Regional integration in Africa has emerged in a somewhat pragmatic and flexible manner and as such, the evolution of Africa's institutions for regional integration has mainly been reactive, with most having emerged in response to immediate pressing needs and or donor pressure. The result is a multiplicity of Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and inter-governmental organizations that seem to have adapted their cooperative structures to the varied priorities that reflect the diversity of Africa’s sub regions. Notably, of Africa's 54 countries, only five belong to just one REC, while three belong to four, and the numbers of members vary widely.
This notwithstanding, Africa’s regional integration efforts have tended to follow a top-down approach, which has not really supported sub regional cooperation efforts of the RECs as building blocks of an African Economic Community as originally intended. The limitations of the existing approach are quite evident—for one thing, they have not resulted to more efficient and more effective institutions for regional integration, which are necessary to create large common markets or manage Africa’s expanding challenges and opportunities.
Institutions are important for a variety of human endeavor including regional integration given that they constitute the formal and informal rules or norms governing human interactions or behavior. The question is: which of these institutions--organizational entities, procedural devices, and regulatory frameworks--are critical for regional integration in Africa and why? How can we establish or strengthen them in order to accelerate Africa's integration, which is widely believed to be central to sustainable development in the continent?
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To accelerate regional integration in Africa, the continent must develop institutions that would have certain critical characteristics and that would do a number of important things beyond promoting trade and regional infrastructure programs. The continent’s faster integration will require institutions for regional integration that:
- Enhance leadership because leadership is critical for Regional Integration. Visionary and effective leadership is an essential requirement for accelerating regional integration. Transformative leadership and political will are important for identifying and defending Africa’s interests at all levels.
- Inform, educate and change mindsets and foster a spirit of Africanness, African solidarity and pan-Africanism. This is essential to ensure that people from the continent think of themselves first as Africans before thinking of themselves in terms of their respective nationalities.
- Enable the right decisions to be made and acted upon and the right laws and policies to be designed, implemented, monitored and evaluated. This is particularly important in ensuring that such organs as the secretariats or commissions of regional economic communities (RECs) are structured and empowered to take binding decisions on behalf of member states in order to speed up implementation of regional integration projects, programs and policies. They must be contributing to the achievement of continent-wide agendas including the objectives of the Abuja Treaty and AU Agenda 2063.
- Allow for a solid financial mechanism and that will enable capacity to flourish through the development, employment, retention and full and optimum utilization of human capacity--in particular capacity for policy design, implementation and monitoring and evaluation.
- Address the often-overlooked soft capacities that are central to regional integration, in particular, leadership, a change in mindset, political will motivation and shared values.
- Foster a citizen-driven regional integration process and allow for citizens’ maximum participation and propagation of awareness of the gains of regional integration.
- Enhance the involvement of supranational, national and local governance organizations that are required to participate in the African integration process. Integration institutions in African RECs must be restructured to allow for maximum local to national political participation in activities of the African Union (AU) and RECs.
- Serve as Africa's voice and enhance the continents engagement with the rest of the world.
Moreover, institutional setups that support regional integration are those that tolerate internal diversity and flexibility and a multi-speed Africa and have transparent and unambiguous legal frameworks, both on paper and in use, with clearly defined membership and compliance rules. They are also those institutions (secretariats) that have independent clear legal mandate and clear institutional linkages with relevant national agencies, stakeholders, other institutions for regional integration and global institutions.
Having identified desirable characteristics of institutions for regional integration, the natural question is: which institutions more specifically are critical for regional integration in Africa and why? If the objective of regional integration is to promote economic development, foster political stability and good governance, promote social development and peace and security, three institutions are critical: institutions that define the rules of the game, institutions that set the agenda, organizations—supranational and national—that will carry out integration and mechanisms and framework to ensure compliance and implementation.
First in this category of institutions is a constitution, treaty or legal framework that defines how member states and institutions interrelate and how power is shared among supranational, national and local parties. The constitution or treaty needs to enable the AU or REC to enforce its will through member countries.
The second category is a legal framework that makes political action relevant to citizens locally and creates willingness in (or compels) governments to domesticate AU or REC laws passed by the AU or REC because national legislatures are involved in passing AU or REC laws. The framework should also ensure that national and supranational regulatory bodies and courts participate in adjudication of AU or REC laws. It should also allow for decisions to be reached by simple or qualified majority vote, which ensures for some transparency through their citizens.
