In September 2012, Carlos Lopes flew to South Africa to meet Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the veteran Cabinet minister who was about to start her new job in Addis Ababa as chair of the African Union Commission. Lopes, an economist from Guinea-Bissau, was also based in the Ethiopian capital — he had just been appointed as director of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa.
The dream of an African continent-wide free trade area is decades old. It was mentioned in the Organisation of African Unity’s Lagos Plan of Action in 1980, and again in the 1991 Abuja Declaration, along with plans to create a continental currency and reserve bank. But, political grandstanding aside, there had been little effort made to realise that dream.
In 2018 — after many hours of torturous negotiations on cross-border tariffs, rules of origin, customs procedures, legal redress mechanisms and regulatory harmonisation — the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement was signed by heads of state at a ceremony in Rwanda. By then, Dlamini-Zuma’s term was over and her successor, Moussa Faki Mahamat, oversaw the proceedings.
So would world peace.
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