David Ofosu- Dorte, a senior Partner at AB and David has described value addition as a defining opportunity produced by the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
In spite of the inherent opportunities in AfCFTA, he asserted that some businesses are definitely going to lose out on its benefits.
“Value addition is a major driver of the AfCFTA because of manufacturing. It is estimated that Africa’s manufacturing will hit a trillion dollars by the year 2030. Fast moving consuming goods, especially food; currently urban food imports about 35 billion dollars per annum and it is expected to rise to 110 billion dollars by 2025… if you have a very urbanized continent and urban food consumption is going up whose food is going to be consumed?.
“I think no situation is as important as how you respond to it and as a strategist that’s how you have to think. But whether you lose or take advantage of it depends on what you see and how you respond. The headquarters brings its advantages in terms of the civil servants we will get here, in terms of travel etc”.
Commenting on the expectations of 2021 for businesses, Mr. Ofosu-Dorte explained with the implementation of AfCFTA, business process will likely change and they must learn to “comply with it”.
“There’s going to be a lot of process changes, especially those who are in the export sector because of the Free Trade Agreement. It is more pervasive than we would like to believe and the response to it is slow like any other thing”.
Chronicling the phases of the AfCFTA, he said services like construction, transport, tourism, business support services and the banking and financial services with regulators like the Bank of Ghana and the Security and Exchange Commission will have to readjust their regulation to ensure that “we can operate in a free market”.
“If a construction company in Nigeria decides to open an office in Ghana, the restrictions you can put on it is limited. The role of GUTA [and] the kind of fights they have; GIPC, the excluded areas for Ghanaians, I’m not saying this will go away overnight but we will have to do a rethinking”.
In looking at how to rope in strategies for a decade period, he opined that businesses will need to “look at what will change, monitor what bills are in Parliament” and know what the bills “are saying”.
Touching on the lessons of 2020 for the business fraternity, Mr. Ofosu-Dorte revealed that the most important lesson was the health and welfare of staff.
He also noted that the pandemic also brought to the fore the significance of “putting together a business continuity plan when COVID occurred” which he reckons was a belated effort; suggesting that an already established continuity plan should have rather been “adjusted to fit the circumstances of COVID”.
“No matter how well you plan, there can be the unexpected… and you’ve got to always have a business continuity plan which can be adjusted to fit the situation.
“You will find that, for some COVID was a positive thing [and], for some COVID was a very bad thing”.
Considering the varying impact of the pandemic on global economies, Mr. Ofosu-Dorte said everything is predicated on “context” and so “your strategy and how you see things must be “strategy specific”.
“Where you are located is the number one dictate of what context is. So, if you are operating in Ghana, then your context will include the context of the general environment which includes how government operates and how that operation affects your business, which may be totally different from what is happening in Europe”.
He further advised businesses to learn to “reinvent, reintegrate and transform”, as it is very dangerous for them to look at 2021 alone but consider it as a decade long projection in planning activities.
