The COMESA-EAC-SADC Tripartite Trade Area finally entered into force

Today, 25th July 2024, is an historical date for Africa. It is the date of entry into force of the Tripartite Free Trade Area (TFTA) Agreement. The TFTA is an inter-regional co-operation and integration arrangement amongst countries of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the East African Community (EAC) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) which aims at combining the three Regional Economic Communities (RECs) into an enlarged Free Trade Area.

The Tripartite FTA was launched in June 2015 in Sharm-el-Sheik, Egypt to address the issue of multiple memberships and to advance policy cooperation, harmonisation, and coordination among the three RECs. In addition to the establishment of a FTA, the Tripartite aims at harmonizing trade and investment regimes and infrastructure programmes focusing on developing joint inter-regional infrastructure, and co-operation on transport and communications and financing of regional infrastructure projects. Despite the slow pace in the ratification of the agreement, the Tripartite legal framework has strongly influenced the negotiations of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), as this agreement drew a lot of lessons from the Tripartite process in terms of general architecture of the agreement (including its protocols and annexes), and modalities and instruments for negotiating the trade in goods arrangements. Also, the AfCFTA Non-tariff Barriers reporting and monitoring system has been modeled upon the Tripartite one.

In March 2023, the Tripartite Council of Ministers also concluded an Agreement on the movement of businesspersons in the Tripartite region to facilitate the movement of traders and other professional service providers within the territories of the 3 RECs by relaxing visa requirements for such categories. In addition, specific regulations were approved to facilitate cross-border road transport in the 3 RECs, namely: a Vehicle Load Management Agreement (VLMA), and a Multilateral Cross Border Road Transport Agreement (MCBRTA).

The Tripartite is an important achievement not only for the 3 RECs, but for the entire continent and a key step in the establishment of the African Economic Community (AEC) under the Treaty of Abuja. The Minimum Integration Programme (MIP), a strategic continental framework for the African integration process elaborated by the AU Commission in close cooperation with the RECs and adopted in 2009, cites the Tripartite as an example of convergence among RECs that also other African economic blocks should follow in order to achieve the ultimate objective of the establishment of the AEC.

The entry into force of the Agreement follows the depositing of Instrument of Ratification by the Republic of Angola on 25th June, 2024. Before Angola, Malawi and Lesotho ratified the TFTA between April and June 2024, bringing the total number of the Instruments of Ratification deposited to 14, the number required for the Agreement to enter into force. This news was announced during the 37th Tripartite Task Force Meeting, which took place on 20th July, 2024 on the sidelines of the 6th African Union Mid-Year Coordination Meeting in Accra, Ghana.

The 14 countries that have ratified the Tripartite are Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Egypt, Eswatini, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. They account for about75% of the Tripartite GDP in 2022. In turn, the 29 Tripartite Member/Partner States represent 53% of the African Union's membership, more than 60% of continental GDP ($1.88 trillion), and a combined population of 800 million.

The next countries that are reported close to ratify the TFTA are Tanzania (which however announced to be ready to ratify this agreement already more than 1 year ago, without making however any step progress), and South Sudan.

Now that the TFTA is operational, the most challenging phase has to start: its implementation, which is expected not to be so smooth as one would expect, due to the number of countries involved in this initiative and the lack of a permanent Secretariat. Indeed, a Tripartite Task Force serves currently as the Secretariat of the Tripartite Policy organs, whose role is limited to coordinate the implementation of the Tripartite Free Trade Area (FTA) work programme. The Tripartite Task Force is made up of the Chief Executives of the three RECs and rotates annually among the three RECs. In addition, the Tripartite negotiations on rules of origin have not been concluded yet, as these rules currently cover only 90% of the tariff lines. Products on which an agreement has not yet be reached include the textiles and automobiles sectors, the same that have stalled the AfCFTA negotiation process.