For decades, Pan-Africanism has been treated by Western policy circles as a romantic relic of the 1960s—a noble dream extinguished in a hail of bullets in Kinshasa, Conakry, and Ouagadougou. But in a major intervention in late 2025, economist Jeffrey Sachs declared that the dream is not only alive, but urgently necessary. Speaking alongside African development scholar Hippolyte Fofack, Sachs delivered what amounts to a manifesto for what he calls “Pan-African now”: a demand for immediate, radical continental integration as the sole bulwark against a predatory global financial system .

The Sachs Diagnosis: Fragmentation as a Weapon

Sachs’ argument is starkly economic. Africa’s fragmentation into 54 small, indebted economies is not an accident of history—it is an ongoing project of imperial strategy. He and Fofack argue that Western powers—principally the US, UK, and France—have actively suppressed Pan-African unity to maintain what Sachs terms “political economies of scale” for themselves while denying them to Africa .

The mechanism is the debt trap. Small African nations are subjected to punishing credit ratings, usurious interest rates, and conditional lending from Western-dominated institutions. Sachs describes this as a structural cage: without monetary integration and collective bargaining power, even resource-rich nations remain price-takers, not price-makers . His solution is not aid, philanthropy, or technology transfer. It is sovereignty through scale—an African monetary fund, a continental credit rating agency, and the political will to reject externally imposed financial architectures.

This marks a significant evolution in Sachs’ thinking. A student Harvard critique from 2020 noted that his earlier work attributed tropical underdevelopment primarily to geography and disease ecology, relegating neocolonialism to a footnote . Today, Sachs explicitly identifies imperialism as the root cause, not the symptom, of Africa’s economic subordination . Whether this represents conversion or capitulation to evidence, his voice now amplifies what African radicals have said for sixty years.

The Cost of Unity Deferred: A Roll Call of Assassinations

Sachs’ call for “Pan-African now” carries an implicit acknowledgment that Pan-Africanism was always considered a capital crime by the colonial powers. The historical record is unambiguous.

Patrice Lumumba, the DRC’s first democratically elected Prime Minister, was assassinated on 17 January 1961 by Katangese soldiers under Belgian command. His crime was attempting to nationalize the mineral wealth of the Congo. A DRC parliamentarian recently summarized it bluntly: “The colonizer did not want to let the DRC flourish” . Lumumba was 35.

Amílcar Cabral, the revolutionary agronomist who led Guinea-Bissau’s independence movement, survived five attempts on his life before being gunned down on 20 January 1973. Cabral had warned months earlier that Kwame Nkrumah was not killed by prostate cancer but by “the cancer of betrayal”—a CIA-assisted coup in 1966. Cabral’s own assassination was plotted by Portuguese intelligence operatives trained by the CIA. He was 48 .

Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso’s 33-year-old president, was cut down on 15 October 1987 alongside twelve colleagues. The hit squad was led by his former friend Blaise Compaoré, who then ruled for 27 years. Sankara had renamed his country from Upper Volta, banned foreign aid, vaccinated millions, and dared to suggest that Africa could feed itself. For 35 years, impunity prevailed. In April 2022, a military tribunal finally convicted Compaoré and ten others. It was the first time a former African president had been sentenced by a domestic court for political assassination .

The list is longer: Félix-Roland Moumié (Cameroon, 1961), poisoned by French intelligence. Mehdi Ben Barka (Morocco, 1965), abducted and never found. Eduardo Mondlane (Mozambique, 1969), killed by a parcel bomb . These were not random acts of violence. They were coordinated responses to a coherent ideological threat. Pan-Africanism was not merely inconvenient; it was existential to extractive empires.

The Third Liberation: Why Now?

If the 1960s were Africa’s first liberation—formal independence—and the 1990s a false second liberation of structural adjustment and conditional democracy, Sachs argues that the 2020s are the crucible for a third liberation: genuine economic sovereignty.

The evidence is no longer theoretical. In the Sahel, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have formed the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) , explicitly rejecting France’s neo-colonial architecture, withdrawing from ECOWAS, and promoting indigenous languages over French in official discourse. Leaders like Ibrahim Traoré and Assimi Goïta are not merely nationalist; they are self-consciously Pan-African, invoking Sankara and Nkrumah in speeches and framing their struggle as continental, not national .

Meanwhile, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) , despite its technocratic limitations, represents the first continent-wide institutional expression of Nkrumah’s vision since the OAU’s founding. Academic assessments note that while implementation lags rhetoric, the AfCFTA has “reawakened Pan-African consciousness” among a generation with no memory of the assassination squads .

Crucially, this revival is youth-led. Unlike the elite-driven OAU, contemporary Pan-Africanism is percolating through universities, social movements, and diaspora networks. A 2025 framework from Kennesaw State University explicitly links “youth-led continental governance reform” to the legacies of Nkrumah, Nyerere, and Sankara, arguing that Agenda 2063 will remain aspirational unless power is devolved to the continent’s median age of 19 .

What Sachs Misses—and Why It Matters

For all its analytical clarity, Sachs’ intervention contains a notable silence. His geography-school past continues to shadow him; critics note that his newfound anti-imperialism does not include a reckoning with his own role in normalizing “tropical underdevelopment” theory . There is also a lingering instrumentalism in his framing—Pan-Africanism as a mechanism to escape debt, rather than a moral project of dignity and self-determination.

But these omissions may be strategic. Sachs is not speaking to revolutionary cells; he is speaking to the Gordon Gekkos of global finance. By reframing Pan-Africanism as smart economics rather than dangerous idealism, he creates discursive space that African movements can exploit.

More substantively, the “Pan-African now” thesis underestimates the lethality of the opposition. External powers have not abandoned assassination; they have refined it. Today’s coups are met with targeted sanctions, currency manipulation, and IMF conditionality. The weapon is no longer the PIDE-trained gunman but the credit rating downgrade. The body count is lower; the debt count is higher.

Due for a Comeback

Pan-Africanism is due for a comeback not because it is fashionable, but because the alternatives have failed. Sixty years after Lumumba’s murder, the DRC remains one of the poorest countries on earth—not despite its mineral wealth, but because of it. Thirty-eight years after Sankara’s assassination, Burkina Faso is convulsed by jihadist violence that is inseparable from state fragility. The model of the sovereign nation-state, inherited from Berlin 1884, has delivered neither sovereignty nor viability.

Sachs and Fofack are right: the fragmentation is the point. Division enables extraction. Unity threatens it. The Sahel states are testing whether a post-neocolonial future is possible. The AfCFTA is testing whether economies of scale can be built politically, not just technologically. And a generation of young Africans, armed with Sankara’s speeches and Sachs’ spreadsheets, is testing whether the third liberation can succeed where the first two were betrayed.

The question is no longer whether Pan-Africanism is desirable. It is whether it can be achieved before the window closes—and whether this time, the dreamers will live to see it.