AfCFTA bets $3.1 billion on making borders digital

Article 70 of the 2006 constitution gives a president two five-year terms, and Article 220 puts the number and length of that mandate among the clauses no revision may touch — which is why the route on the table is a referendum on a new text rather than an amendment to this one, and why this is bigger than one man's third term. We wrote in July that 2026's ballot year is a referendum on how leaders leave; our Power block puts odds on it: of the 54 leaders we grade, 21 governed with a term limit in force, 11 moved or removed it, and only Olusegun Obasanjo was stopped outright — by his own Senate, in 2006. Our Scorecard read on Tshisekedi was written before this week and still fits: legitimacy and constitutional conduct are the two half-marks on a card of 2.5 out of 5. He has something to argue with — rule of law and control of corruption have climbed to the 68th percentile of African countries since 2019, above the continental median — but his democratic trajectory sits at P38 and rights and participation at P34, and the question we put to the minerals-for-security accords in August, who benefits, is harder to answer for a presidency negotiating its own extension. The real test is not a dialogue convened by ordinance two days before the police moved: it is whether a referendum ever gets a date, and whether the Court that unlocked the law is ever asked to rule on Article 220 itself.

We said on 8 September that Kenya's hawker order put East Africa's common market on trial; South Africa's version has run since June, and a peer parliament has now sent the bill. Ramaphosa set the right rule himself on 7 June — enforcing immigration law “rests with the state and the state alone” — and our Scorecard rates his conduct 4.2 out of 5, but by Abuja's count the attacks kept coming while the state's visible answer was deportation. The grievance the vigilantes exploit is jobs, and our data locates that stall at home: since 2018 South Africa's development delivery sits at the 10th percentile of African countries, with GDP per head down 4% to 2022 while the median African country's rose 1%. Nigeria's move is calibrated too — the legislature pulled the lever, not Tinubu's executive, and the directive binds only parliament. The real test for the SADC chair who pledged in August to lift regional trade to 50% is whether voters hear about a prosecuted ringleader, not a scapegoat, before the 4 November municipal elections.

We said in August that goods were getting a digital fast lane while people still waited at the counter; Nairobi has now shown what happens when a president closes the counter in one sentence. Kenya has every right to police permits, and its informal economy — some 18 million people — has real grievances about who competes at the bottom. But a rule announced by nationality and enforced by neighbours before any officer arrived is not regulation, it is a signal, and the 90-day window that corrected it came six days after the looting. The EAC Common Market Protocol, in force since 2010, is worth exactly what Nairobi does in a hard week — and Kampala and Kigali are watching the precedent. The real test is whether the expanded Local Content Bill ends up reserving trades by permit or by passport.