President Uhuru Kenyatta addresses the Kenya-US Trade Forum in Washington DC on February 6, 2020. FILE PHOTO Florizelle Liser, chief executive of the Corporate Council on Africa, said in an interview following the forum that the US has in fact worked to facilitate the Africa-wide trade agreement.
In New York
Kenya’s negotiations with the US on an unprecedented two-way trade deal are on schedule to begin on July 7 despite difficulties posed by the coronavirus pandemic, President Uhuru Kenyatta said on Friday.
“Our team is raring to go,” he assured an online forum sponsored by the Washington-based Corporate Council on Africa.
Kenya is aiming to create “sustainable jobs for our people” through what would be the first bilateral free-trade agreement between a sub-Saharan country and the nation with the world’s biggest economy, the President added.
The US also has much to gain from concluding such an arrangement, Mr Kenyatta suggested.
Kenya is part of a continent that “requires everything from toothbrushes to machine tooling,” he said.
Mr Kenyatta also sought to allay concerns that a bilateral deal with the US could undermine the African Continental Free Trade Area that is due to be implemented at the start of 2021.
The Africa-wide initiative is “very important to us,” the President said, noting that Kenya has worked hard to ensure its success.
He suggested that a Kenya-US bilateral pact can complement the continental trade agreement and could serve as a model to be replicated by other individual countries.
“If we are successful in these negotiations, Kenya can act as a lead or guide,” the President said. “We will be the guinea pig so that many other African countries can follow suit.”But Ghana President Nana Akufo-Addo, who also spoke at Friday’s forum, said the US has paid more attention to the possibility of a bilateral deal with Kenya than to the multilateral Africa trade agreement that will soon come into force.While hailing the significance of a US-Kenya trade deal, Mr Akufo-Addo lamented that “the emphasis of America on exploring opportunities on the continent has not been quite as intense as some of us would have wished.”Florizelle Liser, chief executive of the Corporate Council on Africa, said in an interview following the forum that the US has in fact worked to facilitate the Africa-wide trade agreement.A bilateral deal with Kenya is not an impediment to Africa’s efforts to forge a multilateral free-trade grouping, she added. The US side “understands that Kenya […]