Stand-Alone Posts

Upon improving its infrastructure, Nigeria could very easily leverage its economic base in distributing its products within Africa and internationally. This is already the case in its ‘soft’ products, such as the Nigerian film and music industry, which has seeped into all nooks of African continent, and is largely received internationally. This can be replicated in other aspects, once the foundation is properly laid internally.

Although the restructuring of the existing legal framework is unavoidable, the solution must be carefully sought in a conducive, fair and equitable manner to ensure the needs and interest of the marginalised communities should be considered. It is possible that this approach may provoke controversy, but it is vital ensuring uniform and equitable legal framework that address the need and interest of the marginalised communities to find a balance in the system.

This blog post does not focus on the different reasons that makes integration difficult. Rather, it argues that the structure of the agreements of African Union (AU) contributes to the lack of political commitment among leaders which has been a missing ingredient for successful integration in Africa.

Noting the challenges in implementation of commitments under this Agreement by developing and least developed countries, I argue that there is potential for Customs administrations to act as conduits for WTO TFA implementation through their reform and modernisation initiatives. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, I highlight the achievements realised through Customs reforms and modernisation by Lesotho in the area of trade facilitation.

May, 2019

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Research Networking Scheme, the CLRN_N will host its inaugural conference on the 13th and 14th September 2019, at the University of Reading. It invites submissions on commercial law and policy reform in Nigeria

Prof. Joy Gordon, the Ignacio Ellacuría, S.J. Professor of Social Ethics and the School of Law at Loyola University Chicago is seeking authors working on effects of sanction in Africa. The chapters she is seeking will be published in an edited collection on the humanitarian impact and negative consequences of economic sanctions.  The book will be published by a leading academic publisher.

The call for an open, rules-based approach to investment facilitation at the multilateral level is informed by a tipping point in the international investment arena. As discussed below, this paradigm shift and various precedental challenges have made it imperative to seek international investment policy coherence.

In this blog post I will consider policy initiatives for tackling the issue of illicit flow of funds out of African countries and the implications of these activities on investment and trade in the context of the AfCFTA. Combating Illicit Financial Flows has been a difficult task for African countries and, the best approach to tackle this endemic problem may be to develop and implement comprehensive mechanisms that will encourage the disclosure of these illegal activities in a timely manner. Such disclosure can best be realized by the adoption of a regional whistleblower protection directive.

Many mainstream discussions on African regional integration focus on the role of the executive, bureaucrats and state institutions (hereafter referred to as state-actors) in facilitating regional integration. While state-actors play crucial roles in enabling regional integration from a “top-down” perspective, concentration on these state-actors inadvertently means that less focus is paid to the non-state actors involved in the process. This article explains that while state-actors do facilitate regional integration from a top-down perspective, non-state actors have the potential to (and in some cases, already do) facilitate regional integration using a “bottom-up” approach.