Former South African Trade Minister applauds the strategic shift of AfCFTA

Dr. Robb Davies, a former Minister of Trade and Industry to South African is parsing the AfCFTA Secretariate for leading the continent to move decisively from negotiating the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) to implementing strategic regional value chains in order to help the continent avoid being locked into raw material extraction as the global economy transitions to a low-carbon future.

During his turn on the AfCFTA podcast series, Dr. Rob Davies, who served as South Africa’s Minister of Trade and Industry during the AfCFTA negotiations and now associated to the Nelson Mandela School of Governance at the University of Cape Town emphasized that the path to industrialization through exports to the Global North has become “strewn with so many obstacles” that Africa’s only viable route now lies in building production capacity for the continental market.

“Our only real opportunity now lies in, first, the African market, but also in building solidarity and common positions in the way we confront the challenges in the world at large,” Dr. Davies said.

The former Trade and Industry Minister highlighted that AfCFTA’s creation of a market of 1.5 billion people with a combined GDP exceeding three trillion dollars, making Africa the eighth largest economy globally as a bloc, offers opportunities for “both deeper and more inclusive industrialisation than attempting to do so in our individual countries, even the biggest of us.”

Davies devoted particular attention to Africa’s position in the global transition to a low-carbon economy, warning that the continent risks missing a historic opportunity if it continues supplying only raw materials for green technologies manufactured elsewhere.

“Africa is the home to a very significant part of the mineral requirements for the new low-carbon technologies, but if we are just going to be supplying raw materials into other countries’ manufacturing processes, we’re going to be located at the bottom of value chains, the low-income part of value chains,” he cautioned.

Dr. Robb Davies argued that Africa must demonstrate the “courage” to tell the rest of the world: “We’re no longer going to just offer you dirt out of the ground. We’re going to expect there to be a level of value addition and corresponding investments in supporting our industrial efforts if you want access to our minerals.”

This approach, the former South African Trade Minister suggested, represents the kind of bargaining that countries making industrial progress are already employing, and Africa must become “part of that game as well.”

Dr. Rob Davies concluded with a challenge to all stakeholders across the continent: “Whatever everyone does, whatever line of business or whatever economic activity they’re in, they should ask themselves: what does it mean for me to try to work in the context of the AfCFTA?”

“This now has to be a fundamental prism through which we look at all the activity that we carry out wherever we are on the continent, because there is much to be gained by working together through the framework of the continental-wide market that we have established through the AfCFTA,” he concluded.

Post Views: 12