As with Africa’s widespread early adoption of mobile digital banking, so with free trade agreements, it would appear. Long a laggard in global deals and regional governance, the vast, diverse continent is now setting the pace with a pioneering free-trade pact amongst scores of African states, notes Alexander Hammond in The National Interest.
- The African Union organized the African Continental Free Trade Area under the leadership of Rwandan president Paul Kagame, a powerful regional player who is an ardent supporter of free trade and admirer of Lee Kuan Yew, the founding prime minister of Singapore.
- Gambia joined the AfCFTA signatories in April, becoming the 22nd member, the minimum threshold for the agreement to become active. As soon as it became active, virtually all the rest of Africa’s 45 countries quickly joined.
- The implementation of AfCFTA is projected to boost African regional trade by 52% in just a few years.
- If rule of law and governance accompany free trade and improved infrastructure, Africa could become the key proving ground for free trade principles. It would also mark a major step away from the continent’s disastrous embrace of socialism, which typically produced corrupt dictatorship or traumatic social engineering.
