Last time I left my friend the sceptic with a union that could keep the peace at home. He has one answer left, and it is the oldest. It is a good idea, he says, but it will never happen.
I hear this often, and I hear it from people who want union. Ask them why and the reasons come quickly. “They” will not allow it. We cannot agree even inside one country. There are too many tribes and too many languages. Where would the capital be? Listen to the list and you hear one sentence in five forms: we are not able. That is not an argument about or against union. At their core, all of them are expressions of powerlessness. Every reason on the list is real. Every one of them was also true before each union that now exists. There is no single formula, and unionists do not claim one. In 1776 the thirteen American colonies had no common army, separate currencies and old quarrels among themselves, and they stood against Britain, the greatest power on earth. In 1815 Germany was a patchwork of thirty-nine states, and by 1871 it was one country. Within three years of independence, India folded more than five hundred princely states into one republic. Each of these looked impossible until it was done.
Who will not allow it
The world has been sitting at our table for a long time. Today Africa is fifty-four tables, and across each one sits a buyer, a lender, or a patron. The buyer of our cobalt, bauxite, timber, oil and fish deals with sellers one at a time and plays one against another. Each guest has a style. The West built the arrangement and still holds many of its keys: the borders, the currency, the contracts. China brings capital and roads, and takes minerals. Russia offers what a nervous president wants most, protection for his government, and takes gold for that service. Different manners, same chair. Each does better with fifty-four tables than with one.
Let’s put numbers on it so you can see how this works on the ground. Take a chocolate bar that costs one dollar. Cocoa farmers receive about seven cents of it, 6.6 per cent by the Cocoa Barometer’s count. Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest cocoa grower, captures less than a tenth of a chain worth more than US$120 billion a year. The Congo mines about seventy percent of the world’s cobalt and, according to a 2021 BloombergNEF study, quoted by the UN Economic Commission for Africa, captures about three cents of each dollar of value in the battery and electric-vehicle chain. Nigeria’s own mining audit says why: most companies dig and export without refining, because local firms lack the know-how and the money to build the plants.
Oil looks better on paper. Governments write their share of the profit into the contract, and one comparison of oil contracts, reported by Oxford Business Group, put that share at 38 to 50 percent in Ghana, 64 to 70 in Nigeria and 64 in Angola. But the profit is only what is left after the company takes back its costs, and in some Nigerian contracts it can take back up to 80per cent of the oil for that. Costs are hard for a state to check, and the more a company says it spent, the less profit is left to share. The World Bank found the Congo’s state oil company selling its crude 5 to 6 percent below what that oil should fetch. Chad shows how the loans work. In 2013 and 2014 it borrowed from Glencore, a trading house, and promised to repay in oil. At first the lender was entitled to up to all of the oil profits until the debt was paid, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Then the price of oil fell 54 per cent from its 2014 peak, the oil no longer covered the debt, and Chad had to renegotiate. It did so on commercial terms, the kind a bank offers, not the cheap, long loans that development lenders give poor countries, as a condition of
US$1.1 billion in debt relief. In the Congo, the government’s share runs from 93 per cent in some contracts down to 50 in others, depending on who signed, when and against whom. That gap is what it means to be played against one another. Botswana shows what one country can win when it bargains hard. It owns half of Debswana, the company that mines its diamonds, and 15 per cent of De Beers, which sells them. Imagine fifty-four states bargaining as one.
But the guests are not the only ones at the table. Some are sitting on our side of it. These are the presidents with thrones to keep; businessmen who grow rich on the gaps between 54 rulebooks and 54 customs posts. This is the group that has come to treat the government as their own, and fear becoming only one voice among many in a union. Researchers who studied eighteen African countries over 50 years found that when a leader’s ethnic group holds power, it does better on schooling and infant survival, under democrats and autocrats alike. The proper name for this is “tribal favoritism.” They, too, say a union will not be allowed, and they can make it so.
“They will not allow it” is what people say when they know that those who would lose something from union will fight it every step of the way. That is the “they,” and it is Janus-faced. The outsider (the buyer, the lender, the patron) gains from fifty-four tables. The insider (the president, the businessman, the favored group) gains from the thrones. It is not a law of nature. It is a recognition of powerlessness turned to zeitgeist. The outsider can be bargained with, because one continental table has something to offer each guest that fifty-four tables cannot. The insider can be outvoted. A union worth having is born of the people’s vote, with the presidents setting the timetable, and the president who steps aside becomes a governor with the eternal gratitude of his people, and indeed a continent. Nobody asks the throne for permission. The throne is offered a dignified exit.
We cannot agree even at home
If we cannot agree inside one country, the skeptic says, how can we agree across fifty-four? And there are too many tribes. The surveys say otherwise about the people, if not about the politicians. Afrobarometer interviewed more than 46,000 people in 33 countries between 2021
and 2023. Only 14 percent felt closer to their ethnic group than to their nation. Forty-one percent felt more national than ethnic, and 45 percent felt both equally. Nine in ten said they would not mind a neighbor from another ethnic group, and almost as many were open to marriage across the line. An earlier Afrobarometer survey in 20 countries south of the Sahara found that seven in ten people speak at least two languages, and nearly three in ten speak three or more.The same survey carries a warning. Forty-one percent said their own group is treated unfairly by their government at least sometimes. And that is the real quarrel – not that we are many, but that the rules are not fair to all of us. A federation exists because there are many peoples. Switzerland has four national languages and has held together since 1848. The EU (though not a federation) functions with 24 languages. Nigeria has hundreds of languages and survived a civil war as one country. A constitution that treats every group alike does not erase our differences. It makes them safe with clear rules that apply across the board.
The alternative to a union is not peace. Since independence, the Uppsala Conflict Data Programme has recorded 108 separate armed conflicts involving African governments, 93 of them wars inside a country’s own borders, in 43 of our 54 countries. In 2025, 29 were still active. The programme counts a conflict only after 25 battle deaths in a year, and counts one conflict where several groups fight over the same issue, so the true number is higher. Disagreement with no constitution to resolve it does not stay a quarrel. It becomes a war. A union can settle its quarrels inside one constitution, as America and Nigeria did, and fifty-four separate countries cannot.
By Morro K Ceesay
