NIGERIAN billionaire Aliko Dangote complained recently about his passport sitting in an embassy for 10 days to get a visa that would allow him to travel to one African country when he needed to travel to seven countries during those 10 days.

He raised the issue at a business forum during the Nigerian state visit earlier this month, during which it was announced that the governments of South Africa and Nigeria would sign a memorandum of understanding to allow the issuing of three-year multiple entry visas to businesspeople.

Dangote asked how it was that the UK issued 10-year visas to travellers while Africa’s two economic giants were celebrating a three-year visa, up from one year. Even Ethiopia, despite being host to the African Union, requires many Africans to have visas, and yet there is probably more discussion about the need for regional integration there than anywhere else on the continent.

Africans need visas to visit more than two-thirds of countries on their own continent. Visas on arrival are possible only in a handful of places.

Air travel is another headache. Dangote, along with many other wealthy African businesspeople, has his own jet. The complications of getting between countries, and the expense of convoluted air schedules involving multiple airlines to more out-of-the-way destinations, means private jets have become a must-have accessory for busy people in Africa.

Road travel is a logistical nightmare that is barely possible across swathes of the continent. The increasingly pan-African nature of companies doing business on the continent means a continuous juggling of passports and travel plans simply to run a business. The lack of connectivity in Africa was the subject of much debate at the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Africa in Cape Town in the same week as the Nigerian state visit.

New Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta said it was sad that, 50 years after the wave of independence swept across Africa, 70-million Ethiopians remained cut off from trading effectively with the rest of the East African Community simply by the lack of a decent road of a few hundred kilometres that links this rising economy to its powerful neighbour, Kenya.

A businessman lamented the fact that it took four hours of travelling to get to an airport an hour’s flying time away; another asked why it was cheaper to import goods from China than to take them to the country next door. The lack of connectivity in Africa remains a key challenge, despite billions of dollars having been spent on infrastructure and trade facilitation over the years.

Regional integration has been made a priority by multiple stakeholders — funders, development agencies, governments and the private sector. And yet links between us are poor and sometimes nonexistent, a situation that feeds ignorance and acts as a brake on development and the creation of wealth.

It is common cause that the existence of 54, mostly small, national markets is not a formula for success in Africa. Creating bigger regional markets to attract investment has become something of a mantra. But delivery remains slow. Infrastructure is just part of the problem. The gaps are significant and there are many projects on the table. In order to get some movement on delivery, the WEF has joined forces with governments, business and professional organisations to identify a list of priority projects that have a realistic chance of seeing the light of day in the near term.

But an oft-cited lack of political will to act regionally, rather than nationally, has been a missing link and this is not likely to change soon. Politicians have been largely ineffective to date in solving the soft infrastructure problems — visas, harmonisation of requirements in cross-border trade, free movement of skills and people, and other sticking points that impede real integration even where hard infrastructure exists.

The most effective integration of Africa is happening in the space where the politicians have little or no sway — social media. This weekend, it will have been 50 years since then Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah marked the founding of the Organisation of African Unity with the words: “Africa must unite or perish.” Let’s hope it doesn’t take another 50 years for his vision to be realised.

• Games is CE of Africa @ Work, a consultancy that focuses on African business