“Two Africans, Two Passports, One Broken System!” by Dr. Shaaban K. Fundi is not merely a wake-up call for Africans to unite and work in unison by dismantling the artificial boundaries that separate them and embracing a common African identity and passport. It is, more importantly, a clarion call to African leaders - a demand that they rise from their prolonged political slumber, extricate themselves from the quagmire of fear, ego, and shortsightedness in which they have wallowed for decades, or risk missing the train of history altogether.
In essence, the essay exposes a moral and political failure at the very heart of post-independence Africa.
Dr. Shaaban lays bare a truth so obvious that it has become invisible - Africa distrusts Africans more than it distrusts outsiders. An African billionaire - rich in capital, experience, and commitment to the continent - is treated as a suspect at African borders, while a barely adult foreign passport holder, armed with little more than a GoPro and curiosity, glides effortlessly across the same borders, welcomed with smiles, vidumbaki and visa-free privileges.
This is not accidental.
It is policy.
And policy is a mirror of leadership.
A leadership that distrusts its own people is a dead leadership. And dead leaderships do not reform - they must disappear from our African continent.
African leaders never tire of chanting Pan-Africanism at conferences, summits, and Independence Day podiums. Yet the moment the microphones are switched off, they retreat behind borders drawn in European capitals - borders they now defend more zealously than the colonizers who imposed them.
The outcome is tragic and absurd:
- Africans are foreigners in Africa
- African capital is treated as a risk
- African talent is constrained domestically and compelled to seek survival abroad
- African unity is ceremonial, not practical
The African Union (AU) exists today largely as a talking shop. It issues communiqués, not courage. It hosts summits, not solutions. When it comes to the single most visible and meaningful symbol of unity - the free movement of Africans within Africa - the AU has failed spectacularly and miserably.
This failure is all the more shameful because Africa was once blessed with leaders who saw far beyond the next election.
The late Dr. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana warned Africa with prophetic clarity:
“Africa must unite or perish.”
That message was later echoed across the continent by Bob Marley, but it never entered into the ears of our leaders.
Nkrumah went further and said:
“The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa.”
He understood that fragmentation was a death sentence. His overthrow did not merely remove a president - it derailed an entire continental vision. With his fall, Africa retreated into timid nationalism, small flags, and even smaller ambitions, a condition that persists to this day.
Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, the most sacred father of our land, echoed the same truth:
“Without unity, there is no future for Africa.”
Nyerere, together with Karume, placed action above rhetoric. Against enormous odds, they united Tanganyika and Zanzibar - Karume even relinquishing the presidency to become Vice-President - enabling the creation of Tanzania. That Union remains one of the clearest living testimonies that African unity is not a dream, but a practical possibility, even though the Union is today casually loathed by a few misguided nuts, nincompoops and intellectually careless voices within our own midst.
Our Union remains more real, more functional, and more meaningful than most regional blocs on the continent.
Yet instead of building upon such examples, Africa’s leaders chose comfort over courage.
Africa today suffers from what can only be called the One-Meter Vision Syndrome.
Africa’s greatest leadership crisis is not corruption alone - it is myopia.
Most African leaders:
- Think only as far as the next election
- Govern only as far as the next budget cycle
- Plan only as far as their own tenure
- They fear free movement because they fear competition.
- They fear African investors because they fear losing control.
- They fear unity because unity dilutes personal power.
By maintaining hostile visa regimes and suspicious immigration systems, African states have lost far more than they have gained:
- Lost intra-African trade
- Lost regional industries
- Lost economies of scale
- Lost global bargaining power
Dr. Shaaban, as you mentioned - Europe did not rise by forcing Europeans to beg one another for visas.
Asia did not grow by blocking its entrepreneurs at borders.
Africa will not progress while Africans are treated as intruders on their own soil.
If Africa continues down this path - celebrating flags while sabotaging unity - it risks sliding into a new form of domination. Not through direct colonial rule, but through economic dependency, external validation, and imported solutions, a reality already visible across much of the continent today.
It is unbearable to sink it in our minds that the very powers that once divided Africa now enjoy freer movement across it than we Africans ourselves - the sons and daughters of the soil.
That is not sovereignty.
That is self-sabotage.
Dr. Shaaban Fundi, you are right - painfully right.
Until African passports carry dignity in Africa…
Until African leaders trust African people…
Until borders serve development rather than fear…
Africans will continue, in the immortal words of Dr. Nkrumah, to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water.”
The tragedy is not that Africa lacks vision.
The tragedy is that Africa’s leaders refuse to use the vision they inherited from the likes of Nyerere and Nkrumah!
Africa is not cursed.
It is being held back by the smallness of its own leadership.
And are we Tanzanians guilty of holding Africa back?
Africa will not progress while Africans are treated as intruders on their own soil.
If Africa continues down this path - celebrating flags while sabotaging unity - it risks sliding into a new form of domination. Not through direct colonial rule, but through economic dependency, external validation, and imported solutions, a reality already visible across much of the continent today.
It is unbearable to sink it in our minds that the very powers that once divided Africa now enjoy freer movement across it than we Africans ourselves - the sons and daughters of the soil.
That is not sovereignty.
That is self-sabotage.
Dr. Shaaban Fundi, you are right - painfully right.
Until African passports carry dignity in Africa…
Until African leaders trust African people…
Until borders serve development rather than fear…
Africans will continue, in the immortal words of Dr. Nkrumah, to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water.”
The tragedy is not that Africa lacks vision.
The tragedy is that Africa’s leaders refuse to use the vision they inherited from the likes of Nyerere and Nkrumah!
Africa is not cursed.
It is being held back by the smallness of its own leadership.
And are we Tanzanians guilty of holding Africa back?
Sadly, yes, we are - so long as some among us masquerade as supporters of African unity while harboring corrosive hostility and evil traits toward our own Union back home.
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