Category: Business Daily

Mountaineering is a divine passion to him. A return home to where he belongs. To everyone else, he is James Kagambi. To those who know the sound of crampons biting into ice, he is KG. His life has balanced the security of convention with the risk of passion.

The 65-year-old is a Kaimosi Teachers Training College alumnus, which should mean that, like many of his classmates, he would now be enjoying retirement after decades in the classroom. James, however, taught for only about five years before devoting himself to the mountains.

The passion later became a career spanning more than four decades, including summits of five of the seven highest peaks in the world.

His family, like many in the 1960s, believed in the safe path. Success was becoming a teacher or civil servant, a respectable job with a pension and the stability to raise a family. Mountains were for tourists. Hiking was for wazungu. For sons of peasant farmers, mountains were scenery, not a life’s work.

On the morning of May 12, 2022, KG placed the Kenyan flag on the roof of the world at 8,849 metres, becoming the first native East African citizen to summit Everest. It was a succinct moment of prayer and thanksgiving, disbelief and gratitude, carrying the flag of his country and representing the dreams of countless climbers.

‘People imagine you scream when you get there,’ he says. ‘But the truth is, you are too tired to scream. You are just grateful that you are alive. For me, it was a prayer of thanks, a moment of history, but also a moment of silence.’

In the 1980s, KG was a primary school teacher in Nyeri, posted to a small ‘forest school’ near the edge of Mount Kenya National Park. He taught five days a week, but his weekends were given to the outdoors.

‘I’d be in the forest every chance I got,’ he says. ‘Sometimes I’d see elephants, sometimes nothing at all. Being outdoors gave me a sense of freedom I couldn’t find anywhere else.’

His daily walks cut through fields and wooded areas. A deep connection with nature shaped his choices. ‘I loved the outdoors from the beginning,’ he says. ‘I could spend a whole day walking, just to see what was behind the next hill. When I later met mountains, it was like meeting a friend I had always been waiting for.’

As a teacher, his love of physical activity stood out in the teams he coached. He took pupils to district tournaments and trained athletes for provincial meets. ‘I put my all into teaching but I could feel my calling was somewhere else.’

He says he began ‘by accident,’ yet that accident took him to the roof of Africa more than 300 times. Yes, KG has summited Mount Kilimanjaro more than 300 times. To match his record, you would have to summit daily for almost a year. He has also spent 15 years in Chile’s remote ice fields, training generations of rangers and rescue teams. Sighting of snow

The transformation from rural schoolteacher to the first Kenyan on Everest is the story of a man who said yes to opportunity, kept moving when others stopped, and measured success not only by summits achieved, but by how many returned alive.

His first sighting of snow on Mount Kenya changed everything. ‘The first time I saw snow,’ he says, ‘I thought, ‘How can ice just sit on top of a mountain like that?’ I touched it, and I knew – this is where I belong.’ He returned often, learning the terrain and tagging along with visiting climbers. At first, he was an oddity: a Kenyan teacher wanting to climb with foreigners.

It is Laozi, the ancient Chinese sage who once said, ‘When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.’ During a school holiday, he joined friends on a climb. At Point Lenana, touching snow made him come alive. ‘On my way down, I knew there was something there for me. I didn’t know what yet, but I knew.’

A year later, he enrolled in a rock-climbing course run by the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). ‘I’d never been on a real rock face before. But once I started, it felt natural,’ he says. At the end, the instructors offered him a job. He declined, wanting to coach his school sports teams at nationals. ‘But in my heart, I knew I’d be back.’

His decision to resign from teaching in 1987 shocked his family. ‘My dad was a teacher. Most of my brothers and sisters were teachers or married to teachers,’ KG says. ‘When I told people I was serious about mountaineering, they laughed.’

”Hiyo si kazi ya mtu amesoma.’ (That’s not work for an educated person.) They thought I had lost direction.’ The ridicule only strengthened his resolve. He used his modest teacher’s salary to buy basic gear and train relentlessly.

On weekends and holidays, he climbed. He endured blisters, thin air, and failure – but also tasted freedom he had never known in classrooms.

He started as an assistant instructor, earning far less than he did teaching. His learning was fast: glacier travel, rope systems, avalanche safety, leadership under pressure. On free days he would travel to Naivasha to he climbed rock faces at Hell’s Gate National Park, building a reputation for skill.

