By Jimoh Babatunde

Executive Vice President, Intra-African Trade Bank, Afreximbank, Mrs. Kanayo Awani, said  recent global events have exposed Africa’s continued exposure and vulnerability to the dictates of external partners. 

Awani spoke  at the Nigeria IATF  Business Roadshow with the  theme “Positioning Nigeria to harness the opportunities under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA)” at  the Eko Hotel, Lagos , Monday.

She said When emergency struck in the form of Covid-19, it was discovered that Africa had no capacity to produce even the most basic medical necessities like personal protective equipment.

“The continent scrambled to secure even the simplest of products like face masks and hand sanitisers.

“When the vaccines arrived, Africa was marginalised finding itself at the back of the queue despite having the money to procure vaccines.

Awani added that more recently, “when a food crisis emerged on the back of the Ukraine conflict and commodity prices surged, we found shortages even among rich African households.

“These among other aspects exposed our collective vulnerability and inability to respond in times of crises, despite having attained mass independence in the 1960s.”

She noted that fight for independent makes it imperative for us to work collectively to find African solutions to the challenges facing our continent.

“Perhaps the key demonstration of ensuring that we take our collective destiny into our own hands is the establishment of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement.

“The AfCFTA is a clear signal of the political will and desire to reverse the trend of external reliance and commodity dependence and to ensure that as a continent we take our economic destiny into our own hands. “

Afreximbank , according to her, sees the AfCFTA as a game-changing initiative that will allow us to reverse engineer the colonial strategy of extracting raw materials and dumping manufactures in return.

“A strategy that saw economic policy in Africa being reduced to rudimentary procedures of gathering crops and bartering them and ensuring that countries do not trade with their neighbours.

” We must ride on the AfCFTA, and the collective will of our leaders and all African people. “

She disclosed that Promoting intra-African trade and implementation of the AfCFTA Agreement remains the arrowhead of Afreximbank’s sixth Strategic Plan dubbed ‘Impact 2026: Extending the Frontiers’.

Mrs. Awani said among the biggest constraints confronting intra-African trade is the issue of information asymmetry.

” We remain unaware of the trade and investment opportunities that exist among each other, yet we are more aware of those that exist outside the continent. “

“If I were to ask an Ivorian retailer to procure apparel, she would most likely turn to Vietnam and Bangladesh, yet Lesotho, Kenya and others have thriving apparel industries.

” West Africa alone import meat products worth more than US$3 billion annually from Argentina and Australia while South Africa, Botswana, Mali, Namibia, Chad, and Sudan can supply a large proportion of this demand.”

She said to overcome this dearth of trade and market information and support the implementation of the AfCFTA, “the Bank working with the African Union (AU) and other strategic partners launched the Intra-African Trade Fair in 2018.”

While noting that the 3rd edition comes up in Cairo, Egypt, November this year, she said the Roadshow was to provide the Nigerian business community with critical information on the IATF, its relevance to Africa’s transformation and integration ambitions and the opportunities it presents for Nigerian businesses to expand their footprint across the continent.

She , therefore,urged  the Nigerian Public and Private Sector to actively participate and take advantage of opportunities to grow and expand their business, drive intra-African trade and support economic integration in Africa.