Speaking at the Africa CEO Forum in Kigali, Rwanda, on May 17, Africa’s richest person, Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote, complained that he faces far more obstacles travelling around Africa than Europeans ever do.

“I have to apply for 35 different visas on my passport [to travel freely across Africa],” Dangote said. “I can assure you that Patrick [Pouyanne, CEO of Total Energies] doesn’t need 35 visas on a French passport, which means [he has] freer movement than myself in Africa.”

Even for an uber-wealthy businessman with near unlimited means like Dangote, the continent’s fragmented and discriminatory visa regime is clearly a considerable inconvenience. For millions of African migrants, however, it is a major obstacle to safety, stability, success and prosperity.

Indeed, stringent visa regimes discriminating against Africans are not only inconveniencing industrialists and harming the continent’s economic development, but also destroying migrant lives and dreams and hindering efforts to achieve true African unity.

Today, while most Westerners are free to roam the continent and exploit its socioeconomic potential with ease, Africans who want to move, for whatever reason, are swimming against the current.

This was not always the case.

In the 1990s, my father ran a modest butchery and liquor store on Cameron Street, a busy road that stretched from the outskirts of the central business district to the less-endowed environs of Zimbabwe’s capital Harare.

Small and nondescript, the shop was surrounded by many thriving businesses that sold cheap furniture, beds, clothes, bags, blankets, and shoes. It catered mainly to revellers and shoppers who lived in the nearby Mbare township, a low-income neighbourhood, as well as workers who commuted from places such as Chitungwiza and outlying rural areas. Among our regular patrons were Mozambican traders who sold cheap watches across the city and kept their stock at our shop.

In those years, an ever-increasing number of young entrepreneurs from Central and West Africa were opening up small shops across Harare. These young traders sold distinct, never-before-seen-in-Harare goods imported from India, China, and the UAE: radios, watches, bracelets, chains, and appliances.

I frequented these new places on occasion to buy a........

© Al Jazeera