A couple of weeks back, I mentioned in this column that the African Union will this month be providing details of its plans to launch a pan-African passport as part of its efforts to improve the free movement of people on the continent. The benefits of such a move will be immense; they will include an upsurge in intra-African tourism, which has been identified as a potential major revenue earner.

But it may be some time yet before the envisaged passport is available to us sons and daughters of the African soil. And we do not know the extent to which pan-African passport holders will be able to travel freely across the world.

So, it is interesting to see how much global access each of the passports issued by Africa’s 54 States currently gives its holders. The Henley Passport Index, the latest iteration of which was released a fortnight ago, comes in handy in this regard. Compiled by London-headquartered citizenship and residence advisory firm Henley & Partners using data from the International Air Transport Association, the index ranks passports in terms of the level of access they facilitate.

According to the index’s latest update, the Seychelles passport was the “strongest” in Africa during 2018, with its holders enjoying visa-free access to 151 countries worldwide. The Mauritius passport was ranked second, enabling holders easy access to 145 destinations. Mzansi came in third – citizens of this great nation of ours were able to travel visa free to 101 countries last year. Rounding out the top five were the Botswana and Namibian passports, which granted holders visa-free access to 82 countries and 75 countries respectively.

Other African countries that ranked highly were Lesotho (74 destinations), Kenya and Malawi (71 destinations each) and the Gambia, Tanzania and Malawi (68 destinations each).

All these countries – bar the Gambia – are members of the Southern African Development Community. How I wish the effort they put into convincing other countries to grant their citizens visa-free access was matched by their diligence in ensuring that member countries adhere to democratic norms. I was appalled last week when, with unseemly haste, a succession of Presidents of SADC member countries, including our own McBuffalo (aka Cyril Ramaphosa) congratu- lated one Felix Tshisekedi on ‘winning’ the recent Presidential election in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

I admit it would have been awkward for them to go against the judgment of the DRC Constitutional Court that confirmed Tshisekedi as having garnered the highest number of votes – a judgment that credible stakeholders like the Catholic Church, which deployed 40 000 observers during voting, took with a copious quantity of salt. The SADC Presidents had chosen to keep quiet when electoral officials engaged in all manner of shenanigans. For me, the most glaring was when voting in three regions with about 1.2-million registered voters was postponed to March – a good two months after the declaration of the winner. Mind you, the runner-up received only 600 000 votes fewer than the winner; what if he gets all the 1.2-million votes in March and exceeds Tshisekedi’s tally? If our Presidents chose to keep mum when all this was going on, the mind boggles as to why they suddenly found their voices and rushed to congratulate Tshisekedi.

But I digress – I set out to discuss the latest Henley Passport Index.

Seychelles may have been ranked first in Africa, but it was ranked only fifty-third in the world, with the top country being Japan, whose passport guarantees holders visa-free access to 190 countries. An important takeaway from the latest Henley Passport Index is that, despite the rising isolationist tendencies in some countries, many governments are committed to collaboration with other governments. As Henley & Partners chairperson Christian Kalin noted, the “general spread of open-door policies has the potential to contribute billions to the global economy, as well as to create significant employment opportunities around the world”.