AfCFTA and Trade Facilitation in ECOWAS Borderless Region: Challenges and Prospects (Published)
This paper seeks to examine the establishment and ratification of the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA) as an endeavour on the part of the African Union to promote intra-African trade. The African socioeconomic development and industrial competitiveness is anticipated to increase as a result of the AfCFTA. The agreement is expected to link 1.3 billion people in 55 nations, with a $3.4 trillion global GDP. By 2035, it is projected to be able to save 30 million people from abject poverty. The AfCFTA will result in a significant liberalization of trade in products and services within Africa, making it simpler for business people to conduct international business and lowering trade costs. However, there are concerns that putting the agreement into practice successfully in a continent with limited capacity, uncompetitive industries, and reliable infrastructure will be difficult. The research relies on the secondary sources of data collection, which include the use of such materials as textbooks, journals, newspapers, magazines and internet sources. The paper analyses the political- economic dynamics and argues that the success of AfCFTA will be greatly influenced by a number of variables, including member states level of commitment, the availability of cutting-edge technology, technical capacity, and essential infrastructure, the transparency and accountability of processes, and how infractions and complaints are resolved.
Keywords: AfCFTA, Challenges and Prospects, Ecowas, Trade Liberalization, trade facilitation
UNITED NATIONS-ECOWAS INTERVENTION IN MALI- GUINEA BISSAU: GEO-ECONOMIC AND STRATEGIC ANALYSIS (Review Completed - Accepted)
Intervention in terms of international law, is the term for the use of force by one country or sovereign state in the internal or external affairs of another. In most cases, intervention is considered to be an unlawful. Oppenheim (1992) defines intervention as a forcible or dictorial interference by a State in the affairs of another State calculated to impose certain conduct or consequences on that other State. The military intervention by ECOWAS has not been totally successful in quelling conflicts, crisis of regime change and political succession and military intervention into politics in the West African sub-region and the Africa generally. Intervention can be done by various means, e.g. military, subversive, economic, or diplomatic. The latest of these conflicts in the sub-region which ECOWAS has intervened are Mali and Guinea Bissau in 2012. The objective has been to restore democracy by forcing the military back to the barracks or restricting it to the constitutional role of protecting the territorial integrity from internal insurrection and external aggression. But the root causes of military intervention into politics and crisis of regime change or political succession are yet to be adequately addressed by the ECOWAS, for example, issues of legitimacy crisis, poor governance, bad leadership, political leadership failure, political corruption, electoral crisis and political violence have been largely left unattended or ignored. The political conditions in most of the countries in the sub-region and indeed Africa as a whole are not democracy friendly or unsuitable for democratization and flourishing of democracy or demilitarization (Aning and Bah, 2010; Sperling, 2011). Most scholars like Nowrot and Schabacker (1998) focus on the legality of ECOWAS intervention while the likes of Olonisakan (2010) concentrates on the effectiveness of the military intervention in quelling conflicts in the West African sub-region. Despite the fact that peacekeeping partnerships are yet to mature, the general consensus is that the world is headed towards greater integration between the UN and regional arrangements such as Ecowas. Such institutions play an important role, especially in a world with power imbalances, distrust and unrest. Cooperation among states towards peacekeeping mechanisms gives birth to opportunities for burden sharing, balancing power, pursuing self-interest and generally preventing the collapse of world order as it stands. In light of the changing security dynamics, peace operations have become both all the more complex and important. Bringing together regional arrangements allows flexibility for political manoeuvring and unity vis-à-vis mission mandate and implementation. Still in its infancy, peacekeeping alliances should be viewed as a means to an end rather than an end unto itself. It is impossible to obtain a foolproof hybrid operation. But with each step forward, finding common ground for joint preparation mechanisms becomes all the more easier.This paper titled “UN-ECOWAS intervention in Mali: Geo-Economic and Strategic Analysis” . The study is basically a qualitative research method relying mainly on secondary sources of data from internet source, official documents and country websites as the method of data collection. We made use of qualitative – descriptive analysis as our method of data analysis, that is, documentary studies of official document and other materials in analyzing the secondary data. The major purpose of embarking on this research is to examine the geo-economic and strategic implications of UN-ECOWAS intervention in Mali. Thus, we were able to make the following principal findings that, one, the delayed UN backed ECOWAS humanitarian intervention deepened the crisis in Mali. Two, that the poorly funded UN supported ECOWAS peacekeeping intervention worsened the terrorist attack in Mali. On the basis of this, we recommend, one, that UN and ECOWAS should evolve a rapid and quick deployment of humanitarian intervention forces in order to lesson crisis. Two, that UN and ECOWAS should adequately fund peacekeeping intervention forces in order to reduce terrorist attack.
Keywords: Ecowas, Geo-Economic and Strategic Analysis, Guinea Bissau, Intervention, Mali, United Nations