Depends on how far inland it expands and on how able (and willing) local political bodies will be to plan infrastructure and industrial plant with manufacturing in mind. You can have a billion people in a land-locked country, but unless they have a rail line, a road or a navigable river to get their produce potential buyers, they are not in the global labour force.

And it depends on how successfully the people who would really rather see Africa continue to be a resource provider, rather than a place of manufacture, are going to be in sabotaging industrial development there. So far our Dear Leaders have been depressingly successful at that sort of exercises.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

One substantial advantage of an African Union over a West African, Central African, East African, or Southern African Union is that the African Union poses no risk of going anywhere, so it can be trotted out as evidence of government support of Pan-Africanism without ever forcing a government to change any of its policy to actually support African Union.

The Foreign Office is pro-Europe because it is really anti-Europe. The Civil Service was united in its desire to make sure that the common market didn't work. That's why we went into it.

[...]

It's just like the United Nations, in fact; the more members it has, the more arguments it can stir up, the more futile and impotent it becomes.

- Sir Humphrey

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

There's one huge problem with that analogy, though.  South America has at least a few countries with generally functioning governments, infrastructure, and educated populations.  Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela have their problems, but they're nothing on the order of that faced by Nigeria or Kenya, let alone Rwanda, or basket cases like Zimbabwe.

The West has done nothing to help, and a lot to actively hurt Africa.  But there is a lot of domestic state-building that the peoples of these countries need before they're going to be comparable to much of South America.