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...

Africa has rolled out the African Free Trade Area which has been bestowed with what I assume are high expectations. As I write the AfCFTA is being showered with praises as being historic and going to stimulate and improve the intra-African trade.   I remain pessimistic about AfCFTA and the figures being thrown around as its potential achievements. Protagonists has continued to use statistics quoted in policy papers presented at different conferences and to me most of these figures and targets are out of reach for the AfCFTA and when times comes it will make this project a failure. AfCFTA is comes at a time tariff reductions have failed and nationalism is on the rise as nations are fighting the crippling devastating effects of COVID-19. As the debate of free trade areas rages on without a conclusive stance, what has won is the push for trade liberalism which the forces I shall call the ‘invisible actors’ dominating the discourses and research around the continental free trade area. ...