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Sindiso Ngwenya

Business Editor
AFRICA’S landmark Tripartite Free Trade Area (TFTA) covering 27 countries with a gross domestic product of $1,3 trillion, will be officially launched in Egypt next month.

The TFTA embraces countries under the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa), Southern African Development Community (Sadc) and the East African Community (EAC) blocs with an estimated population of up to 625 million.

The historic move dovetails with the regional economic integration agenda paving way for enhanced business efficiency and increased trade within the whole of Africa.

According to the Comesa secretariat headed by Zimbabwe-born Sindiso Ngwenya, the grand launch will be hosted by Egypt in Sharm El-Sheikh city on June 10.

“The tripartite FTA has a combined population and gross domestic product of 625 million people and $1,3 trillion respectively that would constitute a single largest market,” says Comesa.

The African market is crucial for Zimbabwean companies and job creation efforts in the context of industrial growth in line with the Zim-Asset’s value addition and beneficiation thrust.

The launch of the TFTA would also be a catalyst for negotiations that will pave way for the establishment of a continental FTA (CFTA) by 2017.

The breakthrough follows years of negotiations between the three regional bodies on the need to harmonise trade regimes and craft new tariff rules.

“The tripartite arrangement is going to become a game changer for Africa in the sense that it comprises 26 countries almost half of the African Union and ultimately 27 countries with South Sudan coming on board,” said Ngwenya recently.

“After two-and-a-half years of intense negotiations, the Comesa-EAC-Sadc tripartite sectoral ministerial committee held in Bujumbura, Burundi in October 2014, agreed that sufficient consensus had been reached to launch the Tripartite FTA.”

The new arrangement would be underpinned by robust infrastructure programmes designed to catalyse the regional market through interconnectivity — facilitated by all modes of transport and telecommunications — and promote competitiveness.

“The launch signifies the conclusion of negotiations on the legal instrument and will be followed by a process to finalise negotiations on tariffs and rules of origin — the key elements of a functional free-trade area,” South African Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies commented.

“This is an important milestone in the implementation of the development integration agenda in Africa aimed at promoting market integration, based on industrial and infrastructure development.”

There is consensus across the whole of Africa that industrialisation and value addition is a panacea towards massive job creation and poverty alleviation.

Ngwenya said the decision to form a tripartite FTA, mooted in Uganda in 2008, came after the leaders from the three economic blocs realised that there were different trade regimes yet the economic operators and citizens simply want to have one common rule.

He said the tripartite FTA will provide the basis for the structural transformation of the economies through industrialisation and value addition.