NAIROBI, Kenya
President of Kenya, William Ruto, has announced plans to remove visa requirements for African nationals travelling to Kenya for business as a first major step to remove barriers to intra-Africa trade.
Ruto on Monday, apologised to
public and private sector leaders attending a forum on African Continental Free
Trade Area (AfCFTA) in Nairobi for the visa requirements.
“My minister for Trade has
informed me that somehow some of our officials made you pay visas to come home
and asked me to apologise, which I do. When one comes home, they don’t pay to
come home.” He told the forum, narrating the human evolution story in Turkana,
Kenya.
“I want to promise you that
this might be the last time you are looking for a visa to come to Kenya because
of two reasons. Number one, because this is home and number two, we support
wholeheartedly the AfCFTA. We must remove any impediments to the movement of
people around our continent.”
The announcement, on
Monday, was a continuation of Kenya’s policy for the integration of
Africa, which began gathering steam during the reign of immediate former
President Uhuru Kenyatta.
Ruto’s predecessor, in
November 2017, allowed any African visiting Kenya to be eligible to receive a
visa on arrival.
Kenya’s move, at the time,
came in the same month Rwanda issued a similar directive in the spirit of
pan-Africanism without the requirement for reciprocity from other countries.
“For my fellow Africans, the
free movement of people on our continent has always been a cornerstone of
pan-African brotherhood and fraternity. The freer we are to travel and live
with one another, the more integrated and appreciative of our diversity we will
become.” said Kenyatta when he was sworn in for his second and final term in
office on November 27, 2017.
Nairobi has, for years, been
championing the removal of trade barriers amongst African countries to ease the
movement of goods, services and labour through the integration of regional
trading blocs.
Kenya was among the countries
selected to participate in the pilot phase of the AfCFTA Initiative on Guided
Trade last year as part of the efforts to encourage the movement of goods under
preferential trading, launched on January 1, 2021.
The other countries were
Ghana, Cameroon, Egypt, Mauritius, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Tunisia.
Africa’s under-developed
transport networks have been blamed for raising cost of goods and services as
much as 40 percent, rendering intra-African trade uncompetitive compared with
trade with developed continents such as Europe.
For example, the first
consignment of Kenya’s value-added tea to Ghana which left the country last
October reached Port of Tema in February this year, underlining the
infrastructural hurdles facing intra-African trade.
“This is why we must take such
barriers as weak transport and logistics capacity, customs related delays,
rules of origin, import bans and export restrictions, quotas and levies,
technical barriers, import permits and licenses, very seriously because they
ultimately reverse all the depths we try to make towards a free trade area.” Ruto
said.
“They may look small,
incremental but their sum total amounts to a reversal of what we are trying to
achieve.”
Africa accounted for 18.49
percent, or Sh622.56 billion, of Kenya’s Sh3.37 trillion total trade value in
2022, largely unchanged from 18.39 percent in the prior year, according to
provisional data collated by the Central Bank of Kenya.
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