President Muhammadu Buhari’s recent appointment of Dr Yonov Frederick Agah, former Deputy Director-General of the World Trade Organisation (WT0), as Director-General of the Nigeria Office for Trade Negotiations (NOTN) and Nigeria’s Chief Trade Negotiator is patently meritocratic and smart. And congratulations are in order!
I will come to the implications of Ambassador Agah’s appointment for the Nigerian and African trade landscapes. But allow me to start with some personal reflections.
I first met Dr Agah in 2005 when I was a research fellow at the WTO in Geneva, and he was Nigeria’s ambassador to the WTO. A personable and engaging trade guru, he was always generous with his time and insight each time I visited him at the Nigeria Trade Office. For several years later, after I had returned to London, I stayed in touch with him.
Thus, in 2013, when the Commonwealth Secretariat asked me and a colleague at the London School of Economics, Dr Stephen Woolcock, to produce a report on how to unlock the impasse in the Doha Round, Dr Agah was one of our go-to persons. Dr Woolcock and I met him in Geneva, and our research was hugely enriched by his deep knowledge. The last time I met him in person was later that year when the Commonwealth Secretariat launched the report in Geneva. Dr Agah spoke at the event.
A few months later, in October 2013, I was delighted to hear of his appointment as Deputy Director-General of the WTO. It was richly deserved. Since 2006, Dr Agah had chaired all the important WTO bodies. In 2011, he chaired the WTO’s General Council, its highest-level decision-making body in Geneva, tasked with organizing the Eighth WTO Ministerial Conference (MC8), held in Geneva from 15 to 17 December 2011. Given the prevailing stalemate in the Doha Round, MC8 was widely predicted to fail. But Ambassador Agah snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. The conference was successful.
Popularly called “Fred” in Geneva, Dr Agah’s reputation was hugely boosted with the success of MC8. So, few were surprised when, in October 2013, the then new Director-General of the WTO, Roberto Azevêdo, appointed Dr Agah as one of his four Deputy Directors-General. He was reappointed for another term on 1 October 2017.
Given the above, it wasn’t surprising that President Buhari initially nominated Dr Agah as Nigeria’s candidate for Director-General of the WTO before later replacing him with Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. Truth is, despite his outstanding qualities, Agah doesn’t have Okonjo-Iweala’s global profile. So, the decision to substitute Agah’s nomination with that of Okonjo-Iweala reflected realpolitik, as her subsequent selection as Director-General of the WTO against tough opposition has proved.
But Dr Agah’s talents are too great to go to waste. Which is why President Buhari’s decision to appoint him as Director-General of NOTN and Nigeria’s Chief Trade Negotiator is, indeed, a no-brainer: it’s thoroughly well deserved!
Of course, Dr Agah follows in the footsteps of another illustrious Nigerian, also a linchpin of the WTO: the late Ambassador Chiedu Osakwe. When Dr Osakwe retired from the WTO in 2017, after nearly 20 years, he returned to Nigeria to establish the NOTN and was later appointed as its first Director-General and Nigeria’s Chief Trade Negotiator. On 5 June 2017, the African Union elected Osakwe as chairman of the Negotiating Forum for the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). He resuscitated the moribund negotiations and steered the first phase to a successful conclusion, leading to the signing of the AfCFTA Agreement by 44 African countries in Kigali, Rwanda, on 21 March 2018.
Dr Agah is now asked to make Nigeria’s membership of AfCFTA really operative and lead this country’s participation in the second phase of the AfCFTA negotiations. Well, although Dr Agah is up to the job, we should not underestimate the nature of the challenges.
For a start, Nigeria cannot be an effective and credible player in any international trade negotiation unless it has a sensible and coherent trade policy from which it can derive its negotiation mandate and positions. But Nigeria doesn’t have such a trade policy!
In September 2018, NOTN launched a call for inputs into what it dubbed “A 21st century trade policy for Nigeria”, with the strap line: “A welfare and prosperity trade agenda that works for all.” I wrote at the time about what a “welfare and prosperity trade agenda” should look like. I said it should be based on export promotion, not import substitution. But Nigeria is fixated on import substitution. Thus, it’s not a demandeur in trade negotiations pushing for greater market opening but, rather, a defensive negotiator seeking to protect its domestic industries instead of challenging them to embrace export opportunities.
For instance, evidence shows that as trading started under AfCFTA terms in January, Nigeria was recording a massive trade deficit. Soon, if that trend continues, there will a huge outcry about AfCFTA, with everyone blaming it for unfair trade practices. But here’s the truth: other AfCFTA member-states are raring to enter Nigeria’s market and if Nigerian businesses are not raring to enter AfCFTA markets, Nigeria would incur huge trade deficits.
So, the first task of Dr Agah and the NOTN is to persuade Nigerian businesses to see and exploit AfCFTA’s market-access opportunities. Truth is, there is no normative acceptance, let alone rational appreciation, of AfCFTA in Nigeria yet!
Which leads us to the second challenge: institutions. No country can be a serious player in trade negotiations without the right domestic institutions and infrastructure. Nigeria talks a lot about dumping, but where is the trade remedies mechanism? The first institution the UK established after the leaving the EU was the Trade Remedies Authority (TRA) to deal with trade remedies investigations. Nigeria has none!
In fact, what about the readiness to implement AfCFTA? During a press conference on 1 January, when trading under AfCFTA started, Ambassador Wamkele Mene, AfCFTA’s secretary-general, said that 34 of the 55 AfCFTA member-states had submitted their instruments of ratification, but some did not have the customs infrastructure to start trading on AfCFTA terms. He kept mentioning Egypt, South Africa and Ghana as countries that were customs ready. He never mentioned Nigeria, which was the 34th country to submit its instrument on 5 December? If that’s because Nigeria is not customs ready, wouldn’t that be shameful, if not surprising?
The third challenge, apart from policy and institutions, is process. Some scholars say that Robert Putnam’s two-level game theory of the domestic and international interface doesn’t apply to Africa because the domestic level doesn’t exist given the absence of genuine stakeholder engagement. The situation is worse in Nigeria. But in the words of John Odell, another negotiation expert: “If negotiators take the domestic political landscape for granted, they can step on a landmine.” Of course, Dr Agah knows that!
Which, finally, brings us to AfCFTA itself. To be sure, AfCFTA is still work in progress. The Phase 1 negotiations are still not complete as, for example, Rules of Origin are still being negotiated. And Phase 2, consisting of competition, investment and intellectual property, would be challenging. The African Union should appoint Ambassador Agah as chairman of the Negotiating Forum to give direction and credibility to the process.
Recently, Ambassador Mene, AfCFTA’s secretary-general, was angry and defensive when responding to criticisms from foreign actors about the seriousness of AfCFTA. But AfCFTA can’t just be about increasing intra-Africa trade, it should also be about integrating Africa into the global economy, into global value chains. For that, it must have credibility with the international economic community. Agah’s experience will help facilitate that process!
International trade negotiations are a function of technical expertise, diplomatic acumen and political skills. Dr Agah possesses all of these. With greater attention to the politics, he will succeed. I wish him well!
