transnational visa-free areas to facilitate social solidarities, economic interchanges and political unifications.

The traditional system where individual states operate as independent and isolated actors appears to gradually lose its appeal as more and more economic, social and political coalitions are surfacing around the world to strengthen societies and economies of the citizens of regional economic and political blocs through initiating visa-free circulations of their populations, trade, commerce, technological interchange, skill transfers, scientific exchanges and other benefits.

Narrow and rigid border-based economic and political systems will no longer be viewed as viable and effective mechanisms for the social and economic progress of global societies.

The formation of visa-free migration regimes in Africa will facilitate economic prosperity for African nations, particularly those who suffer from low and stagnant economic growth and social transformations due to many domestic factors.

Transformative

As trade, investment, commerce and technological and skills transfers and exchanges are realised through establishing an unrestricted visa-free movement of people and goods, the economic activities and social development of many of Africa’s least developed countries will transform.

Unrestricted visa-free movements within the continent will enable small-scale and large-scale exchange and trade in goods which will engender competition and affordable prices for goods and services for peoples of the least developed African countries.

Of course, disadvantaged nations should put in place mechanisms to subsidise and assist local producers to compete within the African marketplace.

Visa-free movements for all Africans will catapult revenues for African airlines, road and water-based transportation, the banking system and other service industries.

Unhindered free movement of peoples within the African continent will also give rise to social interactions, intergroup contact and social cohesion among the diverse ethnic, tribal, racial, religious, linguistic, cultural and national groups across the continent.

Such interactions and exchanges among diverse social groupings across Africa will create conviviality and solidarity. Xenophobia, social conflicts and prejudice based on group identities could subside.

Many social scientists have established that continued and enduring intergroup contact, familiarity and interactions play a major role in the dwindling of group-based animosities and conflicts expressed in terms of xenophobia, border wars, racism, tribalism, ethnicism and other forms of intergroup frictions and violence.

As Africans crisscross the continent unhindered by visas, and intergroup/intercountry interactions continue, they will develop a sense of a transnational African identity, or Pan-Africanism, as a unifying self-identification.

Skills transfers and knowledge exchanges will also materialise as highly skilled, talented and educated Africans will be able to travel and work visa-free anywhere in Africa.

To realise this, African countries should not only provide competitive salaries and benefits to skilled and educated Africans but also promote ideas of a common African citizenship, service to Africans through voluntary work and moral obligations of Africans to transform and empower African societies through the sharing of skills and knowledge.

Visa-free movement in Africa will also pave the way for transnational political integrations across the continent, as political borders gradually cease to symbolise traditional, rigid and narrow ideas of “sovereignty” and “territorial integrity” which are based on physical boundaries carved out through divisive colonial planning.

As the free movement of Africans within the continent continues and becomes more normalised, there will arise a need for the creation of a supra-national African political body to regulate and manage people interactions, trade, commerce, investments, economic policies, local and regional conflicts and other continental matters. DM

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