Something concrete for the trade vs aid debate:

 

• Yoweri Museveni

A plane from Africa can fly Britain to its global future

Uganda does not need aid to prosper; it needs to trade with the United Kingdom. That will benefit both sides

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Credit: ABUBAKER LUBOWA/REUTERS

Yoweri Museveni

25 May 2025 4:32pm BST

Last week, we saw a glimpse of Britain’s present and future. First, a “reset” with the European Union, touted by London as a step to lower barriers and increase trade in similar food and fresh produce between neighbours. Second, a Ugandan plane flying direct to the UK for the first time in more than two decades, carrying a cargo of produce that Britain cannot grow. 

It is not for the leader of a country far away to judge the rights or wrongs of closer trade cooperation between Britain and Europe. But what is undeniable in 2025 is that the oft-quoted “first rule of trade” – that proximity matters – is a fiction. If it were true then the proportion of trade the UK conducts with the rest of the world would not have accelerated for the last 20 years, while in parallel trade with its continental neighbours declined.   

It is a fact that many nations around the world proudly possess older and deeper ties to Britain of shared language, culture, and trade. Many, like my own country Uganda, are members of the Commonwealth, and have sought to re-kindle brotherly relations since Brexit in 2020. 

The fruits of this opportunity are increasingly visible: trade deals have been signed with Australia, New Zealand, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), and India. This shows just how many seek to recalibrate the old bonds that predate Britain’s time in the EU, and how regardless of any reset with your neighbours your country’s trade relations are now permanently global.

That’s why the landing of Uganda airlines flight UR110 at Gatwick last week represents such potential. There is simply no reason in today’s world why Britain should not seek to increase trade with every continent – and not least Africa when it contains 11 of the world’s twenty fastest-growing economies. 

In the UK – and her continental neighbours – green beans cannot be grown beyond the summer. Coffee beans cannot be grown at all. In Uganda, both – and more – can be harvested all year around. When much of what you and your neighbours grow is similar, and according to the same seasonal rotations, that makes them as much trading competitors as partners. Uganda, on the other hand, is complementary. 

But we are ahead of ourselves. There are many barriers to trade between Britain and Africa and they will not be lowered by the first planeload of coffee, chocolate, and chillis on flight UR110. Those will be lowered by trade agreements that reduce tariffs, by addressing non-tariff barriers to trade and, just as importantly, by challenging prejudices about Africa – prejudices Africans too must work hard to combat. 

In 2023 the UK launched the Developing Countries’ Trading Scheme, a post-Brexit trade policy that reduced – in many cases to zero – tariffs on a raft of products for 65 emerging market nations with more than half from Africa. 

This major statement of belief in free trade and reengagement with the world was welcome. Yet lowering a tariff on, for example fresh produce, does not automatically mean a single extra pea or mango will be imported. The most devastating barrier facing African farmers – indeed most worldwide – are the non-tariff barriers put in place in the name of food standards. 

Everyone wants safe and clean food, and who has not tasted the best when it is grown naturally, in a garden, smallholding, or allotment? Yet such produce would not be legally permitted for sale in a single British supermarket under a constellation of rules and regulations slated to both protect and seemingly at the same time to remove all taste. 

Extreme certification and regulatory barriers are destined to benefit huge commercial agribusinesses that can afford to meet them, while they wreck the chances of smaller producers through prohibitive costs from exporting to the UK. This is a system that empowers not people but multinationals.

There must be a solution between friendly nations that with sufficient imagination can land a happy medium. That same approach should be turned to address preconceptions about Africa and its expectations of relations with Britain. 

Too many in the West believe Africans want their charity, and their money. They are wrong on the first, but right on the second. We do not want your aid; we want your trade. We want the honesty of being trading partners, not the dependency of handouts. 

Help yourselves by helping us supply you with the food and goods you cannot produce. Sell to us the services and goods we cannot make. Manufacture and assemble with us and bring in technology and we give you the raw materials. This is what the future of trade looks like. Britain can make the first planeload of Ugandan produce in two decades not a footnote in its new global trade relations, but the reawakening of something older and more complementary than we have known for a long time. 

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Yoweri Museveni is president of Uganda

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Home | Wire | The Problem with Africa's Protectionism

The Problem with Africa's Protectionism

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7 COMMENTS

TAGS PovertyProtectionism and Free TradeWorld History

07/17/2020Germinal G. Van

During the postcolonial period, most of the African countries which had opted for socialism as their economic system also adopted protectionism as an economic measure to favor certain politically preferred industries. Policymakers wanted to protect domestic industries from foreign competition through tariffs, subsidies, import quotas, or other restrictions or handicaps on the imports of foreign competitors. For example, today Tanzania is one of the top exporters of agricultural commodities in Africa. It mainly exports tobacco ($248.8 million), coffee ($181.6 million), and oilseeds ($230 million). Interestingly, those products are not primarily exported to other African countries. In fact, Switzerland is the main importer of Tanzanian agricultural commodities, purchasing 16.2 percent of Tanzanian agricultural production, and India is the second-largest importer of its goods. But Tanzania does not trade much with its African neighbors. As figure 1 shows, the country only trades with Kenya and South Africa, while the rest of the world is its customer. It has imposed higher tariffs and subsidies when trading with its neighbors but has loosened those same tariffs and subsidies on non-African countries. Despite the good intentions of protectionists, we find that their policies create two substantive conundrums in the economic development of a country.

