As the global balance of power shifts and traditional alliances falter, analysts argue that Nigeria and South Africa — Africa’s two largest economies — hold the key to steering the continent toward greater prosperity and stability.
According to their leadership, cooperation, and strategic positioning could help Africa navigate the uncertainties of an increasingly competitive and unpredictable world order.
According to this logic, African countries would be more likely to attract investment and trade opportunities in a system less concerned about issues of democracy and good governance. But Trump’s world, one in which raw coercion shapes geopolitics, is dangerous for states that have limited influence in the global economy.
Succeeding in a deal-making era requires leverage that most African countries lack: the continent is home to about 20 percent of the world’s population but only five percent of its economic activity.
African countries would stand a better chance of thriving in the postliberal international order if they came together. Closer coordination among even just a few influential African states could quicken the pace of economic integration on the continent, foster larger markets, and accelerate industrialization. Greater cohesion would also give the region more leverage in trade and investment negotiations with outside powers.
Such coordination is difficult to engineer, but not impossible. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, as former colonies gained independence from receding European empires, African countries united around a shared commitment to self-determination. Leaders across the continent exchanged ideas, financial resources, and weapons in support of one another’s independence movements. When Ghana won self-rule in 1957, its leader, Kwame Nkrumah, declared that the country’s independence would be “meaningless until it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent.” And in 1963, the leaders of 32 newly independent African states met in Addis Ababa to create the Organization of African Unity. The OAU, the continent’s first multilateral institution, became instrumental in coordinating support for African independence movements and forging an international consensus in support of African liberation.
African unity during this period was propelled by moral purpose and championed by the leaders of the first states to gain independence, including Ghana, Senegal, Tanzania, and Zambia. That ethos united elites across borders, ethnicities, and languages, forging a powerful consensus in favor of independence.
In today’s more transactional era, African unity is best advanced by a common economic agenda. Two of the continent’s most powerful countries, Nigeria and South Africa, are best equipped to lead the charge. Together, they can amass the geopolitical clout, financial resources, and cultural influence needed to rally a plurality, if not a majority, of African countries behind a global vision.
A more cohesive African bloc could extract more concessions from its trading partners and have more say in shaping global trade rules. To be sure, Africa is a vast and diverse continent, and its many states often have competing interests and foreign policies. But success in the dog-eat-dog world of Trumpian transactionalism won’t come from African countries’ ruggedly pursuing their own national interests; they will prosper only if they work together.
