BREXIT from the European Union: What lessons for the African Union integration?

The peaking of the threat to the European Union integration through the Brexit of June 2016 has some important lessons for Africa. We argue that the major steps in African integration have been built from a European integration script. Any major changes and transformations in the integration process in the EU would give an easy prediction that there will be changes in a similar direction in Africa as well. While Africa sees Europe as the best and only script that would never fail, the refugee crisis and its corollary of terrorism threat (imagined or real) and the financial crisis in Greece and other weaker economies earlier like Portugal highlight fault lines. It shows that the script that Africa has been following has some missing links. We thus argue further that a closer perusal of the weaknesses in EU integration provides important lessons for Africa. Therefore, Africa should also detach from following external scripts in its development processes and develop its own peculiar functional and neofunctional paths towards integration.