Ghana in Search of Regional Integration Agenda 77 checkpoints and very often customs officials insist on physical checks of goods in transit, despite the existence of valid documents. Another problem is that designated transit corridors do not work satisfactorily because customs administrations totally ignore the transit facilities that are supposed to be accorded to transport. Another problem is customs duty. One reason for it is the fact that the geography of many sub-regional economic groupings demands that imports into some countries has to traverse the territories of other countries. Often, this leads to conflict and controversy, in which inland countries complain that, they do not receive a fair share of the revenue. This was controversial among the countries of the East African Community, UDEAC in Central Africa, and the ECOWAS in West Africa. A particular weakness of regional economic arrangements in Africa is that they tend to be based more on linguistic and cultural criteria. In such groupings, divisive elements are strong and their existence frustrates the development of cohesive and viable sub-regional groupings. For example, in West Africa, Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra-Leone(English-speaking countries) are geographically surrounded by UEMOA countries, all of which are French speaking. Gambia is culturally and economically part of Senegal but not a member of the French speaking bloc of the Senegal River Basin because it is English-speaking. Thus the UEMOA/ECOWAS dichotomy has been a real bane in forging the ECOWAS project ahead. This, at times, has led to yet another problem: the duplication of economic blocs essentially created to achieve the same objectives. Take for instance COMESA and SADC; and IGAD and the East African Community, in which many countries maintain dual membership. Bax Nomvete laments thus: ‘it is patent that better results would be obtained through a limited number of larger multipurpose institutions, which would contribute to the establishment of a basic equilibrium among all states within the same sub-region, and provide economies of scale for quicker economic transformation.' 102 Sadly however, the African Union's(AU) rationalisation effort has been ineffective. The African Economic Community(AEC) project envisaged five viable sub-regional blocs, which would serve as building blocks for the realisation by 2025 of a single African Community. Since its(AEC) inception in 1991, there have mushroomed several sub-regional blocs and the AU sought to rationalise them. Unfortunately, at its Summit in Banjul, The Gambia, in 2006, it only succeeded in adding on to the five to make it eight. 102 Bax Nomvete'Regional Integration in Africa: A Path Strewn with Obstacles' in The Eye on Ethiopia and The Horn of Africa Vol. 6, No. 39, April-May, 1997