He wanted to prove that a Kenyan could lead, not just carry loads. ‘People doubted me. They looked at me and wondered what an African was doing in such spaces. The mountain doesn’t care about your passport. It only cares about how well you prepare.’

His new lifestyle also shaped his family life. He married later than his peers and missed much of his children’s early years. ‘I didn’t have much time with my children when they were young. My wife did most of the parenting.’ Only Covid-19 slowed him down. Before the pandemic, the longest he stayed continuously in Kenya was two weeks. ‘I’d be here for a short break, then off to another mountain somewhere in the world.’

The mountain decides

Over the years, KG became one of NOLS’ most trusted instructors. He taught across North and South America, including the Rockies, the Cascades, Alaska, and the Himalayas. Chile became his second home. From 1999 to 2016, he spent up to six months a year in Patagonia, teaching mountaineering and leadership.

The Patagonia region is characterised by jagged peaks, roaring winds and glaciers stretching beyond the horizon. There are few places on Earth that are as rugged or demanding. It was here that KG honed his skills, teaching young climbers and future guides how to survive and thrive in the wilderness.

‘Patagonia taught me patience. The weather changes five times in a day. You prepare, but the mountain decides.’

He typically taught about thirty students per expedition, travelling by foot, ferry, or small plane into remote wilderness. Many peaks had never been climbed. ‘The mountains aren’t tall like the Himalayas, but they’re wild. You can spend days just getting to the base of a climb.’

The environment was a teacher as much as he was. Storms trapped teams for days. Glaciers shifted underfoot. ‘I learned to adapt to situations. It stretched my patience. Patience is not something I was known for.’

Some locals had never seen a Black person. ‘Children would try to rub my skin off,’ he laughs. He received generosity rather than hostility. ‘Sometimes they’d slaughter a cow in my honour, feed us for days.’ He eventually trained more than a thousand climbers in glacier travel, ice techniques, rescue, and outdoor leadership.

One student told him, ‘You’ve changed how I see Africa. I didn’t know there were climbers like you.’ He understood that every climb was representation. ‘I wasn’t just James. I was Kenya. I was Africa.’ His years in Chile strained family ties. ‘Sometimes I would come back after months, and I could see in my family’s eyes that they wondered if I belonged to them or to the mountains.’ The work nonetheless gave him purpose. ‘I may not be rich,’ he says, ‘but I am wealthy in experience. I have lived on mountains that most people only dream of.’

KG had carved his name as one of the most respected African instructors in global mountaineering circles.

Back home, he helped improve safety on the region’s highest peaks. He helped form the first Mount Kenya Rescue Team, trained guides in the Rwenzori, and developed ranger programmes on Kilimanjaro. Mount Kenya gave him his first snow. Patagonia taught patience. Kilimanjaro stole his heart.

‘People ask me, ‘Don’t you get bored going up the same mountain?’ Every climb is different. The people are different. The weather is different. Even I am different.’ Kilimanjaro became his classroom. Guiding required vigilance.

As a guide, he has led groups of tourists from all over the world. CEOs, students, retirees, thrill-seekers up Africa’s highest peak. Each expedition brought its own challenges: altitude sickness, fatigue, fear.

‘Guiding is not about getting to the top yourself. It is about getting other people there safely. You have to watch them closely, read their bodies, listen to their breathing. A good guide knows when to push and when to say stop.’

His guiding philosophy is unwavering: ‘Summiting is optional, coming back alive is mandatory.’ That philosophy has saved lives. He always insists they turn back, sometimes against their will. ‘Some get angry at me for denying them the summit,’ he says. ‘But later, when they recover, they thank me. Because what use is a summit if you don’t come back?’

Beyond guiding, Kilimanjaro gave him a platform to mentor young Kenyan and Tanzanian guides, teaching skill, integrity, leadership, and humility. ‘A young porter once told me, ‘Baba, you are the reason I want to be a guide.’ That, to me, is bigger than any summit.’

Summiting Everest

For years, Everest lived in KG’s imagination as both a dream and a challenge. In 2022, he joined the Full Circle Everest Expedition, the first all-Black team to attempt the world’s highest mountain. ‘Here we were, Africans, African-Americans, Black climbers from different countries saying, ‘we belong here too.’ I knew if I made it, it would not be just my summit. It would be Kenya’s summit. It would be Africa’s summit.’ At sixty-two, he was older than most teammates. Everest tested every breath. ‘There were nights I thought, maybe I am too old for this,’ he says. ‘My body was tired. My lungs felt like they were on fire. But I remembered all the ridicule I had faced, all the sacrifices, all the years. I told myself: I am here now. I must finish. I felt Kenya on my shoulders; I carried my village, my country, and the whole of Africa. It was not just me standing there. It was all of us.’ The historic images travelled the world. In mountaineering history, it was a milestone.

