Peter Fabricius
South Africa and Nigeria have begun negotiating an agreement through which South Africa will supply components and give training to develop a Nigerian industry to produce vehicles.
Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies announced this in Cape Town yesterday at the end of a South Africa-Nigeria business forum during President Goodluck Jonathan’s state visit to this country.
Davies said the “win-win, symbiotic” agreement on vehicles would be part of wider co-operation to boost industrialisation in both countries.
Other areas of economic co-operation identified during the forum were infrastructure, air and sea transport, and agro-processing, Davies said.
Cabinet ministers from both countries signed nine co-operation agreements.
The chief executive of the Black Business Council, Xolani Qubeka, said the business delegations from both sides had had a “revealing and robust encounter”, which disclosed “great suspicion of each other,” but also a common desire to find solutions to problems.
He said the South Africans were surprised to discover that Nigerian investors had a problem with the BEE component of investing in South Africa.
“We had taken it for granted that as we fought the liberation struggle together, so our Nigerian brothers would have understood the need for BEE,” he said, adding that clearly a lot of disagreement still had to be sorted out.
Both business communities would be undertaking missions to each other’s countries to establish good will and trust.
The nagging issue of visas clearly loomed large in the discussion. Nigerian business people, in particular, have long complained of the difficulty in getting visas to South Africa.
Davies said the forum had proposed that business people on both sides should get three-year, multiple-entry visas.
But prominent Nigerian businessman Aliko Dangote, speaking for the Nigerian business community, said if the UK could give Nigerians 10-year visas, South Africa and Nigerian could do the same for each other’s business people.
As an alternative, they could do what Nigeria and Kenya did for each other’s business people, which is to issue visas on arrival.
“No genuine businessman will wait 10 days for a visa.”
One of the agreements signed by the two governments yesterday was for greater legal co-operation and Jonathan explained at a joint media briefing with President Jacob Zuma that it was expected that criminals would exploit the greater migration of people between the countries.
“So the two countries must co-operate on how they handle this legally.”
Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said on Monday that her government acknowledged that some criminals from Nigeria came to South Africa but that this should not affect the greater number of Nigerians who visited on legitimate business.