NOTN Stresses Need to Address Legal Issues -AfCFTA

The Nigerian Office of Trade Negotiations (NOTN) has stressed the need to address legal issues regarding implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) for proper domestication.

Mr Victor Liman, NOTN Acting Director-General and Chief Trade Negotiator, made this known in a news conference on Wednesday in Abuja.

Liman said that although the recent AfCFTA agreement ratification gave it a legal backing, but it needed to be domesticated.

He said section 12 of amended 1999 Nigeria Constitution stated that to operationalise a treaty, the National Assembly must first enact a law to localise it and give it a full implementation.

“If you do not do that and start the implementation, it becomes illegal and after enacting the law, you have to also publish it as a Gazette,” he said.

On this background, he said he had advised the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment to initiate some legal steps to fully implement the agreement in Nigeria.

He also stressed the need to set up a committee to be chaired by the minister, to look into the AfCFTA documentation and rightly domicile it in the ministry.

“Implementation of an agreement needs deliberate, focused, narrow, technical and well-prepared work.

“We have to deploy a workable way of implementing all of these,” he said.

According to him, you have to first of all address the domestic issues that will then allow implementation to kick start and ensure that you put the right framework in place.

He said it was agreed during the 13th Extra Ordinary Summit of the Assembly of African Union (AU) Heads of States and Government in December 2020, that the implementation of those schedules could begin.

Liman said this was subject to the conclusion of negotiation on rules of origin which the timeline was slated for June 2021, to trade preferentially on the basis of a reciprocal arrangement.

“We also need to prepare guidelines or some levels of simplification of the rules of origin for relevant stakeholders to add value to the criteria negotiated under the rules of origin,” he said.

AfCFTA plans to establish a single market, boost competitiveness, deepen economic integration and according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, lift intra-African trade by 52 per cent by 2022.

Nigeria joined 53 other African countries on Jan. 1 to set in motion the world’s biggest trade bloc that will speed up efficient intra-continental trade, marked by few restrictions across national borders and ports of entry.