COMESA Summit on Customs Postponed
(PANA)--The 13th Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) summit of heads of state and government, earlier scheduled to be held in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe next month, has been postponed till next year.
In a statement, COMESA council of ministers’ chairman Deputy Prime Minister and Trade Minister Uhuru Kenyatta, said the rescheduling of the meeting, meant to take place between 7 and 8 December, followed a communication from the Zimbabwe government that it was not ready to host the summit owing to the current political instability.
For the schedule of the meetings of the regional bloc, Zimbabwe is supposed to host the meeting this year and at the same time take over the chairmanship of head of states as well as that of the trade council of ministers, currently held by President Mwai Kibaki and Trade Minister Uhuru Kenyatta respectively. The meeting would have been held in May this year as scheduled but following the political problems facing the southern African country, the meeting was deferred to December.
The minister assured that the there will be no interruption of the regional bloc programmes as well as trade within the 19-member bloc community. He added that the recent resolutions of the tripartite summit held in Kampala, Uganda last month between COMESA-SADC and EAC will be fully implemented. ‘The postponement of the summit takes into account the need to begin the process of implementing the task force decisions of the COMESA-EAC-SADC tripartite summit held in Kampala, Uganda 22 October, regarding the harmonisation of Free Trade Areas (FTA’s) and Common External Tariffs (CET’s) among the three Regional Economic Community (REC’s),’ he said.
He pointed out that of immediate priority is the harmonisation of the Common External Tariff (CET’s) of COMESA and EAC. Uhuru explained that the consultations between the two regional economic communities will go beyond 8 December 2008, which is the time COMESA Customs Union was scheduled to be launched. The postponed meeting will be held within the first six months of 2009 to enable the harmonisation process and consultations to be completed.
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