Shipping goods from Lagos to Accra, two cities in neighbouring West African countries, separated by approximately 400 kilometres of coastline, costs more than shipping the same goods from Spain to Nigeria, a journey of more than 4,000 kilometres across the Atlantic Ocean.
Aliko Dangote put that figure on the table in a sit-down interview with International Finance Corporation Managing Director Makhtar Diop, and the observation landed with the weight of someone who has spent decades actually trying to move products across African borders.
“It costs more to ship from Lagos port to Accra than from Spain to Lagos,” he said plainly. “There’s no way you can do trade with your neighbours like this.”
For Dangote, the frustration is not abstract. He runs a business across 17 African countries, operates the world’s largest single-train oil refinery, and has built the continent’s most ambitious private industrial empire. And yet he needs 38 visas to move freely around Africa.
“I need 38 visas to move around. How do I invest now if I’m not able to move around? I mean, 38 visas? It doesn’t make sense,” he told Diop. The border crossing problem compounds it further. “I cannot move my goods from Lagos to the Republic of Benin, and when you try to cross the border, you can be there for a week, if you are lucky,” he said.
The shipping cost is not an outlier. It is a symptom of a system that has never been designed to move African goods efficiently between African countries.
A Structural Failure That Policy Alone Has Not Fixed
The numbers reflect a failure that predates AfCFTA, predates ECOWAS, and has resisted every initiative aimed at fixing it. Intra-African trade accounts for roughly 15 percent of the continent’s total commerce, against 60 percent intra-regional trade in Europe and over 40 percent in Asia. The barriers are not only tariffs. They are port inefficiencies, duplicated border documentation, a near-total absence of direct shipping routes that force African cargo to transit through European hubs, and road infrastructure that cannot reliably handle heavy commercial freight.
Dangote added a detail that is rarely discussed publicly: “When we look at the transportation sector, most of the people who own ships that move goods around are not Africans.” Africa’s trade arteries, in other words, are owned by everyone but Africa.
What Afcfta Cannot Do On Its Own
The African Continental Free Trade Area was supposed to change this calculus. Tariffs on roughly 90 percent of goods are being progressively eliminated. But logistics costs, the physical cost of actually moving products, are not addressed by tariff schedules.
A Ghanaian manufacturer exporting to Senegal still faces a journey that is slower, less reliable, and more expensive than exporting to Europe. That arithmetic makes regional trade unattractive regardless of what the tariff schedule says. Dangote was direct about the stakes: “Free movement of people, free movement of goods and services, these are critical areas. Without this, there’s no way we are going to have a very prosperous Africa.” It was this frustration that led him to form the African Renaissance Group, a coalition of major African business leaders pushing for structural reform across borders, visas, shipping, and aviation. A short flight from Lomé to Accra, he noted, can cost $600. “How do you move around? People cannot afford this.”
Dangote’s comments this week were not entirely new. But when the man who built a $20 billion refinery from scratch, tested it at 661,000 barrels per day, and is now planning a 20,000-megawatt power programme, says out loud that he still cannot move a truck across the border without losing a week, it is harder to file away. “The problem is not demand,” he told Diop.
“The problem is delivery.” Until the logistics gap closes, AfCFTA risks becoming exactly what Dangote warned it would be: a framework that works better on paper than on the road.
