From Africa Recovery, Vol.16 #2-3 (September 2002), page 18

What kind of regional integration?

Regional integration in Africa cannot be built around simply lifting trade barriers, but also requires policies that promote industry and job creation, declares Mr. Hassan Sunmonu, general secretary of the Organization of African Trade Union Unity (OATUU). Launched in 1973, the OATUU represents the main trade union federations throughout the continent, and Mr. Sunmonu is a well-known voice for African labour rights, social advancement and democracy. Here he provides Africa Recovery with a labour perspective on regional integration.

On liberalization and integration:

By integration, we don't mean just economic integration, but economic and political integration, infrastructure, linking energy, linking roads, transport, and so on.... In any case, liberalization in the neo-liberal sense is what we don't want. As an African trade union organization, we know that liberalization connotes different things to different people. Liberalization that fosters intra-African trade, and Africa having its own fair share of world trade, yes, in that sense. But liberalization that destroys infant industries in Africa, that does not even promote intra-African trade, and that lessens the proportion of Africa's trade with the rest of the world, that's not our idea.

The people of Europe itself, they say they want a social Europe, not a neo-liberal Europe that marginalizes the majority of the people and benefits only a few multinational businesses. They want a social Europe, where the people of Europe will receive the benefits of integration. The same thing in Africa. We are not saying anything different. We want a fully integrated union of the African people, a social, economic and political union of Africa, in which the people have to play their part.

On free labour movement:

At the international level, they want free movement of capital, and no free movement of people. That is wrong, unacceptable. If capital can move freely, people must also be able to move freely. Within the African continent itself, we are part of this process of the African Union. We are insisting that the union must be a union of the African peoples. So the right of establishment, the right to movement of persons, goods and services, will be there. It will not come in one day. It is a process. But that is the way we want to go.

On sub-regional organizations:

Our role, as an African trade union organization, is to push the integration of civil society into the process of building the regional economic communities, the RECs. This will make the communities cooperate [with each other] in the African Union. We need to push the involvement of African civil society in each of the five sub-regions in order to speed up the process. Otherwise it will take a long, long time. We don't want the regional economic communities to be bureaucratic.

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