Asked if he will retire, he responds: ‘Climbing is life. Even when I am old, I will still climb something, maybe not Everest, but a hill near home. Because mountains are where I meet myself.’

Hilton Hotels is expanding its presence in East Africa’s hospitality sector with a fresh addition to its portfolio, in response to the region’s growing appetite for lifestyle and experience-driven travel.

Set to open in Nairobi’s Lavington, Ava Hotel Nairobi, Tapestry Collection by Hilton will mark the brand’s debut in Kenya. Tapestry Collection by Hilton is a group of independent hotels operating under the name of the American hospitality giant. Hilton has scores of other brands licensed to hospitality investors around the world.

The China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is lining up its first project in Kenya, just over a year after Nairobi became a fully paid-up member in efforts to the country’s bridge a Sh16.14 trillion infrastructure funding gap.

The Beijing-based AIIB has invited bids for a consultant to conduct a pre-feasibility study on upgrading the 243-kilometre Mau Summit-Malaba Highway into an access-controlled, tolled, four-lane road-marking its maiden activity in Kenya’s projects scene.

The answer is an emphatic Yes! Humans have tried to motorise almost everything from staircases to little old ladies, from shaving razors to food blenders, and numerous vehicles that move things about in warehouses.

But I suspect you mean those push-along wheeled baskets designed to telescope together in supermarket trolley parks – the ones invented by a store owner in the US in 1937.in hopes of wooing more customers (who mostly were not weightlifters) to buy more goods. The result was so successful that now every supermarket in the world uses them.

And in some places, they are not only motorised (for obvious reasons with electric motors, not petrol or diesel engines) – some are computerised to help guide the shopper to a selected aisle and lead the way to check-out.

There are even autonomous computerised ‘follow-me’ versions, and mobility-assistance scooters with a panier rack.

Industry uses electric pallet trucks and automated roll cages and order pickers, which are essentially motorised trolleys used in stock and delivery logistics.

And there are, of course, many hobbyists unable to resist the challenge of turning shopping trolleys into a motorsport, using anything from e-bike hub motors to motorcycle engines (perhaps in the interval between ride-on lawnmower grands prix).

So the ‘driving’ forces range from porterage to mobility/accessibility, to convenience, and DIY fun.adding the challenges for stability, braking, and steering. Battery weight, assured control, and attachment methods are important.

The results are numerous enough and fast enough to require traffic and safety laws in some places.and specific rules in supermarkets.

While on the subject, if you have ever wondered why some shopping trolleys are so difficult to steer, it is usually a problem with the ‘castor angle’ of their wheels. They need to be set at a specific angle to hold a straight line and be obedient to turns. The same applies to cars.

The cost of running public offices under the national government surged 31 percent in the first quarter of the current 2025/26 financial year, exposing the government’s struggles to honour its austerity pledges.

Fresh disclosures by the National Treasury show that State ministries, departments, and agencies spent Sh366.5 billion in the quarter to September 2025 on recurrent votes such as on salaries and wages, administration, operation and maintenance of offices, compared to Sh280.09 billion in a similar period a year earlier.

This means that recurrent spending by the public offices under the national government increased by Sh86.41 billion or 30.9 percent over the three months, even though the President William Ruto-led regime insists that it is tightening fiscal discipline to plug a widening budget deficit.

The increase came just a year after President Ruto had pledged to improve efficiency in public expenditure following deadly protests that forced the government to drop a plan for new and higher taxes in June 2024.

The austerities were largely supposed to target non-essential expenditure such as printing, advertising, travel, hospitality, refurbishment, furniture, training, research, as well as communication supplies and services, among others.

During the quarter under review, the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) remained the largest consumer of recurrent resources, drawing Sh88.5 billion, an increase of 8.1 percent from Sh81.88 billion spent in a corresponding period last year.

