Designing an AfCFTA-Driven Continent-Wide Competition Policy Around the Regional Economic Communities

Implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Agreement will lead to liberalization of trade in Africa, thus expanding the market for African products and services. Expansion of markets necessitates development of a regulatory framework that will promote healthy competition among businesses and protect consumers’ welfare. The Agreement recognizes this fact and has set out the Competition Protocol among the key enablers of its success. Since the regional economic communities (RECs) are the building blocks of the continental wide free trade area, the analysis of their regional competition regime is paramount for providing insight that will guide the development of the Competition Protocol. This article responds to this need by analyzing Africa’s four largest RECs and providing policy proposals on how the continental competition policy should be fashioned. Specifically, this article looks at the RECs’ institutional structure, principles, and carries out a legal, economic, and political analysis on the same. It examines how these laws relate to the three elements (abuse of dominance, anticompetitive mergers, and acquisitions) of competition policy and the challenges that they pose in achieving AfCFTA’s goal. It also looks into the challenges that affect trade and fair competition in the region. Finally, it offers proposals on the competition framework that bridge the gap between the AfCFTA Agreement objectives and the African economic, political, and legal realities.