MBABANE – When the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) officially commenced trading in January 2021, expectations across the continent were immense.
By 2025, many policymakers, manufacturers and traders anticipated a visible industrialisation wave driven by tariff-free access to a market of more than 1.3 billion people.
Five years on, AfCFTA has undoubtedly delivered strong political momentum and institutional progress, but it has yet to translate into the scale of industrial expansion and cross-border trade flows that were widely expected.
For Eswatini’s business community – particularly local traders and manufacturers eager to export into African markets – this gap between promise and reality is both frustrating and instructive.
Understanding why AfCFTA has underperformed on industrial outcomes is essential if the next phase is to work better for small economies and SMEs, such as those in Eswatini.
There is little doubt that AfCFTA’s first five years have been politically significant. It has unified 54 African countries under a single trade framework, created common tariff schedules, established a Secretariat in Accra and embedded the idea of African economic self-reliance firmly into continental discourse. Trade ministries now routinely speak the language of regional value chains, export diversification and industrial upgrading.
Yet on the ground, most African firms – especially small and medium-sized enterprises – still struggle to experience AfCFTA as a practical commercial opportunity.
Intra-African trade has grown only modestly and the long-promised manufacturing boom has not materialised at scale.
As Dr Iqbal Survé, Former Chairperson of the BRICS Business Council and Co-Chair of the BRICS Media Forum, has argued, the problem is not a lack of ambition, but implementation bottlenecks that sit squarely at the firm level.
The dominant constraint undermining AfCFTA implementation has been regulatory rather than fiscal. While tariff liberalisation has progressed, non-tariff measures (NTMs) have effectively replaced tariffs as the main obstacle to trade.
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… rules of origin: agreed, but rarely used
MBABANE – Rules of origin (RoO) have emerged as the second major bottleneck.
By 2024, over 88 per cent of AfCFTA product lines had agreed RoO, a major technical achievement. However, utilisation rates remain extremely low.
The problem lies in complexity. SMEs across Africa often lack the documentation systems, traceability mechanisms and compliance capacity required to qualify for preferential treatment.
As a result, many exporters default to Most-Favoured Nation (MFN) regimes, even when AfCFTA preferences are available, simply because the paperwork is too burdensome or certification too slow.
In sectors such as textiles, agro-processing and light manufacturing – all areas of interest for Eswatini’s industrial diversification – this has significantly undermined preferential trading flows and reduced the incentive to reorient production towards African markets.
A third structural constraint is uneven customs digitalisation and trade facilitation capacity across the continent. According to the African Development Bank’s latest Trade Facilitation Index, fewer than a third of African countries have fully operational national single window, and cross-border interoperability remains rare.
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