6-member East African Community (EAC) to finalise competition law amendments
The EAC, a regional intergovernmental organisation comprising Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and South Sudan, is said to be drafting amendments to its thus-far essentially dormant regional fair Competition Act (dating back to 2006, EAC Competition Act 2006, 49 sections) to address antitrust concerns in the region. The EAC’s legislative body is in the final stages of completing its work on the East African Community Competition (Amendment) Bill (2015).
In a 2010 paper, Alloys Mutabingwa (then Deputy Secretary General of the EAC Community Secretariat) writes:
As the EAC begins the implementation of the Common Market, one is pushed to wonder, which kind of competition do we currently have in the East African Community? Is it the kind of competition that constantly pushes companies to innovate and reduce prices? Does it increase the choice of products and services available to EAC consumers? Or, is it the type of competition that is defined by companies colluding to highjack the market? The answer lies somewhere in the middle but one thing is certain, with the intensification of competition in the EAC there will be frictions between companies across the region as they seek to gain advantage over their competitors.
In this short and worthwhile read, he stresses the importance of having a multi-national competition framework vs. a purely domestic network of independent enforcers. Mr. Mutabingwa uses the example of the merger case of East African Breweries and South African Breweries, in which the Kenyan and Tanzanian competition authorities were “allowed by law to handle national practices only.”
According to an October 2014 article, “statistics show that the EAC’s total intra-regional trade soared from $2 billion in 2005 to $5.8 billion in 2012, while the total intra-regional exports grew from $500 million to $3.2 billion in the period under review.” The piece quotes an EAC competition official as saying that the enforcement agency would be online by December 2014.
In addition to the EAC efforts, a report also states that the head of economic affairs of the Tanzanian Fair Competition Tribunal (FCT), Nzinyangwa Mchany, recently emphasised the importance of member-state level enforcement, such as that of the country’s FCT and FCC, “to increase efficiency in the production, distribution and supply of goods and services to Tanzanians,” especially in economies that were centrally planned until only a few decades ago, and which have had to struggle with the ill after-effects of unregulated trade liberalisation and privatisation of state-owned enterprises.
African Antitrust & Competition Law 