Read: Kindiki office spends nearly half annual recurrent budget in 3 months

Recurrent allocations for the National Police Service climbed 12.5 percent to Sh30.6 billion, while those for the State Department for Defence rose by 17.9 percent to Sh42.8 billion, driven by higher and logistical costs linked to regional deployments.

The spending spike comes against a backdrop of slowed revenue growth, with tax receipts underperforming against targets in the first quarter, to stand at Sh553.7 billion, well below the annual goal of Sh2.6 trillion, amid subdued imports and weak corporate earnings.

In budget documents tabled in Parliament earlier in May this year, Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi indicated that he would be proposing to trim the recurrent budget to Sh1.72 trillion from the Sh1.73 trillion spent in the fiscal year ending June 2025.

Parliament, however, approved a Sh1.47 trillion spending plan for recurrent expenses for the current financial year.

The mismatch between revenue and expenditure could further stretch borrowing needs, complicating the Treasury’s plan to stabilise the deficit at about 4.7 percent of GDP this fiscal year.

This also suggests that Dr Ruto, who pledged to rein in rising recurrent costs and expenses when he took power in September 2022, has struggled to control spending, despite making a relatively good start in his first year in office.

PZ Cussons East Africa is investing Sh150 million to introduce products targeting the younger generation, even as it allays fears of exiting the Kenyan market.

The firm, which produces brands such as Imperial Leather and Carex, said it was working on introducing new fragrances, distribution channels and package sizes in a bid to grow its sales among those aged below 35 years.

The company, which enjoys a 25 percent share in Kenya’s beauty and personal care market, had triggered concerns of exiting the market after its divestiture in Nigeria’s PZ Wilmar edible oils and remarks by its top management that it was reviewing its African operations. ‘Our research shows that consumers in this region under 35 years are adventurous with fragrance and personal care, consistently stretching their imagination and experimentation with new formats, favouring bold, differentiated scents and buying across online and modern retail channels,’ said PZ Cussons EA Managing Director Sekar Ramamoorthy.

‘PZ Cussons intends to grow here and has no plans to divest from the local market,’ he added.

Mr Rammoorthy said those below 35 years constitute between 35-45 percent of what is spent on personal care.

‘The category we play in is increasingly becoming more nuanced, with differentiation leaning towards niche markets. We are opting to go for broader sections of the population, having recognised that they have more in common,’ said Mr Ramamoorthy.

Cussons has been operating in Kenya for over 60 years and has a production unit at Baba Dogo. Kenya, the United States and Ghana contribute 15 percent of the company’s global revenues.

‘Kenya delivered good, volume-led growth driven by strong Modern Trade performance,’ PZ Cussons said in its annual report.

Kenya’s beauty and personal-care market is estimated at Sh20 billion and shows a steady high-single-digit growth rate.

Margins made by local soap manufacturers have taken a hit from heightened competition from imports from Egypt and reduced buying power due to inflation.

The Kenyan beauty market has also been cited for being flooded with counterfeit and sub-standard products, which hurts producers of quality goods.

Kigen manages a payments team in Westlands, Nairobi and treats a simmering compliance glitch like a public relations headache rather than an actual internal staffing people problem.

He delays disciplinary steps for a popular salesperson who bent the firm’s client onboarding rules then calls a baraza that offers platitudes to the same errant salesperson, while assigning the external legal counsel to rewrite a policy procedure that no one reads in order to keep them still in compliance.

‘This place brings out the best in me,’ says an excited Rikki Stein, a music industry veteran best known as having been the manager of Nigerian Afrobeat legend, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti.

We are literally on the stage at the New Afrika Shrine in Lagos, as a local band belts out an Afrobeat number; this is the sound that Fela bequeathed the world. It is 11 pm, and there is still a long night ahead, as the week-long festival, Felabration, is just getting started.

Each night during the week of Fela’s birthday (October 15) the Shrine is literally a riot of culture: live music, talent shows, fashion, food, and drink, the annual festival started by Fela’s eldest daughter, Yeni, in 1998 to celebrate her father’s legacy. ‘I left here at 3am last night and the party was still bubbling,’ remarks Stein, as he gestures at his reserved space marked Rikki’s Corner. Even at the age of 83, he still gets up to do a jig to the rhythm every so often.

Among the international acts performing at this year’s Felabration was the American singer, percussionist, and activist, Madame Gandhi. The Berklee College of Music graduate in sound design plays a hybrid of pre-recorded electronic beats off her computer with live drums and saxophones.

