I have spent the last couple of years travelling the world and I have come to appreciate the beauty of interacting with multiple cultures and languages. I have seen the direct economic results of allowing people into your country for trade, leisure and education. I have had that economic impact in every country I have been to, China, India, multiple European nations and even across many African nations. The food I eat while travelling, the activities I do, and the hotels I stay in have all benefited from just one extra person from far away spending in their economy. 

This is my case for free movement across the African continent. I can already hear the naysayers shout out about security and safety and all the problems that opening up the borders would create. Let me remind you that these borders are just imaginary lines on a map. What I am more concerned about is that we have swallowed the ancient dogma on the movement of people for so long that we need to rethink what it is we want as Africans. Not our politicians, not multinational companies and not those xenophobic fearmongers. 

My thoughts are, instead of this long-winded process of creating a whole new African passport and all the logistics of it we should integrate the already existing frameworks for African travel in existence. If my Botswana passport can be treated the same way as an Ethiopian passport anywhere on the continent we would not need to keep moving back and forth about the designs and logistics of launching a new passport. Recognise all African passports as being acceptable for entry into any African country. After the fact, any African country that supports this would put measures in place to manage people coming in and going out of their respective countries. If countries want to set quotas or limitations they can do so within their respective parliaments. While all of this is going on we will be able to get real-world evidence of what works and what does not work. rather than this game of selective access to the African passport, which is elitist and honestly wastes tons of time and money at the AU Commission of meetings and flights and convening multiple meetings to do a very simple thing. Don’t all African countries recognise all other African passports as valid travel documents? Then why go through so many hoops?

I say all of this as someone who has encountered a few of these African passports in my travels across the continent. Friends working at the AU have them, I met a random dude on a flight from Nairobi to Lusaka who had one(I assume he was an AU worker as well). What is keeping me from getting one? It's bureaucracy and political will. So do away with those and elevate the status of all African passports to the same level and let Africans explore their continent for opportunities and business connections that will surely transform the lives of Africans.

To make this truly possible and easy we would need a task force that will ensure that any issues that need to be fixed are fixed as an ongoing concern. This is the same framework that has been adopted for the AfCFTA so why can it not work for free movement? So what is currently happening is that we have a ratified agreement to allow goods and services to cross borders, we have a bank settlement protocol already operational but we can not allow the people that offer those goods or services the opportunity to travel to the places they do business. That will surely limit the success of the Free trade agreement since the trade barriers will still exist, especially considering that 400 million Africans have the spending ability to affect the growth of multiple economies across the continent. Let us not spend time talking about what needs to be done and start doing things.

In the meantime, I will use my Botswana Passport to explore the 36 African countries that offer me visa-free and visa-on-arrival options. And this will be fine for the next couple of years but until every African can have the privilege of exploring their own home we will forever be caught in this developmental prison. Where the opportunities we seek are available next door but we lack the tools to access those opportunities. We are still colonial prisoners after all. We have let the colonial borders imprison our people. They separate people who speak and believe the same things in the name of national identities that are for the most part a result of our colonial past...