The East Africa Community should be congratulated for incorporating Rwanda and Burundi in its Customs Union. The two will launch their memberships officially on 6^th July 2009.  

Despite the fact that Africa’s entrepreneurs and other business people (such as mobile phone companies) have demonstrated that integration is possible by making their networks cut across regions, Africa’s political leaders continue to drag cold feet on integration, for fear of ceding some of their powers and being accountable. Already, ECOWAS has shifted its target of establishing a single currency from December 2009 to 2020. 

Indeed, President Umaru Yar'Adua’s lament that even after 30 years of signing the protocol on free movement, bottlenecks in ECOWAS members’ borders still hamper effective integration is a far cry to Africa’s regional groupings such as COMESA and SADC to walk the talk. Merging the main trade groups in Africa would boost inter-African trade and utilize the combined gross domestic product of more than $620 billion.  

Africa's leaders ought to speedily rationalize the current complex and duplicative plethora of integration institutions with a view of not only creating robust institutions that are strong enough to produce solid gains for all members but also engaging the rest of the world.