Speaking at a recent corporate engagement at UCT’s Graduate School of Business, industry leaders, including Isuzu CEO Mr Billy Tom painted a clear picture. Africa’s logistics and trade infrastructure challenges aren’t technical problems, they’re structural, political, and fundamentally about mindset.

The Colonial Infrastructure That Still Binds Us

Africa’s infrastructure was designed for extraction, not integration. Roads lead to ports. Ports face outward to Europe and Asia. Railway networks, where they exist, were built to move minerals from mines to coastlines, not goods between African cities.

This legacy manifests in absurd realities. Mr Tom in his address recounted flying from Johannesburg to Zambia, then routing through Zimbabwe and Ethiopia just to reach neighbouring Malawi. A journey that should take hours by road required multiple international flights spanning days.

Linguistic fragmentation compounds these challenges. West Africa speaks French, Southern Africa operates in English, and Portuguese dominates other regions. These aren’t just communication barriers, they’re regulatory and bureaucratic walls that make cross-border trade frustratingly expensive.

Infrastructure Realities

Africa’s port inefficiency tells its own story. Container processing times that take days in Asian ports can take weeks in Africa. Rail infrastructure has become so unreliable that transporting goods by rail is now more expensive than road transport in South Africa, a complete inversion of economic logic.

Sending vehicles from South Africa to West Africa is cheaper via European shipping routes than direct coastal shipping, simply because the infrastructure and scale don’t exist for intra-African maritime trade. African demand remains fragmented across small markets, unable to justify dedicated shipping infrastructure.

AfCFTA: Promise Meets Reality

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) represents Africa’s best opportunity in generations to rewire trade patterns, but implementation requires more than political declarations. It demands brutal honesty about capacity gaps and coordinated investment.

The private sector sees this clearly. Companies operating across borders daily navigate the dysfunction, where customs processes break down, where regulatory harmonisation fails, where infrastructure creates bottlenecks. Their insights should inform policy, not just react to it.

The Trust Deficit

The trust deficit is an uncomfortable truth that emerges often in trade discussion.  Africans don’t always trust African products. Research on consumer behavior in developing economies confirms this bias, African consumers often perceive imported products from developed countries as superior quality, even when locally produced alternatives meet identical standards. The resistance is psychological, not rational.

This mindset kills intra-African trade before it starts. If South African companies won’t buy from Mozambique, how can complex regional value chains develop? Integration means Zambian copper going to South African processors, Zimbabwean agricultural products feeding Nigerian markets, and Kenyan technology solutions scaling continentally.

Moving Forward

The pathway requires simultaneous action. Governments must harmonise regulations, invest in cross-border infrastructure, and resist protecting inefficient local producers at regional integration’s expense. The private sector must commit to real value addition. It must invest in understanding different African markets and creating products designed for African realities.

Most critically, we need belief in African capabilities. The talent exists. The resources exist. The markets exist. What’s missing is infrastructure, both physical and institutional, that allows efficient connection.

Intra-African trade isn’t charity or romanticism. It’s economics. When money circulates within the continent, wealth compounds. When trade happens between African countries, logistics networks improve, manufacturing scales, and employment grows.

The question isn’t whether Africa can replicate Asia’s transformation. It’s whether we’ll make the necessary investments before another generation of opportunity passes us by.

*Dr Iqbal Survé

Past chairman of the BRICS Business Council and co-chairman of the BRICS Media Forum and the BRNN

*Chloe Maluleke

Associate at BRICS+ Consulting Group

Russian & Middle Eastern Specialist

**The Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Independent Media or IOL.

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