Victor Kgomoeswana
Johannesburg - Even as the US elections amused the world, thanks to President Trump and his litigation antics, a more serious report implicating the US caught my attention.
This report should feature highly on the agenda of the AU. Africa is the dumping ground, importing 40% of the 14 million used light duty vehicles (LDVs) exported between 2015 and 2018. Weak or no regulatory capacity to control the import of such LDVs, i.e. cars, SUVs and minibuses, make Nigeria the world’s third-largest importer – behind only United Arab Emirates and Mexico.
These are the revelations of a report by the UN Environment Programme (Unep), titled “Used Vehicles and the Environment – a global overview of light duty vehicles: flow, scale and regulation”.
The major culprits in this dumping exercise are the EU, Japan, and the US, exporting 54%, 27% and 18% of these used LDVs, respectively.
All these countries and regions are home to major automotive original equipment manufacturers like Nissan, Toyota, BMW, Mercedes Benz, Ford, etc, who somehow have factories in African industrial zones around Waltloo, Rosslyn, Uitenhage and East London.
Strangely, they make or assemble their cars on the African continent, unnecessarily overpricing them to make them unaffordable to Africans, who end up buying them when they are dirtier and older.
Africa has just ratified the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) to drive the industrialisation of the continent. Part of this drive should include making the cars manufactured in Africa affordable to Africans, rather than condemning us to the carbon emissions of used cars.
Meanwhile, these exporters of used LDVs are already experimenting with self-drive and electric vehicles in observance of their own carbon emission restrictions.
The Unep report projects the doubling of the global fleet of LDVs by 2050, with 90% of this growth taking place in nonOECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries – that includes African countries.
The report ought to be top of mind when the AfCFTA secretariat maps its strategy. The industrialisation of Africa cannot take place without dealing with the key concerns highlighted by this Unep report, such as the emissions of used vehicles, their safety, energy inefficiency, the cost of operation, but most of all, the urgent need to supervise and regulate trade in used vehicles.
South Africa is among only 18 out of the 146 countries surveyed in the report to have a complete ban on the import of used vehicles.
The rest of the African countries either lack proper regulations or have weak mechanisms to enforce their restrictions of the imports. Although some impose age limits, like Kenya, or mileage regulations, such as Botswana, there are those that levy environmental or age-progressive tax on such imports.
This sounds like African countries are willing to take a little carbon emission if they can raise tax revenue.
That is not the way for Africa to assert itself.
Let us recover from the US elections drama, dust ourselves from wrestling Covid-19 and adapt to life in the new normal, which prioritises the end to our status as the dumping ground of the developed world.
* Victor Kgomoeswana is author of Africa is Open for Business, media commentator and public speaker on African business affairs.
** The views expressed here are not necesssarily those of Independent Media.