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The ACfTA’s a reflection of Africa’s hope and aspirations

Tuesday April 17 2018
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The African Heads of States and Governments pose during African Union (AU) Summit for the agreement to establish the African Continental Free Trade Area in Kigali, Rwanda, on March 21, 2018. AFP PHOTO

By RICHARD SEZIBERA

Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, the founding father of the Republic of Kenya is famously quoted as saying that when the Europeans came, they had the Bible and Africans the land. They asked Africans to close their eyes to pray. When Africans finally opened their eyes, they had the Bible, and Europeans the land.

So goes the history of colonial and post- colonial economic relations.

Africa is an outpost, marginal to global trade, contributing less than 2 per cent of global mercantile trade. Our infrastructure is designed, not for intra African growth, but for the extraction of raw materials to the rest of the world for value addition.

Our capital cities are not connected by rail, our waterways drain into seas and oceans, adding very little value to the lives of the citizens of the countries they cross.

Our skies serve mainly to take Africans off the continent, not to facilitate intra African trade, and our energy markets are balkanised by design, making cross-border electrification a nightmare and rational use of our immense energy resources a mirage.

In ferocious defence of sovereignty, we have erected barriers, turned our borders into impermeable membranes to trade, and invested in the repression of entrepreneurial women attempting to make a living through business across borders.

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Because we do not trade with one another, we have traded each other off. It is unconscionable that in this day and age, Africans are still sold into slavery on our own continent.

With intra African trade at less than 20 per cent, far below other regional groupings, it is not unexpected that the Mathew Principle has hit our continent particularly hard.

You remember the biblical adage that, “For everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.” Africa has to strategise to become prosperous, or even the little we have will continue to be taken away from us.

And so, enter the African Continental Free Trade Area and the Kigali Declaration of Principles.

Africa can get more, if she trades more. Intra African trade is mainly in value added products and manufactured goods. Exports to other parts of the world is mainly in raw materials and unprocessed products.

As the danger of global protectionist policies loom, threatening trade and shared prosperity, an Africa United will be a critical counter narrative. The ACfTA has been signed.

Now it needs to be ratified, and quickly.

Tariff offers must be concluded, Rules of Origin and other trade and market-related aspects agreed on. These must not be allowed to turn into endless technocratic arguments about divisive economic and trade arcana.

The ACfTA is a rendezvous with history, not a mere exercise in bureaucratic wrangling or technocratic deal making.

It should not, it must not be turned into a reflection of all our collective national fears, but a reflection and a depository of all our aspirations.

Richard Sezibera is a Rwandan senator and former secretary general of the EAC. E-mail: [email protected]

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