Happy Africa Day
Countries are scrambling to merge their free trade areas into one
“FIRST and foremost, we are sons and daughters of this soil. We are born of Africa and have this land mass as our vantage point. Therefore we should not look at our destiny through the eyes of others but through our own wit and wisdom, through an understanding of ubuntu and a common humanity, as this is what makes us at one with ourselves and at home with the world.”
These were the words Arts and Culture Minister Nathi Mthethwa used ahead of Africa Day which is being celebrated today. He was addressing delegates at an Africa Month colloquium in the city this week when he urged people to categorise the continent based on their own experiences, not the perception of others.
“Even as we have been subjected to the ravages of colonialism, segregation and apartheid and as we acknowledge that we reside in an era of rapid globalisation, even as others seek to dehumanise us and leave us with their culture of violence, which we fight every day, every point of the way, we still need to stand our ground,” Mthethwa said. – ANA
WHILE the EU is shrinking with Brexit, the AU has grown when Morocco rejoined it. This again ensures that every African country is an AU member. Equally fascinating, in the years that there is a backlash against free trade in the US (Donald Trump’s election promises), and a backlash in the UK (Brexit) and elsewhere, African governments are scrambling to merge their free trade areas into larger ones.
At a slower rate, they are also incrementally implementing the existing free trade treaties.
About two-thirds of the countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), have slowly removed tariffs and import duties from about two-thirds of the goods traded between them.
Zimbabwe is the exception in imposing new import taxes on many goods from South Africa. In turn, the SADC, the East African Community, and the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa negotiated the Tripartite-Free Trade Area to start creating a Cape to Cairo free trade zone that includes 26 countries with 500 million people. Academics talk about “variable geometry”. Within the SADC, South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland form the world’s oldest surviving customs union, a step in advance of a Free Trade Area.
Two more customs unions thrive in central and west Africa. Another customs union is in the making between Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda.
And while the euro zone is going through troubles, those five east African governments are also negotiating to merge their currencies within a decade. In effect they will bring back the old East African Shilling, though this time to serve their own and not colonial interests.
Fourteen former French colonies and mandates in central and west Africa share what is effectively a united currency, the CFA franc. The Common Monetary Area has the currencies of South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho and Swaziland fixed at par value with one another, and freely interchangeable. This can be regarded as a monetary quasi-union, even though each state has its own name and national icons on its banknotes and coins. What should, of course, be our priority is to reduce the fees charged for workers to send remittances to their homes across the border.
The Pan-African inter-governmental organisations introduced above are buttressed by the rise of the quangos: quasi-non-governmental organisations. A hot topic is the Southern African Power Pool. Through its long-distance, high voltage cables and pylons, Eskom and its analogues in eight other countries can buy and sell electricity, whenever there is a surplus of energy to trade. South Africa has for two decades imported hydropower from Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We could import far more in future.
The Association of African Electoral Authorities alerts election officers to be aware of illicit tactics used by authoritarians to rig elections in other countries and help resist such trickery in their own country.
The African Development Bank and the African Export-Import Bank lead a dozen similar quangos in loaning funds to build infrastructure on our continent. Specialised agencies range from the African Centre for Disease Control Prevention to the Semi-Arid Food Grains Research; Development. An interesting thought is that such AU agencies are considered to be a function of the federal government in the US.
Both the corporate world and non-profit NGOs, have Pan-African affiliations. The African Airlines Association, African Publishers’ Network and African Stock Exchange Association are examples of continental business associations. The Association of African Universities and the Pan-African Lawyers’ Union, are examples of non-profit and professional groupings.
Some of South Africa’s neighbours have made Africa Day a public holiday. Whether we follow suit, in an internet age we can all use this day to find out what is happening with Pan-Africanism. ● Keith Gottschalk is a political scientist from the University of the Western Cape.