Two Trade Regimes, One Country

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Introduction

Buried in the Cabinet briefing that followed the 18th Meeting of the AfCFTA Council of Ministers responsible for Trade, held in Abuja in late June 2026, was a detail worth sitting with for a moment. Zimbabwe was unanimously endorsed to host the 19th Council of Ministers Meeting in Victoria Falls in 2027, and to host the Intra-African Trade Fair in 2029, a role that builds on Harare's designation in September 2025 as permanent headquarters of the newly independent Intra-African Trade Fair Company.

Foreign Affairs and International Trade Minister Amon Murwira described Zimbabwe's participation at Abuja, where the Council also adopted a new AfCFTA Agri-Trade Action Plan, as advancing the country's constitutional commitment to regional economic integration. Together these developments place Zimbabwe increasingly at the institutional centre of continental trade, which makes this a fitting moment to think through a question that trade law commentators have raised in general terms: how Zimbabwe's obligations under the SADC Protocol on Trade and its obligations under AfCFTA are meant to sit together in the same domestic legal order. What follows is offered as a thought piece exploring that interface.

Two treaty regimes, and a rule that answers most of the question

Zimbabwe is a member of both the Southern African Development Community and the African Continental Free Trade Area, and it has bound itself to trade liberalisation commitments under each. It would be easy to assume this creates an open conflict of laws problem, but AfCFTA itself largely answers that question already. Article 19 of the Agreement Establishing the AfCFTA provides that where AfCFTA conflicts with a regional agreement, AfCFTA prevails to the extent of the inconsistency, except that State Parties belonging to regional economic communities which have attained higher levels of integration among themselves shall maintain those higher levels. SADC, having liberalised tariffs among its members well ahead of AfCFTA's own baseline, falls squarely within that exception. In practical terms, trade between Zimbabwe and South Africa, or between Zimbabwe and Zambia, continues to be governed by the SADC Protocol on Trade, while AfCFTA's principal value for Zimbabwe lies in opening preferential access to markets outside the SADC bloc — Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana among them.

Read this way, the interesting legal question is rarely which regime governs a transaction between two SADC states — Article 19 already settles that. The more genuine challenge is administrative: managing a multi-tier customs environment at the border, where the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority must apply SADC rules to one shipment and AfCFTA rules to the next, often on the same day and sometimes for closely related products, without the two frameworks blending into one another by accident.

Choice of regime and the role of rules of origin

Where a trader has access to multiple preferential trade regimes — such as SADC, COMESA, and AfCFTA — the choice of regime is guided by both treaty hierarchy and practical preference. As set out above, Article 19 settles that question by operation of law wherever two SADC member states trade a product already fully liberalised under SADC. Outside that baseline, or where regimes coexist during transition periods, an importer generally selects the framework offering the most favourable tariff, provided the goods satisfy that specific regime's Rules of Origin (RoO). For instance, a Zimbabwean manufacturer importing sugar from a fellow SADC state must comply with SADC RoO, whereas utilising agricultural inputs sourced from West Africa requires adherence to AfCFTA RoO.

The core challenge is not a legal conflict of laws, but rather an administrative and evidentiary bottleneck. Successfully unlocking this trade potential requires traders and authorities like ZIMRA to navigate a heavy compliance burden, accurately verify "cumulation" of inputs across jurisdictions, and manage overlapping trade frameworks. Initiatives like the AfCFTA Agri-Trade Action Plan attempt to ease these frictions by serving as an implementation framework specifically designed to accelerate agricultural trade and harmonise non-tariff barriers across differing regional blocs.

Domestic law

Section 34 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe requires the state to ensure that international agreements it enters into are incorporated into domestic law. Section 327 details the mechanism for this incorporation, requiring that international treaties, as well as presidential agreements that are not international treaties but impose fiscal obligations on Zimbabwe, be approved by Parliament and enacted into domestic law through an Act of Parliament. Zimbabwe has taken steps to domesticate both its SADC and AfCFTA commitments.

Day-to-day tariff administration is kept functional between the frameworks by a routine instrument, the periodic Customs and Excise (Tariff) Notices issued as Statutory Instruments by the Ministry of Finance, which is where SADC and AfCFTA tariff schedules are actually operationalised and updated for ZIMRA's use.

Douglas Musebenzi, a University of Zimbabwe lecturer in human rights and public international law, has floated a more formal legislative response: a National AfCFTA Harmonisation Act and a Comprehensive Trade Integration Act, aligning Zimbabwe's trade laws with both sets of obligations. Given that Article 19 already resolves the underlying hierarchy question, that proposal may be better understood as a case for consolidating and formalising the existing Statutory Instrument practice into a single coherent instrument, rather than as evidence that no coordination mechanism currently exists. Without some form of harmonisation, Musebenzi has cautioned, Zimbabwe may lose competitiveness and fail to benefit from AfCFTA — a caution about administrative capacity as much as about missing law.

A unified SADC voice

Sekai Kuvarika of the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries has raised a related point from the negotiating table rather than the statute book. She has suggested that a unified SADC voice strengthens a member state's ability to influence continental trade negotiations and protect strategic industries under AfCFTA, and that trade competition among SADC member states themselves can work against the region's collective bargaining power and industrialisation goals. She has also floated the idea of regional ratings tracking industrialisation and competitiveness progress across member states, suggesting that publishing such ratings could create healthy competition among member states.

There is a plausible connection between this observation and the administrative question above: a customs administration that verifies Rules of Origin smoothly and predictably across both regimes is also one that can speak with more confidence and credibility when SADC states coordinate their position at continental negotiations.

Continental posture

Hosting the 19th Council of Ministers Meeting in Victoria Falls in 2027 sits alongside Harare's new role as permanent home of the Intra-African Trade Fair Company, selected ahead of competing bids from several other African states in 2025. Together these give Zimbabwe an increasingly visible institutional footprint within the AfCFTA framework, and a natural point in the calendar to revisit questions of this kind — not because anything is presently amiss, but because a country hosting continental trade institutions is one whose own SADC and AfCFTA interface will draw more attention from visiting delegations than it might otherwise.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the perceived friction between Zimbabwe's SADC and AfCFTA commitments is less a fundamental conflict of laws and more an administrative puzzle. While Article 19 of the AfCFTA Agreement establishes the legal hierarchy, the true test lies on the ground: untangling overlapping Rules of Origin and navigating practical customs procedures. Framed by Section 34 and Section 327 of the Constitution, Zimbabwe's trade administration will require agile, ongoing calibration.

Looking ahead, key milestones such as the momentum building toward Victoria Falls 2027 and Harare's role as the permanent base for the Intra-African Trade Fair Company will serve as vital barometers. Whether lawmakers ultimately consolidate these diverse trade obligations into a single, cohesive legislative framework remains to be seen, but doing so may well be the key to turning continental policy into seamless commercial practice.