The leadership of three AfCFTA-facilitating institutions namely the AfCFTA Secretariat, Afreximbank and the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) calls on the continent’s media to help with the dissemination of timely and accurate reportage about the single continental market to attract the needed participation from the continent’s people and businesses.
According to them, the AfCFTA agreement is very technical and complex hence the need to leverage the media to improve public understanding of the market and its opportunities and risks for intra-African trade.
“The media has a lot of work to do; I’d want to see the media take up this whole AfCFTA and demystifying it for even the average man on the street so that people will become much more aware of this project,” Mike Ogbalu III, Chief Executive Officer of PAPSS, tells Single African Market, in an interview.
He adds that “If you look at Africa, a population of 1.3bn people, what these boundaries that separate us have done is to lock us in some artificial borders and actually made us not to be able to do business with each other.”
This concern was buttressed by the Chief Executive Officer of the Afreximbank, Prof. Benedict Oraman, who admitted that reporting trade and intra-African trade and the works of the AfCFTA Secretariat is very complex and would require tailored training for journalists.
“The AfCFTA agreement is highly technical and the discussion has been on how we can train journalists to report accurately and passionately,” he says.
The Secretary-General of the AfCFTA Secretariat, Wamkele Mene, has equally been making the call to journalists to create the much-needed awareness about the continental agenda to integrate through the creation of a single market.
According to him, it was trite knowledge that the implementation of the AfCFTA agreement requires a collective effort from both the facilitating institutions, stakeholders and the media.
“We need to make sure that there is general knowledge and understanding about this initiative; and that will be about helping journalists to understand the accessibility of the market and its enormous benefits, including access to trade finance,” he says.
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