In July, the musician whose given name is Kiran Gandhi, was the opening act for Femi Kuti during the US leg of his Journey Through Life tour. It is not your classic Afrobeat style, but maybe this fusion of percussion and electronic beats is the direction that the genre will take in the years to come.

According to Stein’s 2024 memoir Moving Music, Femi and his elder sister Yeni conceived the idea of building the New Afrika Shrine as a monument to their father’s memory and to replace the original Shrine that was burnt down during an assault by the Nigerian military in 1977.

Using their share from an advance paid by Universal Music for a licence deal for the release of Fela’s remastered catalogue, they designed and built the ‘perfect club’. ‘Five times the size of the original Shrine.from its façade to its deepest recesses, it is imbued with Fela’s spirit,’ writes Stein.

Right from the street in the bustling Lagos suburb of Ikeja that leads to the New Afrika Shrine, the scene is a frantic hub of activity as food and drink trucks line up the dimly-lit street, pumping loud music while hawkers line the pavements through the night.

The venue itself contains a huge stage, large dancing area, with additional sitting space upstairs. The walls are adorned with portraits of Fela, in a typical defiant pose, along with those of other revolutionaries like Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Nelson Mandela, Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey, and Fela’s mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. The matriarch was a fierce pan-African activist in her own right who championed women’s political and economic rights.

Across the city’s island, the Afrobeat Rebellion: Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, an exhibition that was first mounted at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2022, has come home to Lagos to coincide with Felabration.

Lead curator Seun Alli and her team, with the support of the Kuti family, have reimagined the exhibition for the local audience. ‘This is an important exhibition to understand the life and times of Fela, says Femi, as he gets on stage, to perform at the Ecobank Pan African Centre, which hosts the exhibition until December 28, 2025. The performance had been organised for delegates attending the Forum Creation Africa led by Nigerian Minister for Art, Culture, Tourism and Creative Economy Hannatu Musawa and French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot.

Femi’s Positive Force is an elaborate group, reminiscent of his father’s band, complete with a horn section, guitars, percussion, and three female dancers in bright multicoloured costumes. He switches between the alto-saxophones and keyboards, instruments that he started playing in his father’s band at the age of 16.

‘I am 63 and completely satisfied. I’ll go down with a smile,’ he says in some of the banter between songs in the course of his 45-minute set. His set is a career retrospective, from the potent political anthem Truth Don Die to crowd favourite Beng, Beng, Beng, to Work on Myself from his latest album. ‘When we write, we don’t listen to our own lyrics,’ he says while introducing the latter. ‘If I can change myself, become a better father, musician, and have more humility, be serious with work, then the change begins there.’

The exhibition itself is an outstanding multi-sensory timeline through Fela’s life, his music, and his politics, packed with letters, photographs, magazine and newspaper clippings, vinyl records, audio-visual, and instruments like the massive Gbedu drum from Fela’s Yoruba community that he introduced to his band in the 1980s

Visitors see his costumes, notably the trademark embroidered jackets, and in a hilarious twist, a section dedicated to the underwear that Fela was often pictured wearing when holding court in his self-proclaimed Kalakuta Republic.

It is left up to Femi to sum up his father’s idiosyncrasies: ‘Was Fela perfect? I’ll never lie that he was. But he was a genius, and God gave him the ability to write songs that are monumental, historical.’

My brief in this space is to comment on topical business and economic issues. But I would be burying my head in the sand if I didn’t say something about Mr Raila Odinga, who passed on in India last week – an event already rippling through boardrooms and markets alike.

Indeed, this is one of those rare moments when commentary in the business and economics space isn’t a digression but almost a duty – because this passing will ripple across many sectors.

The expiry of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) on September 30, 2025, closed a chapter in US-Africa trade relations that began in 2000. For 25 years, Agoa functioned as a preferential market access gateway to the US for qualifying sub-Saharan African countries.

Its termination, abrupt in its immediate effects and uncertain in its future trajectory, has triggered alarm across governments, exporters and workers whose businesses were built around duty-free access to the vast US market.

At the same time, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the continent’s flagship integration project, is still trying to find its operational stride. The intersecting forces of Agoa’s end and AfCFTA’s slow start create both short-term shocks and long-term opportunities. News reports and government statements in the last days of September 2025 warned of potential job losses in the tens to hundreds of thousands, particularly in concentrated apparel hubs. Employers facing sudden demand contraction may cut shifts, lay off workers, or close facilities altogether.

