As part of its post-Brexit global vision, Britain is hosting a UK-Africa trade conference. However, its new trade deals fail to offer African nations much extra as Britain falls behind as a trading partner on the continent.

The United Kingdom on Wednesday will host a virtual UK-Africa conference to promote trade and investment opportunities in African markets.

The meeting takes place on the anniversary of the inaugural 2020 UK-Africa summit hosted with great fanfare by Britain’s Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, who famously skipped the World Economic Forum in Davos to lead the event.

At last year’s summit, Johnson said Britain had all it took to become Africa’s “obvious partner of choice” for doing business post-Brexit when it was no longer tethered to European Union trade agreements with the continent.

The British government promised it would improve on the EU-Africa trade model and better protect the interests of African nations.

But the post-Brexit trade deals between the UK and African nations aren’t much different to the old EU ones.

At the same time, Britain — despite its post-Brexit vision for a “Global Britain” and its long history in Africa as a former colonial power — is further falling behind as a trading partner and investor on the continent.

New trade deals basically the same as the old ones

Leaving the EU theoretically allows the UK to make independent trade agreements better tailored to individual African nations.

So far, UK has inked post-Brexit trade deals with 13 African countries. But these new agreements, which offer duty-free and quota free-access to British markets, aren’t much different to the old ones.

That’s because they are primarily so-called rollover agreements — that is, they simply transfer the conditions in the EU deals into bilateral agreements between the UK and the African nation, or blocs.

The members of the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) — which includes Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Namibia and South Africa, along with Mozambique — have signed one such agreement.

A similar deal was rolled over for Ivory Coast and Cameroon, as well as for the Eastern and Southern Africa bloc, covering Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles and Zimbabwe.

Kenya’s trade deal drives a rift through East African trade bloc

Kenya has also signed a continuity trade deal with Britain, one of its top five trading partners in 2019. This allows Kenya to continue to export tea, coffee and spices, as well as vegetables and flowers to the UK without paying duties.

But the agreement has been harshly criticized for risking the integration of the East Africa Community (EAC), a trading bloc which is also working to negotiate a post-Brexit deal with UK.

There’s concern Kenya’s go-it-alone deal will escalate trade tension within the EAC, which also includes Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Burundi and South Sudan.

The agreement could push the different trade tensions between the EAC partner states over the edge, Ugandan-based policy analyst Africa Kiiza told Politico EU.

That’s because the group’s members are already blocking goods from each other.

“When you analyze the integration of the EAC, the EAC is shaky,” Kiiza said. “It is disintegrating.”

Post-Brexit Britain has adopted the EU’s ‘Everything But Arms’ trade preferences. This means least developed countries in Africa exporting to Britain enjoy “quota-free access and nil rates of import duty on all goods other than arms and ammunition,” according to www.gov.uk.

Developing nations such as Ghana — and more importantly Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy — are excluded from this preferential trade treatment, however.

Both Ghana and Nigeria failed to seal an agreement with the UK before the end of the Brexit transition period of December 31, 2020.

Nigeria is probably unwilling to maintain the old trade status quo of exporting crude oil and agricultural raw materials to Britain and importing machinery and technology goods from the UK, according to economist Dirk Kohnert.

“Nigeria increasingly gets its industrial goods from Asian countries such as China and India,” said Kohnert, who formerly researched Africa economies at Germany’s GIGA Institute.

“Global trade is shifting from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the concept of ‘Global Britain’ will be difficult to implement in Nigeria.”

Britain has long come under fire for favoring the 19 African Commonwealth nations, most of which are former British colonies or have historical ties to the UK. (The only two which don’t are Rwanda and Mozambique.)

With Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his allies promising post-Brexit Britain will occupy a bold new place on the world stage in a vision called ‘Global Britain’, it was thought that this might change.

But the new trade deals reinforce the UK’s bias towards Africa’s English-speaking nations, criticizes trade economist Rolf Langhammer from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in Germany.

“The countries with which Great Britain has already concluded rollover agreements are almost without exception English speaking,” Langhammer told DW. “So far Britain has hardly concluded any agreements with the large French-speaking countries in West Africa.”

“It looks as if the British are now strengthening their old colonial relations and have no regard for the French- or Portuguese-speaking countries.”

When it comes to buying products from the continent, Britain isn’t that important for many African nations.

Goods and services from Africa make up just a tiny share of the UK’s imports, accounting for 2.5% of the total goods imported into Britain.

Only eight nations from sub-Saharan Africa — mostly former colonies — count the UK in their top ten export destinations, including Rwanda, Mauritius, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Mozambique, Kenya and South Africa.

The UK is South Africa’s fourth biggest market for exports, after China, the US, and Germany, accounting more than 5% of South Africa’s exports. These are primarily previous gold, diamonds and precious metals, followed by vehicles, and fruit and nuts.

Trade expert Langhammer believes that the UK could become even less important.

“Trade and direct investment depend on economic conditions. The UK will in all likelihood suffer large losses due to leaving the EU,” Langhammer told DW. “Import demand will be negative and that will have a negative impact on demand for African products.”

Britain has been long criticized for undervaluing trade with Africa. The amount of products Britain sends to Africa isn’t just small, it’s also shrinking.

UK goods imported to the whole of Africa in 2019 were only 2.6% of the total. These were mainly commodities, including motor cars, petroleum oils, turbojets, aircraft and aircraft parts, pharmaceuticals, used clothing and electric generators.

France and Italy — whose economies are around the size as Britain’s — export considerably more to sub-Saharan Africa than the UK.

Even Sweden, Belgium and Portugal, whose economies are considerably smaller than the UK, send more goods to the continent.

“As it stands, the UK has not demonstrated enough vigor and commitment to improving its bilateral trade relationships with key trading partners in the African continent post Brexit,” warn Dele Bello-Williams and Kieran Davis in an article on the future of UK-Africa trade relations.

Britain plays more of a role in Africa when it comes to investment, however. It’s the continent’s fifth source of direct foreign investment after China, France, the United States and the United Arab Emirates, according to the Africa Attractiveness Report.

Currently, this investment is heavily focused on extractives, and on South Africa.

But the dual shock of the coronavirus pandemic and Brexit means the investment sentiment in Britain is low, said economist Dirk Kohnert.

“My guess: The UK, under the current coronavirus terms, won’t be able to deliver on its generous investment promises for Africa,” he told DW.