Travelling across Africa is hard for Africans owing to restrictive visas. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS
By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Jan 23 2025 – Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, carries his frustration as visibly as he carries his passport.
To travel across the continent he calls home, he needs 35 visas—each a bureaucratic hurdle and a reminder of the barriers to free movement and trade in Africa.
“As someone who wants to make Africa great, I have to apply for 35 different visas,” Dangote lamented at a recent Africa CEO Forum in Kigali, Rwanda. His words echo the larger frustration of a continent grappling with the paradox of cementing regional integration while battling closed borders.
Nearly a decade after African leaders envisioned a borderless continent, the dream is largely unfulfilled.
Visa Woes
The 2024 Africa Visa Openness Index, launched recently in Botswana, is revealing: only four countries—Benin, The Gambia, Rwanda, and Seychelles—offer visa-free access to all Africans. Ghana has joined the list after it announced visa-free travel to all Africans in January this year.
Published by the African Development Bank and the African Union, the visa-openness index measures how open African countries are to citizens of other African countries based on whether or not a visa is required before travel and if it can be issued on arrival. There has been some progress since the first edition of the report, with several African countries instituting reforms to simplify the free movement of people across the continent.
About 17 African countries have improved on their visa openness, while 29 are instituting reforms on the issuance of visas for Africans, the Index shows. In 28 percent of country-to-country travel scenarios within Africa, African citizens do not need a visa to cross the border, a marked improvement over 20% in 2016
However, the cost of inaction is clear. Intra-Africa trade is at a low 15 percent of total trade, compared to 60 percent in Asia and 70 percent in Europe, according to research by the Economic Commission for Africa. Visa openness could boost intra-Africa trade and tourism while facilitating labour mobility and skills transfer and propel Africa to economic growth. For now, closed borders remain Africa’s stop sign to free movement.
Zodwa Mabuza, Principal Regional Integration Officer at the AFDB, noted during the launch of the 2024 Index on the sidelines of the 2024 Africa Economic Conference that visa openness was not about permanent migration but the facilitation of tourism, trade and investments.
“This is the sort of movement that we are promoting, in particular because we are promoting the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA),” Mabuza said.
Stop In the Name of Crime
Fears of illegal migration, terrorism, and economic disruption keep borders closed, despite evidence that such fears are often overblown, said Francis Ikome, Chief Regional Integration and Trade at the Economic Commission for Africa.
Ikome warned that without free movement of African people across the continent, AfCFTA is ‘dead on arrival’.
“We cannot discuss the concerns of security again, even though I think there is over-securitization of migration. When we talk about migration, we see security,” said Ikome. “When you are a foreigner and an African moves to the immigration officer, they see problems even before they look at your passport. Migrants are job creators; there are a lot of university dons, accountants and other skills that migrants bring to the table.”
Free Passage Paradox
Since the launch of the AfCFTA, a majority of African countries have not ratified the Free Movement of Persons Protocol launched in 2018 by the African Union and signed by 33 member states. Only four countries have ratified the Protocol.
Migration researcher Alan Hirsch highlighted that some richer African countries are more protective of their borders and several of the most open countries are island states or poor countries that do not expect immigration or can control it more easily. He said trust is needed between countries, which takes time and effort.
“The reluctance of some countries is related to their concerns about the quality of documentation and systems in some countries, fears relating to security issues as there are terrorist organisations in some parts of Africa, and fears that the visitors are economic migrants in disguise and will not leave,” Hirsch told IPS.
“There is a lot of progress in the regional communities in Africa. Borders are opening frequently on a bilateral or multilateral basis, as the visa openness index shows,” said Hirsch, an Emeritus Professor at The Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town.
Sabelo Mbokazi, Head of Employment, Labour and Migration at the African Union Commission, suggests that countries that promote free movement must be incentivised to do better.
“Who are we serving with all these visa restrictions? Are we serving the people or the politics of the day? Are we serving populations or our popularity? Are we serving the people around the continent or for profit? These are the paradoxes we see in Africa,” he said, citing that intra-African migration was at 80 percent, with 20 percent going to Europe or America but Europeans who came to Africa moved more easily than Africans.
That some Africans do not have passports and some are nomads, visa-free travel could be a logistical nightmare that many countries would do without. Africa has toyed with the concept of an African passport, which was launched in 2016. The passport has been issued only to African heads of state, foreign ministers and diplomats accredited by the AU.
“Regional passports, such as the ECOWAS passport for the large West African community and the EAC passport for the growing East African community, were developed in recent times and are doing very well. It was probably too soon for an all-African passport, “ Hirsch said.
In analysis, stopping African travellers in their tracks is counter to regional integration aspirations, argues Joy Kategekwa, Director, Regional Integration Coordination Office, at the AfDB.
“The paradox of integration in Africa is we talk about pan-Africanism; we have a passion for it but we keep Africans closed out of it behind the visa.”
Tied to the free movement of persons has been the poor implementation of the Yamoussoukro Decision to liberalize air transport. Air connectivity in Africa is a nightmare.
Hirsch is optimistic that Africa can boost its development through trade and migration, admitting that opening African skies takes time.
“In addition to the African ‘free skies’ initiative and the free movement of persons protocol, there is the AfCFTA,” he said. “All three initiatives were agreed to in 2018. The AfCFTA is making some progress and could help pave the way for the other two initiatives.”
The stakes are high. The AfCFTA, meant to unite 1.3 billion people under a single market, risks failure. With closed borders and skies, a visa-free Africa is a dream deferred.
IPS UN Bureau Report
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