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

Abstract

Prior to the recent commencement of the Agreement Establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area, (AfCFTA), there was no region-wide competition treaty in Africa. Concerted efforts have been invested in uniting broader political, economic and legal policies at sub-Saharan Africa level except for competition law and policy. Granted, the broader political, economic and legal order ought to lay the foundation for a harmonized competition law and policy dispensation. Eleanor Fox and Mor Bakhoum seem to be alive to this reality in their work, Making Markets Work for Africa: Markets, Development, and Competition law in sub-Saharan Africa. Their work brings together the historical, political, economic and legal underpinnings anchoring competition law and policy in today’s sub-Saharan Africa. They do not stop at that. They focus on the legal texts, institutional set-up and performance, and effects of sub-regional regimes on competition law and policy implementation. 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.