The speeches soar. The applause is genuine. The communiqués promise coordination.
Then everyone goes home and negotiates trade deals, security partnerships, and infrastructure projects primarily with partners outside Africa.
The Numbers Tell the Story
Afreximbank’s latest trade series: intra-African trade reached 196 billion dollars in 2023 (14.7% of total trade) and 220.3 billion in 2024 (14.4% of total trade).
That means roughly 85% of African commerce flows outward to Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Let’s compare that with Asia, around 60% internal trade, or Europe (also around 60%, with wide variation by country.
Africa is discussed as one entity by 54 disconnected states.
Four power zones with distinct gravitational centres.
Zone 1: North Africa
Countries: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt
Orientation: Mediterranean-facing, European trade gravity
North Africa’s economic geography runs east-west along the Mediterranean, not south into the Sahara.
Morocco’s largest trade partner: Spain. Just 13 kilometres of water separate them at the Strait of Gibraltar. Algeria’s gas exports flow primarily to European markets, Italy and Spain.
The Trans-Maghreb Highway is designed to run from Morocco to Egypt via coastal routes. Infrastructure connects Casablanca to Cairo efficiently. Cairo to Kinshasa? That’s expensive across the Sahara in both time and cost. North African states sit in both the AU and Euro-Mediterranean frameworks, an institutional overlap that sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t share.
Even within this zone, politics blocks geography: Algeria-Morocco rivalry makes Maghreb-level coordination harder than the map suggests.
North Africa contributes a total intra-African trade 12.4%, one of the lowest levels of regional trade integration on the continent. This is primarily due to its strong ties with the European Union and internal political rivalries.
Security priorities: Mediterranean migration, Libyan instability, Sahel spillover.
Zone 2: West and Central Africa
Countries: Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, DRC, Angola
Orientation: Atlantic-facing, split monetary systems
This zone runs on two fundamentally different systems.
Fourteen countries use the CFA franc, pegged to the euro with a France-linked convertibility architecture. Monetary policy decisions are taken by regional central banks, but the external peg constraint shapes economic reality. Anglophone economies operate on independent currencies with British-derived legal codes.
ECOWAS has debated a common “Eco” currency for over a decade. Implementation: stalled for 2027 review.
Nigeria represents roughly 70% of ECOWAS GDP, a massive asymmetry that complicates regional consensus. The DRC produces over 70% of global cobalt, critical for batteries. Yet refining remains concentrated offshore, with China handling roughly 60–70%.
Zone 3: East Africa
Countries: Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Somalia, Djibouti
Orientation: Indian Ocean/Red Sea corridor, Asian trade ties
Djibouti hosts both US and Chinese military bases, the only permanent US base in Africa, and China’s first overseas military base. The Bab el-Mandeb Strait is a global trade and energy chokepoint linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden.
The EAC shows higher integration than most African blocs: between 2019 and 2023, roughly 28% of EAC exports went to African markets, which is nearly double the continental average. Yet Asia still accounted for 56% of exports and 64% of imports.
Zone 4: Southern Africa
Countries: South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique
Orientation: SADC anchor, South African industrial gravity
Southern Africa accounts for over 40% of intra-African trade, making it the main driver of continental commerce. South Africa alone represented 19.1% of total intra-African trade in 2024.
SADC’s North-South Corridor carries over 60% of SADC trade by volume. Infrastructure knits around Johannesburg, Durban, and Maputo rail networks, road corridors, and power pools, integrating regional economies.
Why Geography Defeats Rhetoric
These zones operate under different colonial legacies; French, British, and Portuguese legal codes still shape contracts and banking. Language barriers, Arabic, French, English, and Portuguese, add real transactional costs.
Infrastructure was built to extract resources to European ports, not to connect African regions.
When your infrastructure connects you to Hamburg or Shanghai more efficiently than to neighboring capitals, bilateral deals outside Africa become economically rational.
AfCFTA is operational and legally robust. Intra-African trade is growing in absolute value. But the agreement hasn’t yet transformed trade patterns as a share of total commerce.
Tiger’s Roar: Strategy That Starts With Truth
Acknowledging fragmentation isn’t defeat. It’s the beginning of strategy.
Zone-level coordination must precede continental coordination. The continent already behaves this way: Abidjan-Lagos corridor on the Atlantic coast, the Northern Corridor anchored on Mombasa, SADC’s North-South spine. These corridors reduce friction. Build them first.
Accept different external partners per zone and leverage it. North Africa will maintain European ties. East Africa will deepen Asian integration. Strategic play: coordinate within that reality so zones negotiate as blocs, not 54 states bidding against each other.
Infrastructure must connect zones, not just capitals. Until African capitals reach each other as efficiently as they reach London or Beijing, tariff reductions hit hard ceilings.
Realistic roadmap: zonal first, then continental. Deepen customs and payments integration inside each zone. Build cross-zone transport and energy corridors. Then scale common standards to the continental level. When SADC collectively sets mineral processing rules, and when EAC coordinates port standards, they shift leverage against external buyers.
Recent bilateral deals prove the point: the US signed a 1.6 billion dollar health agreement with Kenya (December 2025), nearly 2.3 billion with Uganda, and 228 million with Rwanda, each negotiated separately. Not moral failure. Structural behaviour in a continent trading mostly outward through different corridors to different partners.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Africans don’t lack solidarity. PanAfricanism is struggling because too many strategies ignore basic geography, infrastructure constraints, and actual trade patterns.
Africa is four power zones with overlapping edges and competing gravities, trying to coordinate as one, while roughly 85% of trade flows outward through different corridors to different partners.
The question isn’t whether to acknowledge this.
It’s whether to organise around it intelligently, building zone-level strength first.
Ubuntu wisdom: Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. A person is a person through other people. A zone becomes powerful through coordinated zones. Fragmentation acknowledged and organised beats fragmentation denied and ignored.
Tiger Rifkin decodes Africa’s tradition-transformation nexus through fearless analysis. Founder of The Witty Observer.