Africa has shown it has the visionary leadership needed to conceive the African Continental Free Trade Area. Fifty-four states have signed the agreement, governments have negotiated its protocols, and trade has begun on 1 January 2021. But can Africa generate the different type of leadership to make it work?
It takes vision to conceive a continental market and diplomatic skill to negotiate its details. But it takes disciplined, cooperative, institution-building leadership to get coffee from Rwanda to Ghana without unnecessary delays, ensure a Kenyan company can receive payment from a Nigerian company in local currency, and help a small manufacturer in Zambia navigate the specifications for selling in Senegal.
The AfCFTA will not be evaluated in ministerial meetings in Addis Ababa or Accra, but rather in customs posts, harbours, banks, standardisation laboratories, factories, and markets. Africa needs to shift from inspirational to implementation leadership to realise the agreement's trade-creation potential.
Africa’s implementation leadership will not be confined to presidents and ministers. A customs official who unilaterally refuses to accept a certificate of origin will undermine the agreement, and a standards agency that re-tests an approved product will raise as many barriers as it lowers. Technical requirements, cumbersome customs procedures, and other non-tariff trade barriers, according to the UN Trade and Development’s Economic Development in Africa Report 2024, restrict trade in Africa three times more than tariffs.
The East African region shows how effective administration can facilitate trade. Through the East African Community’s Single Customs Territory, member states aligned customs procedures, simplified declarations and sureties, digitised cargo tracking, and adopted one-stop border stations. The EAC’s 2018–2019 annual report revealed that, at the Malaba border, goods cleared under the single customs procedures took an average of 7 hours 31 minutes to cross the Kenya-Uganda border, compared to 19 hours 45 minutes under the previous transit system. Similarly, border crossing times reportedly dropped by 73 per cent at Busia and 83.5 per cent at Holili-Taveta.
Administrative leadership made it happen, not visionary speeches by political leaders. But the EAC 2025–2026 budget document shows that, despite accelerated harmonisation efforts, 47 non-tariff barriers to trade remained in the preceding financial year, and only 16 had been addressed. Trade integration is a dynamic administrative process that requires constant vigilance and commitment.
The AfCFTA Guided Trade Initiative provides another valuable lesson for implementation. By enabling Rwanda’s Igire Coffee to export coffee products to Ghana using an AfCFTA certificate of origin, and by facilitating the export of Kenya’s Exide batteries to Ghana, the initiative demonstrated the agreement's potential to boost trade. But the real test of the guided trade will be its ability to disappear, to become invisible. Trade will flourish when an ordinary African businessperson can identify a market opportunity, comply with published procedures, transport the produce to market, and receive payment without intense involvement from officials.
Payment integration is a critical aspect of regional integration that has received insufficient attention. It makes little sense for two African firms to denominate a trade transaction in a foreign currency and rely on foreign correspondent banks to settle the payment. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System aims to enable African financial institutions to process cross-border transactions in local currency.
According to Afreximbank, the system's operator, if widely adopted, could save Africa more than US$5 billion yearly in transaction fees. However, technology-enabled solutions cannot overcome settlement and currency incompatibilities on their own; monetary authorities, commercial banks, and regulators need to develop appropriate standards and make the system accessible to ordinary businesses.
AfCFTA needs to catalyse production, not just trade. Opening borders will have limited impact unless Africa develops more competitive domestic supply chains. The cotton produced in one country could be processed into textiles in another and turned into garments in a third.
Similarly, Africa’s minerals could form the basis for regional battery and automobile manufacturing, adding value to raw materials and reducing the continent’s reliance on imported finished goods. Deepening regional trade requires transformational leadership that can promote cross-border electricity, infrastructure, human capacity, financial, and industrial policies.
Africa’s leaders cannot rely on presidential authority alone to realise the AfCFTA’s trade potential. The continent needs a distributed implementation capability that will see presidents promoting the agreement at home and abroad, legislators aligning national legislation, customs officials harmonising procedures, central banks building integrated payment systems, and businesses developing supply chains.
Africa has taken the first step in signing a common market agreement. Now it must build one. Otherwise, the AfCFTA will be a visionary initiative that fails because of implementation incompetence.
Bem Max Nomor is a policy and leadership researcher at the Leadership Institute (Nigeria).
