Mohamed Ibrahim, telecom billionaire, writes: "Alongside this focus on improving African governance, we must also put pressure on our leaders to encourage regional integration. Many small, landlocked African countries will never become serious players in the global economy without increased cooperation within their own regions. "Today’s haphazard, overlapping regional integration is proving largely ineffective, and this severely hampers African countries’ ability to compete in international markets. "One of the consequences of this lack of cooperation for Africa’s 967 million people is the bureaucratic replication and currency-exchange issues that being divided into 53 countries entails. China, with 1.3 billion people , is just one country; and the European Union, with some 500 million people , functions as a single economic market, with most of its members sharing a single currency. "If Africa’s small and diverse nations do not come together, they wi