Figure 1: Tanzania Major Export Destinations (2016)

screenshot_3.png

Source: Trading Economics. "Other" includes some African countries such as Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Uganda, as well as the United States, many other Western countries, and Latin America.

Protectionism harms domestic markets. A healthy domestic market relies on the freedom of consumers and entrepreneurs to choose the products they buy, whether for personal consumption or as inputs in their businesses. Protectionist policies limit this ability to choose. Since African protectionist policies are often based on quotas, consumers have very limited choice as to the quantity, quality, and type of products available to them than they would without trade protectionism. Moreover, tariffs and subsidies force a consumer to pay a higher price for a domestic product. Thus, the purchasing power of the African consumer is not as high as that of Western or Asian consumers. When trade protectionist policies are implemented upon domestic products, it compels the consumer to settle for low quality and pay more for a particular product. That is one of the reasons why African consumption is not adequate. Africans are constrained to consumption of lower-quality products that they purchase at a higher price. France, for example, sells its Peugeot automobile to many French-speaking countries, although many consumers consider Peugeots to be low-quality cars. However, because trade restrictions limit access to other choices in automobiles, many Africans end up purchasing these relatively low-quality cars at relatively high prices. This further contributes to the impoverishment of Africans.  Protectionism also negatively affects the growth of new industries. In fact, the protection of an infant industry may actually end up costing a government a significant amount of money and financial resources and actually promotes inefficiencies within the new industry, which has no incentive to make efficient, intelligent long-term investments by borrowing funds or issuing common stock in domestic international capital markets.

Protectionism also creates poverty. Indeed, GDP output falls once tariffs rise because of a significant decrease in labor productivity. Income, in addition to being based on the availability of capital, depends on the productivity of labor. But growth in labor productivity requires growth in access to capital.  When firms in the import-competing sectors receive protection, resources are reallocated within the economy to relatively unproductive uses. For example, when Kwame Nkrumah was the President of Ghana in the 1960s, he imposed tariffs and subsidies on the major Ghanaian industries. However, the president of the neighboring country Ivory Coast (Côte d'Ivoire) during that same period applied free trade policies to the major industries of the Ivorian economy. As we can observe in figure 2, income per capita significantly differed between Ghana and Ivory Coast. The application of free trade policies improved the living standard of the Ivorian people while the living standard of Ghanaians stagnated. Moreover, protectionism often leads to an increase in unemployment. Countries that close themselves off to foreign competition eventually lose their edge, along with innovation, jobs, and growth. This loss of touch with current world affairs leads to unemployment, and therefore to greater poverty.

Figure 2: Impact of Trade Liberalization on Per Capita Income: Ivory Coast and Ghana, 1960–20

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Source: World Bank, author’s computation

How Free Trade Can Improve African Economies

African countries can benefit from free trade by increasing their amount of or access to economic resources. The lowering of trade barriers helps small nations obtain the economic resources they need to produce consumer goods or services. It is here that the comparative advantage theory of David Ricardo becomes more relevant than ever. Ricardo over two centuries ago, in his pathbreaking book Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), argued that comparative advantage exists where local industry can produce a product or service at a lower cost compared to elsewhere. This theory elucidates why a country might produce and export something its citizens don’t seem very skilled at producing when compared directly to the citizens of another wealthier country. The citizens of each country are better off specializing in the goods that they have a comparative advantage producing, even if one country has an absolute advantage in each item.

Over time, free trade will improve the efficiency of production in African economies, because trade enables producers to fill in the gaps in their production processes. That is, entrepreneurs and business owners can make their businesses more productive the more they have access to a full, global range of products and services. The acquisition of knowledge and skills will undeniably contribute to the amelioration of labor productivity and output efficiency. Higher labor productivity and output efficiency will logically reduce unemployment and therefore reduce poverty.

Author:

Germinal G. Van

Germinal G. Van is an author, political essayist, and libertarian scholar. He was born and raised in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa. He immigrated to the United States in 2010 with a student visa. He holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from the Catholic University of America and a master’s degree in political management from the George Washington University.

Infrastructure, government failure & economic development

Massive African infrastructure projects often hurt, rather than help, local people

March 16, 2020 4.09pm GMT

Author

1. Tom Goodfellow
   Lecturer in Urban Studies and Planning, University of Sheffield

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Tom Goodfellow received funding for this research from the Economic and Social Research Council (grant no. ES/N018095/1).

