Common Market

In summary, it is vital to place this case in the broader context of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). Regional financial integration of the sort discussed above, (such as an integrated banking market or a banking union), would significantly benefit the AfCFTA in the light of the bigger regional markets in trade that is now in operation.

Since Kenya had made commitments, it is not far fetched to argue that non observance of these commitments especially regarding trade in legal services offends the EAC Treaty. This brings in the issue of remedies available at the East African Court of Justice. It is time this issue was addressed by the  East African Court of Justice (EACJ).

With an increase in the spread and impact of independent regulatory agencies, Africa now has a nascent but significant network of competition authorities and other economic regulators. This growth in African regulatory practice and influence contribute to the value of adding competitiveness to the theory and practice of African regional integration. To add competitiveness may well increase the total benefits and speed of these developments of multinational agreements and regional integration. A competition policy for Africa consistent with developmental integration should attend to enforcement institutions (courts and authorities) and be flexible regarding its national/supranational balance.

Intra Africa trade remains at its lowest ebb and perhaps this sad state of affairs can only be remedied by the actualization of the envisaged Africa Economic Community (AEC). To this extent RIAs, such as those under study in this paper, offer viable building blocks and learning curves for negotiating in the much larger multilateral trade system.

In order to address a scenario where a AfCFTA member might resort to the WTO and still want the dispute to be resolved under the AfCFTA’s dispute resolution protocol, then this article proposes that the latter Protocol should be amended to the effect that, matters raised in the WTO context and in AfCFTA’s context should be considered not to be the same.

The AfCFTA seeks to change the manner in which African states trade with each other. The existence of the AfCFTA is what Roscoe Pound termed using the law as a tool of social engineering. The African Union in creating the AfCFTA intended to promote, facilitate and eventually experience free intra-African trade. This review appreciates the AfCFTA but seeks to criticize a loophole it has created

Arguably, Fox and Bakhoum’s Making Markets Work for Africa does more than take part in this literature, it helps bring it into focus, crystallizing its insights and articulating a number of its internal debates.  Perhaps this assessment should be nuanced a bit.  Despite their extensive footnotes and their admirable collaborative scholarship and drive to work from and with African sources (for instance with the Quarterly Competition Review produced by CCRED), the book is focused more on the policy problem than on the existing literature about the problem.  This is not a book about books; it is a book about identifying a complex economic situation with challenges and opportunities and charting and driving a particular line in favour of a better life for Africa’s population.

The book provides illuminating insights on the contrasting historical and economic imperatives that drove the development of competition law and policy in the US, post World War II Europe and in selected countries on the African continent.  The authors explain that in the US, the development of antitrust law was a response to the industrial revolution and in its wake, large enterprises.  For almost a century, the US courts, interpreted antitrust law “to protect the weak from the strong.”  There was a significant shift in US antitrust law under the Reagan administration “away from economic democracy and towards efficiency” as the US focused on global competitiveness and economic power.

One would be justified in thinking that AU member states have intentionally created a court which they consciously know they would hardly use given the inertia identified above. If the reforms that would extend standing to private parties are not undertaken, there is little guarantee that Member States will suddenly change their habits. Assuming for once that they trigger the mechanism, it is also very likely that, consistent with their practice for political solutions to legal problems, they would not proceed beyond the consultation and good offices stages provided in Articles 7 and 8 of the Dispute Settlement Protocol.

Ghana and its founding father, Kwame Nkrumah, have played a pivotal role in the Africa’s revolution, integration and the evolution of Pan Africanism in general.  Besides his prolific writings, which cemented his place as a foremost proponent of Pan Africanism, Nkrumah was not only a freedom fighter, but also one of the recognisable organisers of the 1945 Manchester Pan Africa congress which primarily advocated for decolonisation of the continent and the supplanting of colonialism with African socialism.