Analysis

The Analysis Section of Afronomicslaw.org publishes two types of content on issues of international economic law and public international law, and related subject matter, relating to Africa and the Global South. First, individual blog submissions which readers are encouraged to submit for consideration. Second, feature symposia, on discrete themes and book reviews that fall within the scope of the subject matter focus of Afronomicslaw.org. 

Reflections on Making Markets Work for Africa and the Structure, Function and Challenges of Nigeria’s new Anti-Trust Regulator

Making Markets Work for Africa is a courageous attempt to bring order to the sparse and often chaotic studies of competition law and policy in Africa. The reader is immediately struck by the logical style of the authors followed by the skilful presentation of the often-esoteric issues of competition law across the different chapters of the book. The text also serves as a well-timed primer on African competition law which may be useful for the reform of existing competition regimes or the introduction of new ones.

Overview of Development of Competition Law in Nigeria

In his contribution to this symposium on Eleanor Fox and Mor Bakhoum’s book, Making Markets Work for Africa: Markets, Development, and Competition Law in Sub-Saharan Africa (OUP, 2019), Jasper Lubeto notes the omission of Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, as a case study in the book. This excellent book went to press before Nigeria’s competition law came into force in January this year. To add to the rich discussion in this symposium, this essay discusses the historical development of Nigeria’s new competition law as well as the players and forces that shaped it. Finally, it reflects on the challenges and opportunities open to the new agency established to oversee competition law and policy in Nigeria. This essay also precedes two other essays on Nigerian competition law in the next two days.

Competition law and policy as a tool for development: a review of Making Markets Work for Africa: Markets, Development, and Competition Law in sub-Saharan Africa by Eleanor Fox and Mor Bakhoum

Fox and Bakhoum’s fairly broad analysis focusing on West, East, and Southern African countries brings to fore the real challenges at play in Africa. It is a fragmented, stratified yet at times vertically united legal and policy landscape. While they observe the need for convergence of competition law at the continental or regional level, they note the different states of developmental progress among sub-Saharan African countries hence concede the need for the fragmented approach

Review of Making Markets Work for Africa (Fox & Bakhoum, OUP 2019)

The book provides helpful examples of the challenges faced in terms of the financial and human capital needs for effective competition law enforcement as well as challenges of corruption and political pressure. Having set out these challenges, the authors document how some countries have very admirably dealt with them, showing how some competition authorities have risen to find effective solutions, making competition law worth much more than the paper it is written on.

Reflections on Fox and Bakhoum’s Making Markets Work for Africa (OUP, 2019)

Fox and Bakhoum contextualize competition law by describing (in chapters 2 and 3) the structure and other key characteristic of markets in numerous African countries, including the economic and political history of those countries and their markets, as well as the legacies of colonization and decolonization – and by highlighting more broadly the economic challenges and needs of the people of Africa.

Book Review of Fox and Bakhoum: Making Markets Work for Africa (OUP, 2019)

Arguably, Fox and Bakhoum’s Making Markets Work for Africa does more than take part in this literature, it helps bring it into focus, crystallizing its insights and articulating a number of its internal debates.  Perhaps this assessment should be nuanced a bit.  Despite their extensive footnotes and their admirable collaborative scholarship and drive to work from and with African sources (for instance with the Quarterly Competition Review produced by CCRED), the book is focused more on the policy problem than on the existing literature about the problem.  This is not a book about books; it is a book about identifying a complex economic situation with challenges and opportunities and charting and driving a particular line in favour of a better life for Africa’s population.

Book Review of Fox and Bakhoum, Markets, Development, and Competition Law in Sub-Sub-Saharan Africa

The book provides illuminating insights on the contrasting historical and economic imperatives that drove the development of competition law and policy in the US, post World War II Europe and in selected countries on the African continent.  The authors explain that in the US, the development of antitrust law was a response to the industrial revolution and in its wake, large enterprises.  For almost a century, the US courts, interpreted antitrust law “to protect the weak from the strong.”  There was a significant shift in US antitrust law under the Reagan administration “away from economic democracy and towards efficiency” as the US focused on global competitiveness and economic power.

Devising Most Favored Nation (MFN) Clauses for the implementation of the AfCFTA in Economic Partnership Agreements

The effective implementation of the AfCFTA can only be achieved where state parties are assured of the stability of their local markets. This article notes that one of the key ways to safeguard these markets is through the development of a coordinated response to MFN clauses which can only be effectively attained through the Council of Ministers.

The Importance of Traditional Knowledge and Traditional Cultural Expressions in the AfCFTA

September 9, 2019

With the launching of the operational phase or phase 2 of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), debates and negotiations have started on different instruments that will govern this agreement. One of the main subjects would be intellectual property and particularly issues related to the protection of tradition knowledge (TK) and traditional cultural expressions (TCEs). The intellectual property (IP) Annex or chapter of the AfCFTA will give Africans countries a unique occasion to deal with these issues.