Federal Government is considering a law and/or an executive mandate to enable it operationalise a trade remedy infrastructure and contain those key risks that the Africa Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA) could possibly throw up if Nigeria finally signs the trade deal.
Chiedu Osakwe, Nigeria’s Chief Trade Negotiator who disclosed this on Monday said that the trade remedies infrastructure was necessitated by concerns raised by stakeholders, particularly industry operators on efficient safeguards that protect the local industries before going ahead to sign the AfCFTA.
“There is a heightened determination to sign the agreement, but questions about when we will join is a political decision by government,” Osakwe said in Abuja, speaking to some select journalists in an interview.
“And that decision will be taken when we have adequately responded to the concerns of private sector investment holders and as you noticed a number of the concerns are not matters for the NOTN, power, border security, the domestic market,” he further noted.
Osakwe explained that Nigeria already has enough safeguards to take care of concerns raised in the ACFTA, and that all key issues raised by the stakeholders are being addressed.
Osakwe who is Director-General Nigerian Office for Trade Negotiation, explained, “In the agreement establishing the AfCFTA which Nigeria has not signed, we have a provision on trade remedies, we have an anti-dumping clause. This is on the basis on which a member country can apply certain duties on products that have been sold below market price from its producer, importer into Nigeria.
“Secondly, we have a provision on counter veiling measures to trade distorting subsidies, if the importer from another country has used illegal and trade distorting subsidies like export grants, export subsidies, loans that some countries give to their businesses, which they never ask back, to give them an unfair advantage, we have a clause on counter veiling duties on such products in the AfCFTA.
“Number three as part of the trade remedies is infrastructure, in the AfCFTA, we have the preferential safeguard, which is not the anti-dumping, counter veiling duties, but a safe guard provision you have in an all trade agreements to deal with the probability that when you liberalize in some instances, you have a surge of imports and what that preferential safeguard is does is to help you stop the imports.
“But despite those clauses, the manufacturers also raised concerns that the country does not have enough infrastructure of trade to implement those clauses.
At the moment, 47 countries have signed the agreement, approximately 10 have ratified to come into force.
“On where that leaves Nigeria if it neither sign nor ratify, my answer to that is that lets deal with that when we get there, I don’t want to speculate,” Osakwe stated
He said following these ‘legitimate’ concerns, the Nigerian Office for Trade in December last year signed on behalf of the government, a memorandum of understanding with the King and Spalding, a leading global law firm on trade remedy to train and help Nigeria build capacity on trade remedy infrastructure at no cost.
“We signed an MoU on the basis that they will work with Nigeria to draft a trade remedy infrastructure and plot the parameters of how this will work in practice. The training at the King and Spalding offices in Lagos was for a three months period and they were opened for transparency reasons.
“We now have a program of work on the basis on which no later than the end of this year, December that trade remedy infrastructure will be in place, on the basis of the following; a bill will go the National Assembly, but it will be operating on the basis of the executive authority depending on how long the legislative process of enactment takes because sometimes it takes a while, so the first element of it is a law and or an executive mandate to operate it,” the Chief Negotiator explained.
He also explained that an investigating authority would be key and would be responsible for inspecting, analysing the products coming into it, another component was that government would be scaling up the infrastructure for implementing the rules of origin/agreement for the AfCFTA.
Giving feedback on the recent government-stakeholders engagement as mandated by the President, Osakwe said there was a significant nationwide support that Nigeria should go ahead with the agreement establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area.
According to him, stakeholders, however, demanded that key issues like power supply which will help drive competiveness of the local industries should be fixed, as well as improving more on the enabling environment for business, although a lot of progress has been made.
He said the private sector stakeholders were really aggravated by the harassment in the domestic market by the representatives of the security agencies, the tolls, the proliferation of taxes, check points even agents coming into the domestic market.
He said the stakeholders also urged the need to transform the huge informal trade that goes in the country’s different trade corridors to formal trade, as they also advocated that those trade corridors be kept open.
He said there was also a strong call to integrate Women’s entrepreneurs into trade as well as a 21st Century trade policy coordination, and implementation and monitoring mechanism for trade, which is said is ‘absolutely important,’” among others.
