Why Africans Still Find It Difficult to Enter Africa

By Kolawole Osinowo

Africa built a single market for its goods. It is yet to build one for its people.

When Aliko Dangote, the richest man in Africa, sat down with the businessman and philanthropist Mo Ibrahim, he made a confession that should have stopped the room. He carries six or seven passports, he said, because as an investor building factories across the continent he needs visas for close to 38 African countries. He had even been given one of the rare African Union passports, the document meant to wave its holder through all 55 member states without a visa. It did not spare him. Invited to Angola by that country’s own president, Dangote still had to apply for a visa.

Sit with that. The wealthiest African alive, arriving at the invitation of a head of state, was told to get in line.

He has not stopped saying it. Years later, at a forum in Kigali, he turned to a French executive seated beside him and pointed out the quiet absurdity of it all: a French passport moves more freely across Africa than his Nigerian one. The man pouring billions into African factories is treated, at African borders, as more of a risk than a visitor from Paris.

I am no Dangote. But I know that counter well. As a business executive, I have spent years travelling for work across several countries, a great deal of it within Africa itself, from meetings to the conferences I am invited to speak at. The crossing was never guaranteed. There were the forms. The invitation letters. The bank statements offered as proof that I could afford to leave again. The processing times that respected no calendar. The questions, some designed less to gather information than to remind you who was asking.

What unsettled me was never the inconvenience. It was the contrast in the next queue. The visitor from London or New York waved through on a visa bought at the desk in ninety seconds, already photographing the arrivals hall while I was still accounting for myself. On African soil, somehow, the African was the suspect, and the foreigner was the guest.

Let me be precise about the argument, because it is easy to caricature. This is not a call to fling Africa’s doors open to the world. It is a call to make Africa navigable for Africans. A citizen of this continent should not need an embassy appointment to attend a trade fair one country away.

The contradiction is loud. We celebrate the African Continental Free Trade Area as a single market of 1.4 billion people and roughly $3.4 trillion in combined output. We talk of regional value chains, youth mobility, and the rise of African enterprise. And yet, by the African Development Bank’s most recent Africa Visa Openness Index, Africans can travel without a visa in only about 28 per cent of journeys from one African country to another. The trend has just gone into reverse.

The share of trips requiring a visa arranged in advance climbed from 47 to 51 per cent in a single year, and visa-on-arrival access fell to its lowest level ever recorded. A free trade area without freer movement is a marketplace with the roads to it barricaded. How are goods supposed to move if the people who make, finance, ship, regulate, and buy them cannot?

I write this as a Nigerian, and I say it as one who wants the best for home. A Nigerian passport, from one of the continent’s largest economies, opens just 44 of the world’s 199 countries without a prior visa, and that figure has lately been drifting down rather than up. Like several of our neighbours, we have at times tightened entry where we might have eased it. That is precisely why the larger economies carry a special responsibility: a continent this ambitious will move faster when its biggest players choose to lead the opening rather than wait to be led.

The instruments to fix this already exist on paper. In 2018, the African Union adopted a Protocol on Free Movement of Persons, signed the very same day as the free trade agreement we love to quote. The trade pact is now operational. The movement protocol is not. It needs fifteen ratifications to take force. It has four: Mali, Niger, Rwanda, and São Tomé and Príncipe. The last country to ratify did so in July 2019. For more than six years, a continent that talks ceaselessly about integration has not produced a single new signature on the one document that would deliver it. And yet the evidence that openness works is sitting in front of us.

ECOWAS has guaranteed free movement across West Africa for more than four decades. I crossed those fifteen borders on my Nigerian passport alone: no visa, no fee, no interrogation. East Africa built its own common-market mobility. A growing vanguard has gone further still and dropped visas for every African passport holder: Rwanda, Seychelles, the Gambia, and Benin, joined now by Kenya and Ghana, with Togo and the Republic of Congo following. None of these countries collapsed. They gained visitors, trade, and more of the very enterprise the rest of us keep promising from podiums.

The honest objection is security, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a wave of the hand. Borders exist for reasons. But mobility and security are not opposites. The countries that opened did not abolish their borders; they upgraded them, trading paper queues for digital pre-screening, shared traveller data, and trusted-identity systems that catch the dangerous few without punishing the ordinary many. A smarter border lets the entrepreneur through faster precisely because it knows more, not less.

The real choice is not between open and safe. It is between modern and obstructive. So the path is not mysterious. Accelerate e-visas and visa-on-arrival for African passport holders, with published fees and honest timelines. Let the regional blocs that already work, ECOWAS and the East African Community, become the building blocks of a continental system rather than islands of sense in a sea of friction. Move the Free Movement Protocol from a framed declaration into ratified law. And listen, at last, to the people who carry value across these borders: the traders, the founders, the students, the nurses, the engineers, the creatives. They can price the cost of every delay to the hour. Because that is what a visa queue really is. It looks like a minor indignity, twenty minutes and a stamped page. Multiply it across a continent and a generation, and it becomes something heavier: a tax on African ambition, levied by Africans on Africans.

We have told our young people to think continentally. We owe them the right to move that way. If Aliko Dangote cannot move freely through the Africa he is helping to build, the rest of us are not merely inconvenienced. We are being told, politely, at counter after counter, that the single market is real for our goods and imaginary for ourselves. Africa will not integrate by speech. We have given speeches. Africa will integrate by movement. Let the people move.

*Kolawole Osinowo is a Senior Research Fellow at the FATE Institute and a Public Voices Fellow Tackling Poverty, a partnership of Acumen and The OpEd Project.