African Integration For Dummies: From A Pyramid To A Network

The title of the article is deliberately provocative, but the idea behind it is quite serious... and sophisticated. Think of African integration as an orchestra of 54 musicians, each playing a different instrument, shaped by a different tradition and following a different rhythm. The objective is not to make every musician play the same instrument (or even the same part), but to create the conditions under which different instruments can play in harmony, producing a coherent piece of music without losing their distinct voices. This is, in essence, the challenge of African integration: to move from the pursuit of uniformity to the creation of harmony: from making systems alike to making different systems work together. African economies are not necessarily drawn toward a single centre of integration. They are influenced by multiple centres of economic gravity: regional markets, corridors, production and consumption networks and borderlands. The challenge for the AfCFTA is to create the connections that allow these different gravitational systems to interact rather than pull economic activity exclusively inward, toward their own regional centres. Read it on the Eurasia Review.