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Big infrastructure projects are always controversial. Yet in parts of the world associated with severely deficient infrastructure, the positive value of major infrastructure investments is often taken as a given.

This assumption needs to be subjected to much greater scrutiny, as I argue in new research that explores the narrative of Africa’s “infrastructure gap” and why different bodies are rushing to “plug” it. The nature of the relationship between infrastructure and economic growth is already contested. Despite their tendency to produce a short term boom, there is evidence that big infrastructure investments can exacerbate economic fragility.

But such negative impacts are more than economic. While some internationally financed transport projects are very popular with many city-dwellers – such as the light rail in Addis Ababa, regardless of its other failings – others can generate widespread anger and various perverse local impacts. The reality is that the kinds of projects attracting big finance are rarely structured to benefit those who most urgently require infrastructure access.

The mega-road as a barricade

In Nalumunye, a suburb of the Ugandan capital Kampala, some people are so angry about the newly opened expressway carving an impassable barrier through their lives that they refused to take part in my team’s research about it. This is more than mere nimbyism. Those living near the road are furious on the grounds that it is useless to them, has inflated land values for some other people while cutting off their land and swamping it in dust, and offers no easily accessible entry points.

On one side of the road, commutes into the city have hugely increased in length as many people have to travel miles in the wrong direction before reaching a crossing point. On the other, people are cut off from land and families on which their livelihoods depend. Meanwhile, the social character of the area has changed dramatically as speculators swarm in to build luxurious villas. Many of these remain empty as the promised local benefits of the road fail to materialise. Even if they can access the road, ordinary people fear that the toll payments, when introduced, won’t be affordable.

Of course, the expressway has its benefits for regular travellers between the capital and Entebbe airport – though there are growing concerns about continuing low usage a year and a half after its opening. Dubbed the world’s most expensive road, it provides just one among many examples of large, expensive infrastructure projects for which the benefits are increasingly being questioned within Africa.

Mind the gap

Africa is often presented in international media and policy as being held back by absences that need filling. But rarely is much attention paid to different experiences of this “need” or who benefits from filling such gaps. The idea of a yawning African “infrastructure gap” is the ultimate example of this, with the shortfall in infrastructure often estimated in hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars.

It is true that there are major infrastructure challenges in many parts of Africa. But a careful look at the motivations behind the increased emphasis on this “gap” by a range of financial bodies such as pension funds, insurance companies and other major global investors is needed.

Since the financial crisis of 2007-09, such bodies have been looking for new kinds of asset to invest in. This has led to Africa’s infrastructure gap being increasingly framed as an investment opportunity. While it is often Chinese-financed infrastructure like the road described above that is currently most visible, a further wave of infrastructure financed by private international capital from the West is on the horizon.

From South Africa to the Democratic Republic of Congo, infrastructure financed through public-private-partnerhips and other forms of “blended finance” are being touted as the answer to Africa’s challenges. In the words of the South African government, such projects “must be large” and must provide a “sufficiently attractive risk profile” for investors.

Yet the popular idea that boosting the global financing of African infrastructure represents a “win-win” for investors and African populations is problematic. There is evidence that the infrastructure that global financiers want to fund, such as toll roads, is not the kind that is most desperately needed by the majority of the population. Much more important are the relatively unglamourous critical infrastructures required to provide safe water, sanitation, drainage and transport accessible to all.

Stoking conflict?

Meanwhile, as the Kampala case shows, big infrastructure investments often push up the value of land as speculators and high-end developers come in. This frequently displaces pre-existing populations.

The rising cost of land and property in urban Africa, especially in rapidly transforming areas on the peripheries of large cities, is also associated with increased land conflicts. In west Africa particularly, it is common for groups of men – known as “landguards” in Ghana or “Omo-Onile” (children of the soil) in Lagos – to base their livelihoods around violently extorting resources from ordinary people attempting to build on urban land, citing ancestral claims to the land as justification.

The boost to land prices provided by infrastructure investments is likely to exacerbate these practices, if not carefully managed. As one Nigerian landowner once noted to myself and a colleague: “Land is the crude oil of Lagos.” Valuable land echoes the idea of a “resource curse” through which abundance in a resource, such as oil, can generate violent conflict. And as wealthy urban property-owners cash in on increased land values, they also form an important political lobby that can block progressive reforms such as increased property taxation. Ironically, this starves city governments of the resources to provide the infrastructures that really matter for the poor.

Instead of presenting African cities as places characterised by absences, it is crucial to understand the interests and everyday practices that exist in these supposed “gaps”. This is not only about considering who will be displaced by mega-infrastructures: it means paying attention to whether they might generate new opportunities for some by preying on or excluding others.

