Online Reporter
Business Reporter
Zimbabwe must use its upcoming chairmanship of COMESA to champion value-added production and industrialisation, rather than trade in primary commodities, the chief executive officer of the CEO Africa Roundtable, Kipson Gundani, has said, warning that Africa’s slow pace on regional integration is leaving the continent exposed to external shocks.
Speaking on Capitalk FM, Mr Gundani said regional integration was no longer a distant aspiration but an urgent necessity, as global trade becomes increasingly fragmented and major economic powers turn towards protectionism.
“Africa has not been doing itself a very good favour by moving slowly when it comes to the concept of regional integration. Regional integration gives us leverage. We can negotiate as a bloc,” he said. “But unfortunately, it has been more of an aspiration in Africa as opposed to reality when it comes to truly and fully integrating our economy.”
His remarks come as Zimbabwe prepares to host COMESA in October and assume the chairmanship of the 21-member bloc. Mr Gundani said Harare should use the platform to set an industrialisation agenda, recalling that Zimbabwe had previously introduced an industrialisation-focused programme during an earlier SADC chairmanship.
“After the realisation that trade alone without industrial growth is not sufficient, similar as we assume the COMESA chairmanship, we need to set the agenda that Africa focusses on, or COMESA focusses on — value-added production to give meaningful trade,” he said.
He attributed Zimbabwe’s low trade volumes within COMESA — imports of just under US$90 million against exports of about US$28 million — to the fact that member states produced broadly similar commodities.
“The reason why the trade numbers we are talking about between Zimbabwe and the rest of COMESA countries is such patchy and low is simply because we import more or less similar products,” he said. “For example, let us take Zimbabwe and Zambia. The major export from Zambia is copper, which is a mineral. The major export from Zimbabwe is gold, platinum, PGMs and so forth. And most of these products go to China or America or in some instances the Middle East.”
Mr Gundani said the African Continental Free Trade Area, SADAC and COMESA remained critical vehicles for the continent, but that inadequate logistics, digital infrastructure and diversification continued to hamper intra-African trade.
“For trade to fully happen, we need the logistics and so forth, including the digital infrastructure. And Africa is far behind that. That is why intra-Africa trade is actually very, very low. Africa actually trades more with outside Africa than it does itself,” he said.
He added that non-economic barriers and regulations also hampered trade among African member states, though he said regional blocs such as the EAC and ECOWAS should serve as building blocks towards a fully free trade area across the continent.
On the question of collective bargaining, Mr Gundani said African countries stood a far better chance negotiating as a bloc than individually.
“As a bloc, as a group, I think we have got more power as opposed to going there individually. African economies are very small in size. What would a $50–$60 billion Zimbabwean economy really negotiate with a $19 trillion economy in the form of China? The balance is already tilted in that regard,” he said.
“If you take Africa as a whole, $3.4 trillion, you are now talking numbers. Over one billion people, you are now talking numbers. It improves your bargaining power.”
However, he bemoaned the continent’s failure to translate that potential into practice.
Mr Gundani said African chief executives should now be holding conversations they were not having five or ten years ago, including de-risking supply chain concentration by producing within Africa what the continent needs, and addressing currency corridor risk.
“The mere fact that the predominant non-contributing currency is the US dollar makes the playing field very much uneasy. So we need to remove these currency corridor talks from the treasury footnotes, actually to the strategy table,” he said.
He also urged African business leaders to focus on technology access, including artificial intelligence and payment infrastructure, to accelerate growth and enhance the continent’s economic independence.The CEO Africa Roundtable is set to take its case for deeper regional integration and industrialisation to Cape Town from 6 to 10 October 2026, where business leaders and government officials will gather for a conference expected to be dominated by the continent’s response to a fragmenting global trade order. According to Mr Gundani, the meeting will examine how African economies can move beyond rhetoric on integration and begin building the practical foundations for trade among themselves.
Mr Gundani said regional integration in the context of the continental free trade area would be among the topics dominating discussions at a conference in Cape Town, alongside energy, infrastructure, critical minerals and industrial policy.
