Levious Chiukira on Customs and Trade

  The global COVID-19 pandemic is plunging the world into a socioeconomic and financial crisis of an unprecedented scale, in addition to the acute health crisis. The crisis has exposed and exacerbated vulnerabilities and inequalities in both developing and developed countries, deepening poverty and exclusion and pushing the most vulnerable even further behind. The shattering effects have been more visible to the African continent which has consolidated its energies in the creation of an African Economic Community (AEC) prior to the eruption of the pandemic in December 2019 in China.   Africa doesn’t have the luxury of time and cannot follow the traditional path to economic integration. Africa has to abandon the EU linear model of integration and create our own model which is acquainted with the peculiar African challenges. It worth to mention that the integration of Europe happened at the time the world financial systems had the capacity to fund the initiatives and reconst...

  The launched African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA ) which houses a GDP of USD 2.5 trillion and a population of 1.2 billion people has the been regarded as the answer to African intra-regional trade challenges. The AfCFTA comes at a time where African economies have shown little capacities to transform their economies through trade as there has been little progress on the diversification of exports and value addition to the exports of primary goods manly minerals and agricultural produce. The AfCFTA comes as one of the flagship projects of African Union Agenda 2063. Agenda 2063 is a strategic framework for the socio- economic transformation of the continent over the next 50 years. It builds on, and seeks to accelerate the implementation of past and existing continental initiatives for growth and sustainable development. Key to Agenda 2063 is epitomising sustainable development as a key result of African integration. There are other     key programmes and initi...

The continent celebrates the historic achievement of an integrated Africa through the establishment of AfCFTA which came after not a smooth sailing. The continental free trade area comes as result of the vision of the African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere. The basis of the AfCFTA emanated from the need to have an integrated prosperous continent with the African people owning the continental projects and taking advantage of the untapped resources of women and the youth. For any development to be successful and have a meaning the process of regional integration must be first and foremost be driven by the domestic people.   The momentous accomplishment comes at a time when Europe is negotiating the exit of Britain out of the European Union (EU).   The major partners in the integration process have been the West through the developmental agencies and EU resulting in the adoption of the European model of integration being utilised for an African set up. As Af...