The Sunday Mail
Regionness is the centre and hallmark of the new global architecture. The current developmental discourse is incomplete without it.
It is envisaged to ensure holistic development for the benefit of the entire region, as opposed to focusing on national development in isolation.
The proliferation of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) being notified to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) also supports this notion. By June 2014, the WTO had received 585 notifications of RTAs, of which 379 were in force, compared to less than 30 in the 1990s.
The pursuit for deeper regional integration has proven to be relentless, if not inevitable. When you hear the name “Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa)”, what you may fail to quickly realise is that the phrase “Common Market” is just an ambitious declaration of how we yearn to lift the integration agenda to the zenith. We don’t have a Common Market yet, which is a combination of a Customs Union plus free flow of factors of production.
Neither do we yet have a Customs Union, which is composed of a free trade zone plus a common external tariff.
Comesa is just but a Free Trade Area, whose agreement was entered into at the turn of the New Millennium, whose focus is on fostering duty-free and quarter-free trade as well as the elimination of non-tariff barriers.
The year 2012 had been set to gear up integration by forming a Customs Union in the Comesa region.
However, the fireworks were not lit, the ribbon was not cut – it just didn’t happen. Now every Comesa Summit comes as a constant reminder of how things could have turned out, had we operationalised the Customs Union back then.
The Comesa Summit recently held in Ethiopia is one such reminder.
Who forgets June 2009 when Comesa Heads of State gathered in the majestic Victoria Falls to launch the Customs Union with a three-year transition period, which meant that a functional Customs Union would be in place by 2012?
It went so well to the end that a mid-term review of the implementation of the three-year transition period for the Customs Union was undertaken prior to the 2011 Summit.
The review evaluated all the preconditions of the Customs Union, namely the Customs Management Regulations (CMRs), Common External Tariff (CET) and the Common Tariff Nomenclature (CTN). The CET stipulated that a tariff rate of zero percent will be applied to capital goods and raw materials, 10 percent for intermediate goods, and 25 percent for finished goods – imported by all member states.
The migration to the Comesa CET was to be done in three categories.
The first category was that of those tariffs that are already aligning to the CET; the second was that of tariffs below CET with the third one being of those above CET.
For those above CET, they would be reduced by 25 percent in the first phase, 25 percent in the second phase, and 50 percent in the last phase, until they align.
Those that were below CET were to be increased by 50 percent in the first phase, 25 percent in the second phase and 25 percent in the final phase to align them.
The Comesa Treaty also gave member states flexibility for policy space so that countries agree to have sensitive lists of products that should not be part of the common external tariff, as well as the exclusion list.
The threshold for sensitive products was pegged at 25 percent, but it would gradually settle at 20 percent, whilst that of excluded products is five percent.
The CMRs defined the customs territory, which is the territory having the same customs regime. This implied that there was to be similar CMRs in the region in light of the fact that there were different CMRs in different member countries.
The CTN, which is the harmonised system of goods description, classification and codification, was the final instrument to facilitate the CET, leading to the operation of the Customs Union.
So, the mid-term review of the implementation of the transition period, undertaken prior to the 2011 Comesa Summit, looked at all the above.
When the Summit finally happened, the Comesa Authority, according to the communique, “noting the good progress made on the whole”, established a Ministerial Task Force to work with member states to address any outstanding issues in order to “ensure that a functional Customs Union is implemented by the end of the transition period”.
By that time, the end of the transition period (2012) was just a few months away.
However, come 2012, the Comesa Authority convened another Summit again where, despite the “good progress” alluded to the previous year, the envisaged Customs Union was not operationalised. The Authority, instead, extended the transition period for the Customs Union by a further two years.
They also called for the adoption of a comprehensive roadmap for the two-year period to address outstanding issues and concerns. And that was it.
Again, the additional two-year transition lapsed in 2014 with no Customs Union coming into sight. The 2014 Summit only urged member states to domesticate and implement the preconditions of the Customs Union, taking us back to the same resolution made at the Summit of 2010 – talk of taking four steps backwards. Since that was the end of the extended transition period, one would have expected that the Summit was going to tell us the new timelines for transition, which only leaves cowboys like me making village assumptions that the transition is now indefinite and that the sense of urgency has waned off.
Last week, in Addis Ababa, the Summit again confirmed the cowboy’s village assumptions by not putting any timelines on the operationalisation of the Customs Union. Instead, they resolved for the “application of the principle of variable geometry to the implementation of the Customs Union”.
I must confess that it is my first time to come across the phrase “variable geometry” in Comesa Summit communiques since 2009 – not that I hadn’t seen it in the Comesa Treaty. The application of this principle means that some countries in the region may integrate faster than others. This leads us to the new question: Are we now going to see the Customs Union coming into force sooner, without pending issues of all member states necessarily being resolved first?
Or a “coalition of the willing” will just operationalise the Customs Union, leaving the laggards to catch up?
Will it change the meaning of “Common” on Comesa’s full name?
While we wait for those questions to hatch into answers, we must also be fair and understand the challenges that Comesa experiences as a region, which might also impede the acceleration of the regional integration agenda.
In 2011, your cowboy had the opportunity to work at the Comesa Secretariat under the Comesa Policy on Attachment of Officers from member states to the Secretariat.
One of the objectives of this policy is to develop a cadre at national level that would articulate challenges and opportunities at Comesa. This programme targets selected experts from the private sector, experts on various sectors from different Government ministries, and Comesa desk officers from Government ministries.
I was working for a local chamber of industry then, and had the privilege of going to the Comesa Secretariat where I was deployed to all its divisions and departments.
I discovered some of the main challenges facing Comesa to be as follows:
Limited funding
Apart from member states’ contributions, most Comesa projects and programmes depend on donor funding. Donor funds usually come with strings attached in terms of the manner in which programmes and projects ought to take shape. Comesa does not have a diversified source of income, and many projects and programmes are not implemented well because of lack of adequate funding.
Apart from incomes received from rentals, Comesa is still at a low level of self-sufficiency.
Secretariat is understaffed
Virtually all division staff I interacted with raised the issue of being understaffed, which means they are often times overstretched or may not timeously and adequately go through all their workload.
Bureaucracy
There are rigid policies and long procedures at the Secretariat that just do not seem to be compatible to the overall goal of regional integration. I noted that decisions should be made quickly and procedures should be simplified.
Member States’ Apathy
There seems to be lack of interest from members states to participate in some programmes and projects that are developed and implemented for them to utilise.
This is one of the main handicaps to the regional integration agenda. I noted that there should be a mechanism in place that ensures all agreed issues are widely implemented, with measures to effectively deal with apathy.
Before your cowboy gets on his horse, he has one bias to confess – that he’s for deeper integration as opposed to wider integration.
Is “wonderful Comesa” now falling in unrequited love with wider integration by apparently shifting all efforts on the Grand Free Trade Area?
