Free movement of people, but not of goods: the West African paradox.

With my Ivorian ID card, I can travel freely in Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria. My goods, however, remain stuck at the borders.

This paradox is at the heart of my article "The Eco Can Wait, Intra-African Trade First," which you can find the link here:👇

https://mariusoula.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-eco-can-wait-intra-african-trade.html

This reflection has just found concrete confirmation. The highway linking Abidjan to Lagos — 1,081 km, six lanes, $`15 billion, crossing Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria — has officially entered its execution phase. The African Development Bank has been appointed lead arranger to mobilize public and private financing for the project, presented as one of the largest regional infrastructure undertakings on the continent and intended to bolster the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

A colossal investment, then — but its true effectiveness depends on much more than asphalt.

Asphalt moves faster than rules.

Let's be clear: no sustainable development is possible without road, rail, port, and airport infrastructure. These facilities are the essential prerequisite for trade, the engine of any economy. What distinguishes trade in goods from the movement of people is the volume of merchandise. A port does not expand its capacity to accommodate people, but to handle ever more containers. Consequently, increasing trade volumes necessarily requires facilitating flows.

For business to thrive, both physical infrastructure and a solid contractual framework are needed. African states have indeed made significant efforts to improve their business environments in order to attract investment and support economic activity.

This environment rests on two pillars:

· Physical infrastructure: roads, railways, ports, airports, etc., which enable the movement of goods within and beyond the country.

· Contractual infrastructure: laws, customs regulations, operating licenses, and trade rules, which govern and authorize transactions between economic actors.

As visible as physical infrastructure is, contractual infrastructure is equally essential for regulating trade and ensuring its smooth operation. It is this legal framework that sets the conditions for doing business and secures transactions, both nationally and with regional partners. This raises an obvious question: why invest $15 billion in a highway between Abidjan and Lagos without first harmonizing customs, financial regulations, and trade rules across all the countries it traverses?

If people can move freely, goods should be able to do the same.

Without such harmonization, intra-regional trade — which is meant to underpin stronger regional integration — will remain incomplete and insufficiently inclusive. The highway investment will only yield its full effects if accompanied by genuine customs and regulatory convergence.

The paradox of the timeline

This is where the timeline becomes revealing. The Abidjan-Lagos highway is entering its execution phase right now, with a lead financier already appointed and a mechanism for mobilizing public and private capital already underway. The eco, for its part, will not see the light of day until 2027 at the earliest, and even then gradually, reserved for countries meeting convergence criteria that no ECOWAS state yet fully satisfies today.

Compare this to the path taken by the European Union: customs union by 1968, single market completed in 1993, and only then the euro in 1999 — regulatory integration preceded the common currency by several decades. In West Africa, a very different sequencing is taking shape: physical infrastructure moves ahead first, the common currency follows its own separate and still uncertain timeline, and customs and regulatory harmonization — the real missing link — has no comparable official timetable at all.

In other words, the region is building the pipe before deciding what should flow through it, and under what conditions.

An Ivorian truck using this brand-new highway will still have to clear several distinct customs regimes, multiple tax systems, and various regulatory frameworks — ultimately arriving in Lagos just as slowly, administratively speaking, as before the road itself was built.

Furthermore, the future common currency, the eco — heir to the CFA system — benefits from a convertibility guarantee and a fixed peg to the euro. This arrangement makes the eco structurally expensive, because its value does not reflect the real economic potential of its member countries. As a result, these countries' exports are less competitive.

For Côte d'Ivoire, for example, importing rice, wheat, fish, or meat is often cheaper than buying locally. Even though local production is encouraged, it struggles to compete with lower-cost imported goods.

This perverse effect could be mitigated by vigorous development of intra-regional trade. But for that, building roads — even at $15 billion — is not enough. What is also needed, above all, is to put in place the contractual infrastructure that allows goods to move as freely as people.

WAEMU, ECOWAS, and their financial partners must therefore prioritize customs and regulatory harmonization before the eco even takes effect — and, now, even before the highway is completed. That is the price of making regional integration inclusive and capable of generating unprecedented growth.

Today, intra-African trade accounts for only 12% of the continent's exchanges — a figure that alone illustrates the enormous untapped potential of this regional market, still too dependent on extra-African imports.

The Abidjan-Lagos highway is a real opportunity to change this. But without a clear timetable for customs and regulatory harmonization as ambitious as that for the asphalt, it risks becoming a grand symbol of integration that, in practice, will carry goods still hindered at the very borders it crosses.

It is time to reverse the trend — and to give rules the same priority as physical infrastructure.

Marius C. Oula