Five years after Africa's most ambitious trade experiment took effect, the African Continental Free Trade Area stands as a testament to the distance between a signed agreement and a functioning reality. Across 55 nations and 1.2 billion people, the architecture of integration exists on paper, yet intra-African trade lingers at 14 to 16 percent — a fraction of what flows freely within Europe or Asia. The barriers are not the tariffs that negotiators labored to reduce, but the slower, harder truths of crumbling roads, fragmented payment rails, and domestic laws quietly designed to keep neighbors