24 - 30 May 2001
Issue No.535
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 24 - 30 May 2001 Issue No.535 |
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The pressure mounts
COMESA countries have to prove they can work together in bad times,writes Gamal Nkrumah
The two-day Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) conference, which convened in Cairo on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, brought together six heads of state whose main task was to review developments since the signing of the free trade area agreement last October. The agreement was signed by only nine of the 22 COMESA member countries.
While the idea of banding together to create a common market and free trade area is fast gaining momentum among African nations, industrialists in some countries are reluctant to take the plunge. The main goal of the Cairo COMESA summit was to prod the hesitant COMESA partners into signing.
Tanzania withdrew from COMESA last year precisely because of the removal of tariffs. Its explanation was that changes in internal tariff arrangements would harm the country's budding manufacturing sector. Indeed, many of the industrially less developed COMESA countries are concerned that the new free trade area will benefit the larger, more dynamic and sophisticated economies in the region. Tanzania claimed that the removal of barriers was bound to impede its industrial development plans.
Moreover, the nine COMESA member states which scrapped tariffs -- including host nation Egypt and the two other economic powerhouses of COMESA, Kenya and Zimbabwe -- are accused by some of the smaller and less developed members of introducing non-tariff barriers that pose no less a threat to free trade in the area than the tariff barriers themselves. The introduction of controversial non-tariff trade barriers which constitute discriminatory trade practices has caused some serious disputes, which observers hoped would be ironed out in Cairo.
COMESA deputy secretary-general Sindiso Ngwenya said that some member states influenced policy and decision makers to enforce non-tariff barriers in the form of sanitary standards. "The denial of market access is a violation of the treaty provisions. As a matter of urgency these practices must be discontinued because they undermine the COMESA trade regime, particularly the COMESA Free Trade Area," Ngwenya told Al-Ahram Weekly.
On the more positive side, the Egyptian Cooperatives Association for Small Industries (ECASI) announced its intention to support activities of small industry associations and economic development in Africa and foster cooperation among small enterprises in COMESA to assist them in marketing promotion.
However, the Secretary-General of COMESA, Erasmus Mwencha, said that creating a free trade area would only be viable if conditions of peace and political stability prevailed in the region. The COMESA region is plagued by civil wars, the most serious being the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). On the eve of the Cairo COMESA conference, the main Congolese insurgency group, the Ugandan-backed Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC), announced that it was withdrawing its troops from the front-line separating Congolese government and armed opposition forces, as stipulated by the Lusaka peace accord signed in the Zambian capital in 1999, in exchange for United Nations assistance. The MLC had in the past adamantly refused to pull back its forces from the front-line.
The stalled Congolese peace process has cast a shadow of doubt on the credibility of a politically fractured COMESA in seeking to transform itself into a united economic grouping. Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, all COMESA member states, are pitted against Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe, also COMESA member states, who back the Congolese government of President Joseph Kabila. Kabila took office following the assassination of his father last January.
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