According to the head of the trade secretariat, most of the African countries are not prepared to enforce the terms of the African Continental Free Trade Area when the new zone comes into force on 1st January.
The agreement was ratified by 54 African nations, but many of those 33 countries did not have the customs procedures and facilities to make tariff-free trade feasible, said Wamkele Mene, Secretary-General of the AfCFTA Secretariat. The agreement was ratified by 33 countries.
One Western diplomat said a free trade area should support producers in smaller, developing countries and in more industrialised parts of the continent in order to achieve the agreement. The diplomat said that many countries regarded the field of open markets as a way to improve their exports but few had taken the corollary of importing more.
Data inputs from FT