The termination raises the business risk premium for investors considering African light manufacturing. Importers that rely on secure, long-run preferences may shift production to countries with more predictable access, accentuating capital flight or investment freezes.

The aggregate macro effect could be lower export earnings, higher unemployment in affected towns, and a weakening of nascent domestic industrial linkages that had begun to form around export hubs.

If Agoa’s end is a shock, the AfCFTA that has been formally operational since 2021 and ratified by over 50 African states is the continent’s most credible platform for a collective response. Five years into implementation, AfCFTA’s results are mixed. Why has it had a slow start?

Africa’s transport and logistics networks are fragmented and expensive. Poor roads, congested ports, slow border procedures, and weak customs cooperation hamper intra-African shipping and raise transaction costs, undermining trade even where tariffs have been reduced.

Overlapping regional blocs, divergent standards, and differing national regulations create unpredictable trade friction. Companies attempting cross-border trade encounter dozens of different procedures and certifications.

Negotiated phasing, special treatment for sensitive sectors, and long transition periods for some member countries mean that full tariff liberalisation is slow because many products remain on exclusion lists or protected schedules.

Many countries lack sufficient upstream producers, finance, and standards compliance to support cross-border value chains. Without firms that can source inputs regionally, tariff liberalisation alone will not spark rapid intra-African trade.

Implementing AfCFTA requires harmonised customs systems, dispute settlement, rules of origin frameworks, and enforcement. This is a heavy coordination task for 55 states with different capacities and priorities. Progress is uneven and often dependent on donor-funded technical assistance.

These obstacles explain how AfCFTA, despite wide ratification, still sees intra-African trade levels well below the intra-EU or intra-ASEAN comparatives thereby leaving a gap that Agoa has helped to fill for some exporters.

However, it can be leveraged purposefully to soften the Agoa shock and create more resilient, African-centered value chains. Going forward there are a few practical proposals.

Encourage apparel and agro-processors to re-source inputs regionally so that margins are captured inside Africa. The AfCFTA Guided Trade Initiative has already piloted tariff concessions for selected products and scaling this could create viable intra-African supply webs that substitute some lost US demand.

Complex or lengthened rules of origin hamper firms that previously relied on Agoa’s simpler regimes. AfCFTA institutions should prioritise simplified, predictable rules for sectors displaced by Agoa’s end and coordinate mutual recognition of standards.

African institutions, notably regional development banks and national export-promotion agencies, should provide bridge financing, export credits and working capital to affected factories to avoid mass layoffs while firms retool for regional markets. Public procurement can also be used to guarantee demand during transition.

Investment in ports, rail corridors, and single-window customs systems reduces trade costs. Donor programmes and public-private partnerships must be redirected to fast-close critical bottlenecks that make intra-continental trade commercially viable.

Exporters need help upgrading to meet regionally harmonised standards. Technical assistance for factory modernisation, quality labs and workforce skilling will raise the competitiveness of African manufacturers across African markets and beyond.

African negotiators should pursue reciprocal, rules-based agreements with major partners not to replicate Agoa but to secure access that is more predictable over the medium term. While AfCFTA builds continental market capacity, parallel diplomatic efforts can stabilise external demand as industries transition.

Political economy: windows of urgency and opportunity

AGOA’s expiry is a political inflection point. For governments, private sector actors and multilateral partners, the question is how quickly Africa can convert short-term emergency responses into durable industrial strategy.

AfCFTA offers the institutional architecture but only if its operational deficits are treated with urgency and financed at scale. The alternative is prolonged deindustrialisation in places that had just begun to industrialise.

Agoa’s termination is a shock, not the end of Africa’s trade story. The continent must not treat the loss of US preferences as solely a diplomatic challenge; it is a policy design, industrial strategy and infrastructure challenge. AfCFTA will not fully substitute the US market overnight, but it is the most powerful endogenous mechanism Africa has to create larger, denser regional markets that can absorb productive capacity, build value chains, and reduce vulnerability to unilateral preference shifts.

Success demands accelerated AfCFTA implementation from simplified rules and targeted finance to hard logistics investment and urgent international cooperation to ensure a soft transition for workers and exporters.

If African governments and partners respond with coherent, well-funded strategies, the end of Agoa could become the painful catalyst for a more self-reliant, regionally integrated industrialisation.