Current “solutions” financed by international investors seeking high rates of return are not only offering limited prospects for the poor. They could even generate new forms of political instability by amplifying inequality and displacement, and fomenting land-based grievances.

African Continental Free Trade Agreement

Be aware of the basic elements of this world-changing agreement. It can provide a stellar conclusion, or very good context at a minimum.  First a short video, then some background reading, then more videos:

The African Continental Free Trade Agreement, signed by 44 African countries in Kigali, Rwanda, in March 2018, promises to be a game changer for future trade and development on the continent.

Although the agreement has the potential to become the precursor of a unifying economic vision for Africa, challenges remain, and effective implementation will be crucial for success.

The agreement is meant to create a tariff-free continent that can grow local businesses, boost intra-African trade, encourage industrialisation and create jobs, while creating a single continental market for goods and services. Countries joining the agreement must commit to removing tariffs on at least 90% of the goods they produce as well as establishing a customs union with free movement of capital and business travellers.

Read: Botswana pushes for SA investment

Implications for African trade

Ronak Gopaldas, director at Signal Risk told a Gordon Institute of Business Science forum that the agreement is significant because of its potential size and scale: If all 55 African countries join the free trade area, it will be the world’s largest by number of countries, covering more than 1.2 billion people with a combined GDP of $2.5 trillion (about R36 trillion).

“It is an African solution to an African problem and would dramatically lower the cost of doing business in Africa and improve the ease of doing business on the continent. The agreement is also significant because it comes at a time when the benefits of global trade are being contested,” he added.

Researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs, Asmita Parshotam, said the agreement was a “massive show of political will, the extent of which has not been seen previously”.

The African Continental Free Trade Agreement would bring African countries together to create a framework for an agreement, and a support structure for business.

“It is important to see the implementation of the agreement against measures of international protectionism and continued uncertainty for global trade. African countries can compete globally, integrate into value chains and participate,” she said.

Challenges

Head of coverage for Africa at Rand Merchant Bank, Tshepidi Moremong, took a more cynical view of the agreement: “As a continent, we always have grandiose plans, whereas the regional trading blocs have been more successful than we give them credit for.”

Moremong said the continental free trade agreement was an “aspirational plan, agreed to by technocrats and policy makers. Doing business in Africa is difficult because basic infrastructure such as roads are often still lacking in many countries. It takes more than creating agreements,” she added. 

Parshotam conceded the agreement was an incomplete vision, which had the potential for good, but that “not everyone is going to be a winner”.

Issues that required resolution before the agreement could reach the implementation phase included labour consensus, including the free movement of people, and rules of product origin, which need to be finalised.

President of Olam International, Ramesh Moochikal, said African entrepreneurs and small and medium enterprises with ambition could use the agreement to their advantage: “There is no need to think Pan African all the time. Small businesses will be able to step across the border of one or two countries and expand their markets.”

Moremong said the main beneficiaries of the agreement in its current form would be Africa’s more diversified economies, especially those that are manufacturing based.

Land-locked countries would also benefit, as would those driving technology, because it was easier to move across borders.

Moochikal pointed out that Nigeria, the only country to have engaged in consultation with its business sector, had chosen not to sign up to the agreement. The panel was in agreement that the African Continental Free Trade Agreement was unlikely to be credible without Nigeria’s involvement, but Parshotam said this presented an opportunity for a second tier of political leadership to emerge. The opinions of the regional economic powerhouses of South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria usually dominated trade discussions, she explained, and there was an opportunity for countries such as Rwanda, Egypt, Ethiopia and Ghana to come to the fore.

Towards a unifying economic vision for Africa

Partner at Brunswick Group South Africa, Itumeleng Mahabane said the number of African countries ratifying the agreement is encouraging, but that there is a lot of work remaining. He argued that a unifying economic narrative or shared vision of Africa’s future is needed to “bring people on board and encourage them to remain on board when things get difficult.”

“We see the low trade numbers and we see the opportunities. However, we don’t have a vision of shared imperatives which will continue the momentum,” he added.

Africa had to create 30 million jobs every year for the next 30 years if the continent was to avoid a youth crisis, Mahabane said.

“Our demographic opportunity is more of a threat and special interests will stand in the way if we haven’t identified shared imperatives which can in turn be transformed into narratives for people to see the benefits of cooperation.”

Mahabane explained that the driver of successful regional agreements such as the European Union and the Asia-Pacific Trade Agreement had often been regional peace and security, which had then promoted economic integration through trade.

“It is important to remember that these agreements have evolved over years and even decades into harmonised consensus. We mustn’t be unrealistic but must begin by creating a framework to start negotiations.”

Africa was full of entrepreneurial energy and success stories, Moochikal concluded.

“A shared vision that leadership must believe in and sell will determine whether the agreement succeeds or not,” he said.