by Justice Lee Adoboe
LOME, May 21 (Xinhua) -- Some leading African trade officials have called for harmonized competition protocols to ensure fairness in trade under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
At the ongoing third edition of Biashara Afrika in Togo, an annual pan-African business and investment forum organized by the AfCFTA Secretariat, participants stressed that without a strong common protocol, unfair practices such as market abuse, unfair trade practices, cartels, and monopolies would undermine the goal of the AfCFTA.
Speaking at a high-level conference on competition policy and law held on the sidelines of the event on Tuesday, Simeon Koffi, director-general of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Regional Competition Authority, said that cross-border anti-competitive practices, differences in national legal frameworks, and a lack of funding are among the key challenges facing competition authorities in member states.
Koffi added that barriers to market entry, the dominance of informal economic activity, institutional weaknesses, and inconsistent enforcement of regional trade rules further deepen the bottlenecks that require urgent attention.
While noting that ECOWAS has made significant progress in establishing regional competition rules, he acknowledged that implementation remains a major challenge requiring stronger continental cooperation.
"Purely national solutions have shown their limits. What we need is a stronger collaboration between regional competition authorities and the proposed AfCFTA competition authority to ensure coordinated market regulation across the continent," the official urged.
In his keynote speech, Togolese Director-General for Trade Claude Talime Abe highlighted that a unified protocol on competition is needed as a strong pillar for fairness, transparency, and security within Africa's nascent single market.
On strengthening cooperation between governments, regulators, and the private sector, Talime called for the harmonization of competition principles at both national and regional levels.
"Competition policy and law are essential for promoting trade exchanges within a framework of fairness, security, and healthy competition. But competition law must go beyond policy declarations and focus on practical implementation mechanisms capable of supporting sustainable regional trade," Talime said.
Wamkele Mene, secretary-general of the AfCFTA Secretariat, emphasized that the current level of implementation of intra-regional trade under AfCFTA has highlighted the importance of competition policy and other policy enablers in an integrated market.
He said the protocol of competition contains various provisions that provide the required complementarity in terms of jurisdiction between the regional and national authorities on the one hand and the continental authority on the other hand.
"We have built into the treaty these legal complementarities to enable the national authorities and the regional authorities to continue their work in a complementary manner between the two," he said.
"What we are seeking to achieve is a common policy and legal framework of competition for our continent, both for the benefit of big economies and small economies, and more importantly, for the benefit of Africans and consumers," Mene added. ■
