South Africa and Nigeria were still at loggerheads after Sunday’s first day of the African Union summit in Addis Ababa over who should be the first secretary-general of the vaunted African Continent Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). After an intense debate for several hours, they postponed the decision until Monday, when it is expected it would be put to a vote.

South African officials are irked because they say that despite a technical panel having selected South African senior trade negotiator Wamkele Mene, who helped negotiate the AfCFTA and once represented SA at the World Trade Organisation in Geneva, as the best candidate, Nigeria was still punting its candidate, Cecilia Akintomide, a former vice president and general secretary of the African Development Bank. The third short-listed candidate is the DRC’s Faustin Luanga, former economic adviser to ex-President Joseph Kabila.

The three candidates were whittled down by the technical panel from an original list of 121 candidates after interviews last week. The AU foreign ministers on Friday first tried, but failed to select one candidate to put forward to the heads of state and government to confirm on Sunday. The South Africans believe that Nigeria has politicised what should be a purely technical appointment. Sources said on Sunday most West African states had rallied behind the Nigerian candidate while southern Africa and East Africa mostly backed Mene. 

The Nigerians also played the gender card quite hard as their candidate is a woman. And they used President Ramaphosa’s own speech earlier in the day, when he accepted the chair of the AU for 2020, against him. In his speech, Ramaphosa had strongly emphasised women’s empowerment and specifically proposed that at least 50% of appointments should be women. 

The sources said the real contest was between Mene and Akintomide as the DRC candidate Luanga is not gaining much support, although, according to some reports, he was rated second to Mene for expertise by the technical panel. The secretary-general, once elected, will take up his or her posting in March in Accra which is to host the AfCFTA secretariat. The AfCFTA is due to start operating on July 1, though Ramaphosa said in his acceptance speech as AU chair on Sunday that much work remained to be done in finalising technical trade matters such as tariff levels and rules of origin. 

The agreement will create a single market of all Africa’s 55 states with a population of some 1.2 billion and a combined GDP of almost $3-trillion. Ramaphosa hailed the AfCFTA as “the greatest step towards continental unity since the founding of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).”

It would “reignite industrialisation and pave the way for Africa’s integration into the global economy as a player of considerable scale.”

But he also warned:

“We must all ensure that the AfCFTA does not become a conduit for products with minimal African value addition to enter and penetrate our local markets under the guise of continental integration. 

“There must be a reasonable standard set for what constitutes a product that is Proudly Made in Africa.” This is the principal issue that will have to be resolved under the “rules of origin” negotiations that are still taking place — how much value must be added to a product in Africa for it to qualify to enter the rest of the continent free of import duties and quotas.

“We have to level the playing field for African businesses, so they are able to operate in a large-scale market unfettered by regulatory fragmentation,” Ramaphosa said. “ This is an integral part of rebalancing global trade relations.

“The era of economic colonialism and imperialism, under which Africa is a pitstop in the global assembly line, has passed.”

He said the success of the AfCFTA depended on infrastructure development and so “We must all drive the implementation of the Presidential Infrastructure Champion Initiative so that priority and high-impact projects act as catalysts for the AfCFTA.”

Ramaphosa is also chair of the initiative, which aims to close gaps in cross-border infrastructure across the continent, including roads, railways, ports and bridges, without which free trade will be difficult. 

Ramaphosa announced that back-to-back summits would be held in South Africa in May to address the AfCFTA and another major item on his agenda as AU chair, the ambition of Silencing the Guns of Africa. This is the AU’s theme for 2020. It originally set 2020 as the deadline for silencing the guns, but with 11 months to go, the “2020” has been quietly dropped.

Ramaphosa put considerable emphasise on one of his other main goals — to increase women’s empowerment and curb violence against women.

He said he intended to ensure the interests of women were mainstreamed and wanted 2020 to 2030 declared as the Decade of African Women’s Financial and Economic Inclusion.

One way of empowering women would be to give more public contracts to women-owned businesses. The AU’s Agenda 2063 called for at least 25% of public procurement to go to women, but Ramaphosa called for this to be improved.

“The representation of women in decision-making structures in governments, parliaments and other sectors is far too low,” he said. 

“The women of our continent want and demand to occupy their rightful place in all decision-making structures. They deserve 50% representation.” 

“We will make the adoption of an AU Convention on Violence Against Women a priority, and for member states to ratify international protocols that outlaw gender discrimination.”

Another priority which Ramaphosa spelt out was to improve governance in member states. On Saturday, he was elected to chair for two years of the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) which is dedicated to improving political, economic, social and corporate governance across the continent. With the addition of Zimbabwe and Seychelles, 40 African countries are now members of the APRM and Ramaphosa committed himself to engage with the rest to try to reach the AU’s goal of having all its members join by 2023. 

And he said South Africa would make a contribution to promote peace and security in the collective effort to Silence the Guns. This would include convening an intra-Libyan Conference to promote ceasefire and dialogue.

On Saturday, the AU’s Peace and Security Council met at the AU and decided that Africa should be more closely involved in the efforts to end the Libyan warfare. So far it has been the UN and individual Western countries, especially Germany, which have been leading mediation efforts. 

Ramaphosa said he would continue to work with the parties in South Sudan with a view to implementing the outstanding issues of the September 2018 Revitalised Agreement, to pave the way for the formation of the Government of National Unity. Ramaphosa separately met the two main antagonists in that conflict, President Salva Kiir and proposed vice president Riek Machar, on the sidelines of the AU summit. It is not clear what, if anything, they agreed to. 

South African Deputy President David Mabuza has been mediating in the dispute as Ramaphosa’s special envoy, but last week acknowledged he had failed to persuade the two sides to agree on an arbitration process to resolve one of the major sticking points, the number of states that there should be within the South Sudan federation.

Ramaphosa said the extraordinary AU summit which South Africa would host in May would look at the implementation of the AU Master Roadmap on Silencing the Guns, and also respond to emerging circumstances on the African peace and security landscape. 

“The summit must come up with real actions we as Africans must take to end conflicts and deal with acts of terrorism that are raging in many countries and regions such as the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and now spreading to other parts of southern Africa as well.” The latter was an apparent reference to the eruption of jihadist extremist violence in Mozambique’s northernmost province of Cabo Delgado since October 2017.

Ramaphosa said Africa had to deal with external actors fuelling conflict on the continent and that the “principle of finding African solutions for African problems must be our overriding theme in addressing all the conflicts on our continent”.

On other long-standing conflicts, Ramaphosa said the AU was reaffirming its “unwavering support and solidarity with the Palestinian people in their legitimate quest for an independent and sovereign state, as well as the right of the people of Western Sahara to self-determination”.

He departed from his script to say the recent US-backed plan for a resolution of the Middle East conflict – which would allow Israel to annex more of the West Bank — “sounds like a Bantustan type of construction” because the Palestinians had not been consulted at all.

Asked to comment on Ramaphosa’s insistence on the AU’s reaffirmation of its support for Western Saharan self-determination, Moroccan foreign minister Nasser Bourita told journalists that this was a UN issue – and that AU Commission chairperson  Moussa Faki Mahamat had pointed this out in his speech at the summit. DM