There is need for bodies that produce the general policy direction and policies and laws that apply through the AU member states. In this regard, this will include the policy-making mechanisms and arrangements that exist in the organizations promoting regional integration in Africa at either the continental level or at the regional level. Among these are the Assembly of the Heads of State and Governments, etc.
- There is also need for organizations, which drive the integration agenda. These include continental, regional, and national institutions dealing with various political, economic and social issues necessary to foster regional integration as well as non-governmental continental or regional organizations that support integration, e.g. : The African Union and its organs, the RECs and other intergovernmental institutions,
- the continental institutions or pan-African organizations that support in one way or another Africa’s integration efforts, including the African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF), African Development Bank (AfDB) and Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).
Also crucial is the setting up of independent watch groups that will monitor the compliance with laws, implementation of decisions and policies and mobilize to ensure that action is taken at various levels.
The African Capacity Building Foundation’s Africa Capacity Report 2014 (ACR 2014) shows that at the moment, the capacity to implement regional cooperation and integration is inadequate. For instance, many protocols that have been signed remain unimplemented, due to ineffective and inadequate institutional implementation capacity. In some RECs where capacity exists, it is neither optimally used nor sufficiently nurtured. Similarly, the overlapping membership hurts Africa's ability to negotiate as an equal with, say, the G20, BRICS or the European Union over important initiatives such as the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs).
Furthermore, RECs are faced with inadequate human resource capacity, which compromise policy design, implementation and monitoring and evaluation of their projects and programs; inadequate staffing for analysis and strategic planning, staff mismatches and workloads and limited autonomy of the secretariats and underdeveloped ICT infrastructure and databases.
Establishing institutions, which matter for regional integration in Africa is easier said than done. Building or strengthening these institutions could benefit from experience and best practices elsewhere. For this to happen, however, there would be need for institutional design experimentation that recognizes the existing sociopolitical and economic circumstances. Because many of Africa’s regional integration institutions are firmly established, we need to find ways of reforming and or strengthening them and creating an institutional architecture capable of meeting the new challenges facing regional integration.
It is important to identify overarching institutions whose role in African integration is critical. But is it equally important to create them if they do not exist and indeed strengthened and rationalized. Likewise, the African Union and the RECs need to have more effective and more autonomous commissions and secretariats.
While recognizing the principle of subsidiarity, it is important to strengthen the AU, its Commission and organs and the RECs so that they can play their role more effectively. It is equally important to strengthen other existing critical pan-African institutions such as ACBF, AfDB and ECA so that they can more effectively support the integration process recognizing the principle of comparative advantage. Notwithstanding, there is need to establish new institutions which play important roles as facilitating regional integration institutions. These include the African Central Bank, the African Monetary Fund and the African Investment Bank.
Sub regional initiatives that have worked well in specific parts of Africa ought to be replicated elsewhere. For instance, ECOWAS free movement of people and goods and common passport and East African Community’s (EAC’s) Customs Union. Also, the tripartite arrangement involving the COMESA, EAC and SADC can influence similar arrangement between ECCAS and ECOWAS which would create a large economic space in west and central Africa.
Building institutional capacity will require a long-term approach, an integrated and holistic approach, be demand-driven, adequate administrative and financial resources and regular networking among the RECs.
Key pan-African organizations such the ACBF, AfDB and ECA have a crucial role to play in supporting the establishment and strengthening of institutions for regional integration in Africa. Regional integration has been a priority focus for ACBF and the Foundation has, since its creation in 1991, been working to either build institutions or strengthen the capacities of existing institutions for regional integration. Some of ACBF’s regional interventions are:
- Knowledge generation and sharing via the production and dissemination of knowledge products and services on issues related to regional integration. A key example is the Survey of the Capacity Needs of Africa’s Regional Economic Communities published in 2008 and the ongoing update of the report as well as the ACR 2014 which focuses on the “Capacity Imperatives for Regional Integration in Africa.”
- Financial investment in capacity building through support at continental level to the African Union (AU) and at sub regional level to the RECs, such as CEMAC, COMESA, EAC, ECCAS, ECOWAS, SADC, and UEMOA
- Establishment of regional training programs in Anglophone and Francophone and Africa through programs such as the Economic Policy Management (EPM) Programs and the Programme de troisième cycle interunivesitaire en Economie (PTCI) and the African Institutions of Science and Technology (AIST).
