By Ziad Hamoui

When a Nigerian general recently floated the idea of fencing the country’s borders to combat terrorism, the response was swift and unforgiving. Colleagues across West Africa denounced the proposal as colonial throwback thinking – divisive, retrograde, and fundamentally at odds with the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) commitment to free movement.

They were right to object. But the conversation should not have ended there.

While Africa engages in heated debates over physical barriers that trigger immediate outrage, a more insidious network of invisible walls continues to strangle the continent’s integration. These hidden obstacles inflict far greater damage than any fence ever could, yet they escape scrutiny precisely because they masquerade as normal administrative procedure.

The Security Paradox

West African governments face a genuine dilemma. Terrorism and cross-border crime create legitimate pressure for tighter controls at the exact moment when the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) demands the opposite.

This landmark agreement – connecting 1.4 billion people across 55 countries in a market worth US$2.8 trillion in nominal GDP – can only deliver on its promise if goods, services, and people flow freely across borders.

Yet framing this challenge as a simple trade-off between security and commerce obscures the real problem. The question is not whether Africa needs border controls, but rather: what actually constrains African mobility and commerce in the first place?

The Bureaucratic Straightjacket

Consider the visa regime. Today, only 28 percent of intra-African travel occurs visa-free.

Nearly half of all African citizens still require pre-travel visas to visit neighboring African countries – a proportion that would be unthinkable within the European Union or among ASEAN nations. These bureaucratic hurdles create structural exclusion while maintaining a veneer of legitimacy.

They are invisible walls that discriminate just as effectively as barbed wire, but without provoking international condemnation.

Trade regulations tell a similar story. Rules designed during colonial arrangements continue to determine who accesses which markets and on what terms.

These invisible checkpoints inflate transaction costs far more effectively than any border post with lengthy queues. The infrastructure of exclusion operates smoothly, efficiently, and largely without comment.

Colonial Ghosts in Modern Systems

The institutional frameworks governing Africa’s borders carry forward the partitions drawn at the 1884 Berlin Conference through practices so normalized we rarely question them. Civil law systems collide with common law traditions at border crossings.

Language barriers between Francophone and Anglophone customs agents create communication breakdowns. Documentation requirements developed in different legal traditions fail to recognize each other’s validity.

Through my advocacy work with Borderless Alliance, I have visited border posts such as Akanu-Noepe on the Ghana-Togo frontier. The modern infrastructure is impressive – new buildings, digital systems, updated facilities.

But the most significant obstacles are precisely those you cannot see: fragmented management systems that don’t communicate across the border, disorganized coordination channels, and a profound trust deficit between border agents, local communities, and economic operators. That trust deficit constrains regional trade as powerfully as any infrastructure gap, yet it receives a fraction of the attention or investment.

The Politics of Visibility

Physical walls provoke protests, media coverage, and diplomatic interventions. Invisible barriers persist because we have accepted them as normal, necessary, even beneficial.

This acceptance reveals itself in telling statistics. While 48 African countries have ratified the AfCFTA trade agreement, only four have ratified the African Union Protocol on Free Movement of Persons – the “twin” instrument designed to enable the human mobility that trade requires.

This disparity exposes where the real resistance to integration sits. Governments enthusiastically endorse trade liberalization in principle while quietly maintaining the bureaucratic apparatus that prevents it in practice.

A Path Forward


They need to build the community dialogues and institutional trust that balance security compliance with economic facilitation. Border systems currently operating in parallel must be harmonized into genuine partnerships.

Most fundamentally, Africa needs to interrogate the walls it cannot see with the same intensity it brings to those it can. The barriers embedded in legal codes, visa application forms, and customs procedures do not generate dramatic photographs or viral social media posts.

But they determine whether the AfCFTA becomes a transformative force for African prosperity or merely another unfulfilled promise.

True liberation requires dismantling both the visible and invisible architecture of division. The question facing African governments is not whether to build new walls, but whether they have the courage to tear down the old ones that have been hiding in plain sight all along.

Which invisible barriers should African governments prioritize addressing? The answer will determine whether the continent’s integration remains a distant aspiration or becomes an economic reality.

Ziad Hamoui is the Co-Founder and Past President of the Borderless Alliance, a leading private-sector advocacy group promoting economic integration and removing trade and transport barriers in West Africa. With extensive experience in Ghana’s road transport, logistics, and shipping sectors, he currently serves as Executive Director of Tarzan Enterprise Ltd., a long-established family business. He is a former Co-Chair of the Africa Food Trade Coalition, Co-Founder of the Trade Facilitation Coalition for Ghana, and serves on multiple high-level advisory committees on trade, transport, agriculture, and security. A Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILT) Ghana, he is also a former member of its Governing Council.