Foreign Direct Investment

When the EU and Angola announced the first round of the first-ever ‘Sustainable Investment Facilitation Agreement’, development experts must have asked themselves, like I did, which aspect of this Agreement will induce many foreign firms to plough their capital into the resource-rich Southwestern African nation.

This paper engages in a critical legal analysis of Professor Ian Taylor’s article, Sixty Years Later: Africa’s Stalled Decolonization. It is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis but will provide a limited legal perspective of the article’s foundational arguments on the underlying causes of Africa’s economic underdevelopment, through a legal lens rooted in intellectual property (IP) law and international investment law (IIL).

The quest for Africa’s decolonization is existential and must therefore go beyond platitudes and rhetoric. The exhortation by Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni on the risk of decolonization losing its “revolutionary potential” is germane: decolonization “comes from within, as a revolutionary concept that speaks about rehumanization—which is a fundamental planetary project”.

While investment is not per se a current focus of our TVI, this present article discusses vulnerability concerns in an investment context utilising Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Member States as the point of departure. It concludes by discussing the ways these countries have sought and could seek to build resilience.

As evidence shows that tax incentives are not key drivers of investment and the opportunity cost of the incentives are high with dire implications for the health sector in Africa, it becomes pertinent for African countries to re-evaluate and reform their tax incentives frameworks. To achieve this, African countries need to ensure that all tax incentives are only considered after conducting a cost-benefit analysis of the potential impact of the incentives.

The Namibia Law Journal invites contributions from authors with regard to the impact of Covid-19 on the Namibian society and developed countries, from legal and socio-economic perspectives, regarding the effects that the global pandemic will have on such countries’ developmental aspirations and the realisation of their Sustainable Developmental Goals (SDGs). 

African countries are very diverse in terms of their current debt situation, debt management practices and government securities markets. Debt management is, therefore, a vital component of the appropriate fiscal policy for the management of the negative impact of COVID-19 on the economy of African countries. However, debt management alone cannot solve structural problems and macroeconomic imbalances. Rather, a holistic approach including an appropriate debt level, debt restructuring, and maintenance of healthy domestic and continental forex markets can contribute to preventing sovereign insolvency despite the negative effects of this pandemic to African countries.

This symposium presents two interesting memoirs of African students who have participated in these moots and have chosen paths of graduate studies that are related to international economic law and development studies. Mr Mishael Wambua a student at Strathmore University Law and last year winner and best oralist at the John H. Jackson writes about his experience and advice to future mooters. Ms Purity Maritim a former participant of the same moot and now a masters student at the Graduate Institute in Geneva also writes about her experiences and what she learnt from the moot. The other two contributions are from Mr Christian Campbell the Assistant Director FDI moot and Tsotang Tsietsi lecturer and moot coach from the National University of Lesotho. These two contributions present two interesting perspectives on the many directions that moot court competitions can take for Africa in the near future.

The Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal (PER/PELJ) invites contributions from authors with regard to the impact of the COVID-19 on the future regulation of foreign investment in developing states.