At least 14 countries can trade freely within East, Central and Southern Africa following ratification of a Tripartite Free Trade Area (TFTA) Agreement that flattens the East African Community (EAC), the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa) into a single commerce bloc.
This follows submission of instruments of ratification by 14 out of the 29 partner states making up the tripartite, thus meeting the threshold required for the TFTA to enter into force.
Comesa’s vision has been to be a fully integrated economic community that is prosperous, internationally competitive, and ready to merge into the African economic community.
The agreement is poised create the largest free trade area in the world measured by the number of countries participating. The pact connects 1.3 billion people across 55 countries with a combined gross domestic product (GDP) valued at $3.4 trillion.
It has the potential to lift 30 million people out of extreme poverty, but achieving its full potential will depend on putting in place significant policy reforms and trade facilitation measures. The scope of AfCFTA is large.
Implementation and execution of the agreement will reduce tariffs among member-countries and cover policy areas such as trade facilitation and services, as well as regulatory measures such as sanitary standards and technical barriers to trade.
Full effecting of AfCFTA would reshape markets and economies across the region and boost output in the services, manufacturing and natural resources sectors.
What does the TFTA need to succeed and catapult AfCFTA into tangible reality? The African Union has a vision as codified in the Yamoussoukro Decision of 1999, which is for the full liberalisation of air transport in Africa and relaxation of non-physical barriers to the movement of persons, goods and services.
When these two goals are achieved, the socio-economic benefits to the African continent will be enormous.
Partner States in the TFTA must implement the foregoing. This will further lead to establishment of routes-to-market via the Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM). This is an initiative that aims to free the African aviation industry, transforming it into a single market by deregulating air services and opening regional air markets to transnational competition.
The collaboration and cooperation of the regional economic blocs via the TFTA will be so instrumental towards the realisation of the Single African Air Transport Market.
The impediments towards having Open Skies in Africa are the challenges posed by poor aviation safety and security standards in most African countries. This is coupled with imbalanced and complex macro-economic environments as well as socio-political disparities.
A case in point is when the EAC partner States needed to sign the Economic Partnership Agreement with the European Union (EU) recently but the was a delay by Tanzania. This would have made it very costly for Kenya to trade singularly with the EU and not as a trading bloc.
EPAs are reciprocal free trade agreements where each party offer duty-free access to its respective markets because while the EU allows access in unlimited quantities for all products originating from EPA partners, partners open their markets only partially to the EU, in a measure that varies from EPA to EPA, and sometimes from country to country within the same EPA.
The TFTA is hence a very welcome move for not only the lucrative intra-African trade but also for free movement of people to the extent that one does not need to fly out of the African continent to arrive to an African destination.
The writer is transport, trade & supply chain consultant at Leverage Consulting
