Only three of 27 members of the Common Market for Eastern Africa
(Comesa) bloc have endorsed the tripartite free trade area deal, three
years after it was launched, shining the spotlight on their commitment
to opening up the region’s market.
The Tripartite Free
Trade Area (TFTA), featuring Comesa, the East African Community and the
Southern African Development Community (SADC), was launched on June 10,
2015 in Egypt, to open up a market of 700 million people in the region,
with a GDP of over $1.4 trillion.
It is expected to
come into force in April next year after at least 14 countries endorse
the deal, and will smooth the path to achieving the African Continental
Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) launched early this year.
But
the slow progress in ratifying the TFTA instruments has brought to the
fore the challenges countries face in trying to open up their markets.
At
the 20th Comesa Summit in Lusaka, Zambia, this week, it emerged that
only Kenya, Uganda and Egypt have endorsed the agreement.
It
was expected that the Council of Ministers and the Heads of State
Summit would put pressure on the remaining countries to ratify the deal.
Comesa’s outgoing chairman, Madagascar President Martial
Rajaonarimampianina, appealed to member countries to prioritise
endorsing the agreement “so that it may be used as a basis for
implementing the African Continental Free Trade Area.”
Progress
But
in their statement at the end of the summit, the heads of state only
acknowledged the progress made in preparing the instruments for the
Digital Free Trade Area (DFTA), such as the Electronic Certificate of
Origin. They encouraged the member states that are ready to implement
the DFTA to do so on a pilot basis.
“The heads of state
stressed the importance of prioritisation programmes that promote
small-scale cross-border trade, taking into account gender empowerment
and poverty eradication, and called for the extension of these
programmes to cover both goods and services,” the statement reads.
In
mid-June, the region’s ministers met in Cape Town to give direction on
the implementation of both the TFTA and the continental market, where
members set yet a new deadline of April 2019 for countries to complete
the ratification process. On tariff negotiations, the ministers set a
new deadline of December 2018.
The meeting also
adopted the tripartite agreement on the movement of business people,
after outstanding issues were addressed by the chiefs of immigration.
“As
the tripartite has higher levels of deeper integration, and shorter
timeframes in light of the upfront elimination of Customs duties on 60
to 85 per cent of total tariff lines, its implementation should be
fasttracked as a building bloc for the AfCFTA.
“So far
49 out of the 55 African countries have signed the AfCFTA deal. Kenya,
Ghana, Niger, Rwanda, Chad and eSwatini (formerly Swaziland) have
ratified the agreement. However, Rwanda and eSwatini are yet to ratify
the TFTA Agreement.
“We appeal to all member states to
ratify the Tripartite Agreement so that it enters into force not later
than April 2019,” the ministers said in their statement.
27 countries
At
the end of June, only 22 of the 27 countries had signed the TFTA
agreement, with Botswana being the latest signatory in January.
The
countries that have so far signed the agreement are Angola, Burundi,
Botswana, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Kenya,
State of Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia, Rwanda,
Seychelles, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, eSwatini, Zambia and
Zimbabwe.
Uganda, which has ratified the tripartite agreement but is yet to deliver it to Comesa, has yet to ratify the AfCFTA.
In
June, Kenya’s permanent representative to Comesa Sophy Kombe presented
the ratification instrument to the chair of the Tripartite Task Force,
former Secretary-General Sindiso Ngwenya.
Rwanda, which
has been seen as the champion of free markets, is yet to ratify the
tripartite agreement, despite being among the first AU members to ratify
the AfCFTA.
When contacted, Rwanda's Trade and Industry Minister Vincent Munyeshaka referred The EastAfrican to Prime Minister Edouard Ngirente, who attended the Comesa summit.
“The
Prime Minister, as leader of government business, is better placed to
provide more information. However, we expedited the AfCFTA agreement and
ratification because we believe in continental trade to achieve our
target of increasing intra-Africa trade to spearhead integration. It is a
big opportunity because Africa is the future," said Mr Munyeshaka.
Missing legal information
The EastAfrican understands
that some countries have taken time to sign the agreement because of
some missing legal information, while the reasons given for the lack of
ratification is that countries are still aligning some of the annexes
with their domestic laws.
The first phase of the
negotiations, which involved tariff negotiations among member states and
regions that do not have preferential arrangements among themselves has
taken long, delaying the second phase.
For instance,
the Southern African Customs Union (SACU), comprising Botswana, Lesotho,
Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland, is still negotiating tariff
liberalisation with the EAC and Egypt, and it has yet to start
negotiations with individual countries like Djibouti, Sudan and Eritrea.
Negotiations between SACU and EAC have two major outstanding areas; automobiles and dairy products.
In
addition to the tariff negotiations, there are efforts towards
concluding a protocol on movement of businesspersons, which is a side
agreement.
The member countries have also adopted an
industrial development framework and a plan to co-operate on
infrastructure development.
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