Ex-MSU lecturer lands AfCFTA advisory role

BUSINESS REPORTER

A former law lecturer at the Midlands State University (MSU), Gainmore Zanamwe, has been selected as one of the advisers as the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) quickens.

A senior manager (Trade Facilitation) at Afreximbank, Zanamwe was departmental chairperson and law lecturer at MSU from 2005 to 2006.

The AfCFTA Trade and Industrial Development Advisory Council was constituted by AfCFTA Secretariat secretary general Wamkele Mene to provide advice on trade integration and transformative industrialisation as part of the implementation of the AfCFTA.

It was endorsed last month by Africa’s heads of States and Government.

The Advisory Council also Prof Caroline Ncube, an NRF rated researcher, former UN Economic Commission for Africa executive secretary Carlos Lopes and Jane Ezirigwe, researcher at the Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies.

AfCFTA is the world’s largest free trade area since the formulation of the World Trade Organisation and seeks to bring together all 55 member states of the African Union, covering a market of more than 1.2 billion people, including a growing middle class and a combined gross domestic product of US$2.6 trillion.

It works towards several objectives, most importantly to create a single market for goods and services, having the potential to boost intra-African trade by 52.3%.

Advisory Council members

• Dr Arkebe Oqubay, a Senior Minister and Special Adviser to the Prime Minister of Ethiopia and has been at the centre of policy-making for over 30 years
• Dr Arkebe Oqubay, a Senior Minister and Special Adviser to the Prime Minister of Ethiopia and has been at the centre of policy-making for over 30 years
• Dr Taffere Tesfachew, is an international consultant on trade-and development related issues. He was director of the Division on Africa and Least Developed Countries, UNCTAD
• Dr Dipeolu is Special Adviser to the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria on economic matters
• Dr Celestin Monga is a Visiting Professor of Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Faculty Associate at the Centre for International Development at Harvard University, and Fellow at the Harvard University Centre for African Studies
• Ambassador Magda Shahin is the Director of the Prince Alwaleed American Studies Centre at the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at The American University in Cairo
• Prof Fiona Tregenna heads the DSI/NRF South African Research Chair in Industrial Development, leading this centre of research, training and policy engagement, and is also a Professor of Economics at the University of Johannesburg. She sits part-time on the South African Competition Tribunal (appointed by the President), where she adjudicates competition cases
• Stephen Karingi is currently the director, Regional Integration and Trade Division of the Economic Commission for Africa
• Prof Oyebanji Oyelaran-Oyeyinka, Special Advisor to the President of AfDB on Industrialisation and a globally respected leader in the field of development economics, where he has contributed immensely to the social sciences of urbanisation and human settlement, industrialisation and economic development
• Prof Faizel Ismail is the Director of Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town