Welcome to the Symposium on the Zero Draft of the UNIDROIT/FAO/IFAD Legal Guide on Agricultural Land Investment Contracts (ALIC) (hereinafter Legal Guide or Zero Draft). The Legal Guide, is being developed by a UNIDROIT Working Group in collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

The AfCFTA seeks to change the manner in which African states trade with each other. The existence of the AfCFTA is what Roscoe Pound termed using the law as a tool of social engineering. The African Union in creating the AfCFTA intended to promote, facilitate and eventually experience free intra-African trade. This review appreciates the AfCFTA but seeks to criticize a loophole it has created

We are keenly following the unfolding developments in Nigeria and in the sub-Saharan countries that are on the cusp of adopting competition laws, and of course the developments in the AfCFTA as well as ECOWAS/WAEMU and other regionals. We hope to engage with these developments, and hope that our book can provide some insights and a perspective; a building block for moving forward towards a Voice for Africa.

 Appel à contributions 

DÉMOCRATIE CONSTITUTIONNELLE, ÉTAT DE DROIT ET LUTTE CONTRE LA CORRUPTION 

In implementing its mandate, AUCIL carries out a series of programs and activities such as AUCIL Forums which are organized every year and constitute a platform for discussion and interaction on issues of interest to Africa, viewed through the prism of International Law and African Union Law.

The SADC-EAC-COMESA Tripartite Free Trade Agreement (TFTA) negotiations on developing a Protocol on Competition Policy as directed by Article 45 of the TFTA have been ongoing at the same time as this symposium. Though, still at draft stage, the negotiating member states have agreed to adopt a cooperation model framework that will foster cooperation among competition authorities and consumer protection institutions with the aim of encouraging convergence of laws and policies, analysis, common understandings and common competition culture.

The Nigerian Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act (FCCPA), which is modelled after the South African Competition Act, established two institutions for the purposes of enforcing its provisions. These are the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) and the Competition and Consumer Protection Tribunal (CCPT). It saddled them with the responsibility of promoting competition in the Nigerian market by eliminating monopolies, prohibiting abuse of a dominant position and penalizing other restrictive trade and business practices.

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.

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.

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