A response to Ken Opalo’s call for stronger African international organisations
Ken Opalo, an Associate Professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service (pictured) wrote one of the sharpest analyses I’ve seen on why African international organisations remain so weak. His framing is devastating but straightforward: weak states create weak institutions, and Africa’s obsession with ideological equality—“every country having a say”—has produced a system where no one is truly in charge.
He’s right. The AU is structured like a debating society that fears its own agency. Consensus and equality have become tools of inertia. Fifty-four presidents, each clutching their sovereignty like a relic, meet to reaffirm policies they will never implement. The result is predictable: Africa speaks often, but never moves.
Ken argues that Africa needs a new model of cooperation—one that rewards states willing to lead, invest, and take risks. That may sound undemocratic, but it’s how real power works. France and Germany drive the EU. The U.S. anchors NATO. Strong states create credible systems because they can afford delegation and enforce rules.
This is where Pan-Africanism must evolve. It was never about states; it was about African peoples. Our institutions were meant to be vehicles of solidarity, not parking lots for sovereignty. The independence generation built things – schools, roads, armies – with nothing but conviction. Today, we hold conferences about them.
And here’s where we must go further. Pan-Africanism needs a utilitarian turn. We can’t keep waiting for all 54 states to agree before we act. Let’s make unity a matter of use, not ideology.
Movement is how nations mature. When Africans travel, trade, and live across borders, they create networks that no treaty can manufacture. Every friendship forged through study, work, or chance encounter becomes a bridge for commerce and collaboration. A Ghanaian student in Nairobi becomes the future partner of a Kenyan logistics firm. A Malawian carpenter working in Zambia learns new methods and later starts a regional enterprise. History is full of such beginnings: big multinationals were once small cross-border hustles – Dangote as a trading shop, Equity Bank as a local building society.
Commerce follows connection, and connection follows movement. The more Africans meet each other, the faster ideas, capital, and trust circulate. That is how Pan-Africanism becomes not just a sentiment, but an economy.
When a young Senegalese man hikes the Rwenzori Mountains and couch-surfs across Uganda and Tanzania, something more profound than tourism happens; he builds friendships that outlast visas. He learns how people live, trade, and dream across invisible borders. A few years later, those same friendships become collaborations — an export idea, a logistics link, a tech startup bridging Dakar and Dar. Many of Africa’s future multinationals will not be born in boardrooms but in these ordinary journeys, where trust precedes capital and experience precedes policy. Real integration begins not with agreements signed by ministers, but with Africans meeting each other and deciding to keep in touch.
Most proposals focus on regional neighbours – Kenya with its East African neighbours, Nigeria in ECOWAS, I think, because proximity feels safe. But regionalism has already trapped us in paralysis. ECOWAS, EAC, SADC, and COMESA have each spent decades drafting communiqués while trade between them remains anaemic. Proximity breeds comfort, not progress.
If we want to provoke movement, we must facilitate people to cross the map.
Let Kenya and Ghana sign a One Sky pact to make it cheaper to fly between Nairobi and Accra than to Paris. Let Nigeria and Ethiopia strike an energy and logistics accord – oil meets hydropower, Lagos meets Addis.
Let South Africa, Cameroon and Morocco co-produce industrial components and batteries, creating a north-south manufacturing spine.
Let Senegal and Kenya build a digital commonwealth linking Dakar’s fintech ecosystem with Nairobi’s tech scene.
Let Egypt, Gambia, Zambia and Rwanda co-found a continental research and innovation hub.
These kinds of cross-regional alliances would not only cut through bureaucracy but also embarrass it. They would expose how hollow “continental coordination” has become. When citizens start trading, learning, loving and building across these corridors, the bureaucrats in Addis will have no choice but to follow reality.
Pan-Africanism must stop performing and start producing. Power, not poetry. Action, not applause.
And the test of this new phase is simple: How easily can a small fabrics trader in Kumasi distribute to a shop in Kilifi? Can a student from Kigali study in Cairo as easily as in London? Can a musician from Zambia tour East Africa without an EU-sized paperwork nightmare?
That is what a useful Pan-Africanism would look like—not ideology, but infrastructure; not declarations, but deals.
It’s time to confound the system and make Pan-Africanism useful again.
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A compelling article. While I agree we need bold, direct action between countries rather than relying solely on slower regional institutions, I am curious as to models for such mega bilateral initiatives that have been very successful?
The most significant progress on this continent, free movement, common tariffs, and integration treaties, has been overwhelmingly midwifed by those very institutions – ECOWAS, SADC, EAC and AfCFTA by the AU. The main challenge remains the bureaucrats in the 55 AU Member States and not necessarily those in Addis Ababa. In any case, those in Addis Ababa have no powers to compel anything.
This reinforces a point you also alluded to, which I believe is the true challenge: the deficit of visionary leadership. The bottleneck isn’t necessarily the institutional framework, but the lack of leaders willing to take bold, short-term risks to secure the transformative, long-term gains we urgently need.