Most debates surrounding the AfCFTA tend to revolve around the gap between ambitious legal frameworks and uneven implementation. The central question is often framed in these terms: if the architecture is in place and political commitments exist, why does progress remain fragmented and inconsistent? Yet this framing may itself be incomplete. This article forms part of a broader effort to examine the AfCFTA and its relationship with subordinate frameworks through a different analytical lens. In a previous analysis, we argued that the AfCFTA should not be understood merely as a trade agreement, but as a coordination architecture for fragmented integration: an overarching framework intended to generate coherence across pre-existing, overlapping, and often disjointed trade regimes without pushing these systems towards an artificially constructed uniformity. This article moves one step further by exploring how interactions between those layers function in practice, and which interfaces (or “operational touchpoints”) make coordination possible between continental, regional, subregional, and national systems. The point is simple: integration is not only a matter of drafting better rules or implementing them more effectively. It is also a matter of understanding how the system itself operates. A basic principle of systems thinking applies here: one cannot improve the performance of individual components without first understanding the dynamics of the whole. African integration has often been imagined as a ladder, with each supranational layer gradually replacing the one below it. But is this assumption necessarily applicable in Africa? What if continental, regional, subregional, and national frameworks are not designed to replace one another, but to coexist? Because integration does not necessarily mean building a single system. It may also mean to make multiple systems work together in an harmonious way.

This article offers a fresh and powerful way of looking at the AfCFTA that goes beyond the usual focus on treaties, rules, and legal commitments. Instead, it shifts attention to what really matters in practice: how institutions interact on the ground, where trade is either made easier or blocked. Rather than seeing Africa’s fragmentation as a temporary problem to be fixed, the article argues that it is actually a structural feature of regional integration. In this view, the AfCFTA is not replacing existing Regional Economic Communities (RECs), but acting as a “layering architecture” that sits above and across them, coordinating systems that remain overlapping and autonomous. A key idea is “interface governance”: the practical tools that make fragmented systems work together, such as digital platforms, payment systems, and customs interoperability mechanisms. These are the quiet but essential bridges of African integration. In this sense, the article challenges both extremes: the optimistic view that Africa is steadily converging into a single unified trade system, and the pessimistic “spaghetti bowl” narrative of permanent chaos. Instead, it reframes the AfCFTA more realistically, not as a final destination of integration, but an evolving coordination system that learns to operate within complexity, rather than trying to eliminate it.