“Fine. But is all that worth the trouble?”
Last time I promised arithmetic, and I keep my promises, even the ones that make me do math. Union has a price and an honest accounting starts with what union buys. I will give you three numbers, all for the year 2075. The first is where we are headed if we stay apart. The second is what union could add. The third is a question of African pride.
Africa’s economy today is about $3 trillion. Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, looked fifty years ahead, and its forecast, as Colin Coleman reports it, has the continent reaching about $44 trillion by 2075. (Mr Coleman ran Goldman Sachs’s sub-Saharan Africa business until 2019 and is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.) That is nearly fifteen times bigger than today. Put another way, the economy would double about every thirteen years. That is growth of 5.4% a year, every year, for half a century.
The question is, how much more could we do if we stopped going it alone?
I will tell you plainly that the union number rests on an assumption no one has proven. It is that union adds at least one extra point of growth a year for fifty-one years, 6.4% instead of 5 .4%. One extra dollar in a hundred sounds like nothing, but at 6.4% growth, an economy doubles about every eleven years and that equals about $71 trillion by 2075, 62% more than the $44 trillion we would reach apart. With me so far?
If the GDP of Africa is $44T in 2075, that total shared among the expected 3.3 billion population of Africa in 2075 is about $13,000 a head a year. If union adds only one extra percentage point of growth a year (6.4% instead of 5.4%), Africa’s GDP in 2075 is $71 T, or $21 ,600 for each of its 3.3 billion people. The difference between the two totals is about $27 trillion. That is the prize union begets. But there is more.
The third number is an appeal to African pride before it is an economic argument. From 1980 to 2019 China’s economy grew by nearly 9.5% a year, for forty years, and China then was a poor country of farmers. If China did it, why can’t we? Let’s borrow from Obama and say, “Yes, we can!”
Let us match China’s record and go no further. Start from about $3.6 trillion in 2026 (the first two numbers started from $3 trillion in 2024). At 9.5% a year, forty years takes that to about $135.8 trillion. Then let growth ease to 4.5% for nine years, as it is likely to do in a maturing economy. That brings us to about $202 trillion. Shared among 3.3 billion people, that is about $61,000 a head, against $2,250 today. Thus the premium for union is not one point of growth but as much as four points a year for the first forty years.
Is it likely? Here is the paradox: the numbers with the most measurement behind them are the least likely, and the numbers with the least are the most likely. The studies that exist measure trade agreements among fifty-four countries that keep fifty-four heads, as we are, and that arrangement has failed us before. Kwame Nkrumah left us a commandment: seek ye first the political kingdom, and all else shall be added unto you. China had one government, one rulebook and one market of more than a billion people. Give Africa a republic with one elected president, and the market, the minerals and the defense will be added unto it. Only union delivers the steady state that makes the numbers likely. What Africa needs is union and belief, and we have a real shot at the $202 trillion by 2075. It is the difference between being the victim of a world order and being the world order.
What the money is for? The answer is capacity. Capacity is the power to do what a constitution asks of a state. To keep the peace, so that internal quarrels do not turn into civil wars; to feed people, so that a drought in one place does not become a famine; to defend the land, so that no outside power can buy a government, arm a faction or take the riches; and to give people a life with dignity at home. Isn’t that worth fighting for?
Look at what the boldest number would make us. Goldman Sachs forecasts that in 2075 the United States will have an economy of $51.5 trillion and China $57 trillion, together $108.5 trillion. At China’s pace, at $202 trillion, Africa would be nearly twice the two combined! Isn’t that worth fighting for?
Money is also the muscle of a state. At China’s pace of growth, a 2075 defense budget of 5% would be about $10 trillion of Africa’s $202 trillion GDP, $2.6 trillion of the United States’ GDP of $51.5 trillion, and $2.85 trillion of China’s $57 trillion GDP. If a budget is any measure of the vigor of that defense, the largest economy on earth would also field the most powerful military on earth.
