Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa—COMESA

This chapter addresses the Preferential Trade Area (PTA) and its successor REC, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), which was the first Regional Economic Community ((REC) or at least its precursor) to be formed in the immediate period after the Abuja Accord in 1981. Besides ECOWAS, PTA was one of the first economic communities formed for the express purpose of trade and economic cooperation in the region. In Abuja, the OAU decided to work to establish the African Economic Community (AEC) through RECs. RECs would also serve as pillars of continental integration. It outlines PTA’s formation, to ‘enhance cooperation among member-states in the development of their natural and human resources for the benefit of their people.‘ PTA sought to address problems caused by the failure of attempts at federation in Eastern and Central Africa, the need for a sub-regional economic organization as a counterweight to apartheid South Africa and its destabilization of the economies of southern African states, and the glaring need to adopt forms of collective self-sustaining development, the latter geared to reduction of their continued dependence on aid from the Global North. The chapter goes through the signing of the COMESA treaty in 1993 in Uganda, with the goal of forming an FTA that eliminates non-tariff barriers (NTBs) among member states, formation of a customs union with common external tariff (CET) and formation of a monetary union with common currency to be issued by a (common) central bank. It also highlights COMESA’s decision to distribute some of its programs and agencies across membership and assesses the quantitative data on the overall impact of COMESA on the security, economic development and governance.