Income per head is a different matter. It decides how well each of us lives, and person for person we would not be as rich as Americans: Goldman puts them at about $132,000 in 2075, and we would be at about $61 ,000. But that does not decide what a continent can do. The United Arab Emirates earns more per head than China, and no one thinks it sane for it to take on China. Power comes from the size of the whole. What each of us needs is to be rich enough that no young person risks being swallowed by the Sahara or drowned in the Mediterranean to get away from Africa, rich enough that a coup is a poor bargain, and rich enough to see something rarer than a unicorn – a president who steps down when the constitution says so and lives out his old age at home. I daresay $61 ,000 a year is rich enough.
There is one more thing the money buys, and it concerns Europe as much as us. Colin Coleman, whose forecast I have been using, wrote in 2024 that Africa’s population is set to rise from 1.4 billion to 3.3 billion by 2075, “likely triggering an explosion of migration to Europe,” and that the continent “could also trigger the next great European war.” We already see the far right rising in Britain, Germany, France and Italy, and I do not see any of them going to war with a neighbor to keep Europe’s door open to Africans. It is far more likely they will collaborate, as they do now, to keep Africans in Africa. You need not even squint to see them fortifying Ceuta, Malta and the Canary Islands to do it. Staying apart is a bet that a Europe facing that many people at its shores will behave well. I would not take the bet, because the pressure only grows. I think the nearer we are to 2075, the likelier the conflict. A frightened Europe will be tempted to return to what it knows best. Its old imperial instincts, now politely hidden behind aid and trade deals, will resurface in the open. A union rich enough to keep its young at home, and strong enough to say no, takes away both the reason and the temptation. Union is how we prevent that war.
I cannot prove that a divided Africa leads to war, and I do not need to. No one can prove the hurricane will strike your house, but you board the windows because of what it does if it comes. When the loss is catastrophic, even a modest chance justifies the strongest preparation, all the more when we have no defenses of our own. Fifty-four countries, each with its own head, can be bought, frozen or turned against one another one deal at a time. Union is the only defense we can build, and it pays for itself even if the storm never comes: $27 trillion more if it adds a single point of growth, and $15 8 trillion more if we grow as China did ($202T minus $44T is $158 trillion). So why run the risk of being colonized again, when the bet in the other direction could make us the greatest power on earth?
So where does the money comes from? Only about 13% of the trade of African countries is with each other, against 55% in Asia and 70% in Europe, according to the UN Economic Commission for Africa. The cause is barriers such as tariffs, slow borders and bad roads. One budget, not fifty-four, would pay for the roads, power lines and ports that cross our borders. Who pays, and who receives, is written into the constitution, in the open, at the birth of the union, before the first dollar moves.
Three honest warnings. First, these figures are scenarios. They show scale. They are not predictions. Second, the studies that exist measure trade agreements; nobody has measured political union, and the two union figures assume the federation comes first. If it does not, they do not follow. Third, some gains a single country can chase alone, as Congo, the world’s largest cobalt producer, did when it limited its exports in 2025. What no country can do alone is get the other producers to move with it. A free trade zone does not guarantee that agreement, because each member can still break ranks and sell. Nor will separate countries or a free trade zone prevent a Libya. A federation does both, because it has one head and a formidable military, and acts as one republic rather than 54 separate countries.
We stand at a fork in the road, and we must choose. Do we stay apart, or do we unite? A free trade zone is half a union, and half a union keeps every old weakness. Suppose we stay apart and it goes wrong. Suppose it goes exactly as planned – $44T by 2075. That success still fails the test that matters. At about $13,000 a head, against more than $100,000 in the Euro Area, $132,000 in the United States, $55,000 in China and $31 ,000 in India, we meet whatever comes – a Europe at the end of its patience included – as fifty four separate countries, with no collective defense of our own and no capacity to mount one. But suppose we unite, go bold, and it goes wrong. We meet it as one union with one army and one voice. Failure either way may end in a confrontation with Europe. But only with union do we have the power ($202 trillion) to prevent that war, or to meet it on our own terms, as the most powerful country in the world.
I think the choice is obvious. Staying apart is not the safe choice, the wise choice, or the right choice. It is the choice that made us exactly who we are today. We are not powerless to change the future. But my friend the skeptic has one more answer ready. Surely the African Union can do all this gradually, one careful step at a time, without the trouble. That’s called Gradualism. The answer is no. And that’s next …
By Morro Ceesay
