Washington cuts duty-free access for South Africa and Rwanda

According to Al Jazeera, the United States is preparing to suspend South Africa and Rwanda from its duty-free market access scheme. For Pretoria, the loss would concern roughly $1.7 billion in annual exports, including cars and agricultural products. The agency's summary says nothing, at this stage, about the reasons given, the date of entry into force, or the reactions of the two governments. We will not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First, the vocabulary. We speak of "suspension", like a subscription being cancelled. But preferential access granted by a power and withdrawable at its whim is not a right: it is a leash. "Free" trade has the handy quality of being very free for whoever holds the key to the door. The African exporter, for his part, learns that a production chain can depend on a decision taken thousands of kilometres away, without having a say in it.

This is where dependency theory earns its keep. Southern economies have not simply been "lagging": they were shaped to supply the centre with raw materials, cheap labour and outlets. When access to the centre's market becomes conditional, every car plant and every farm finds itself in the position of a supplicant. The threat need not even be carried out to discipline: uncertainty is enough to steer public policy.

The South African case is telling. Cars and farm produce are not simple ores, but the logic remains the same: a country whose sales partly depend on the goodwill of one large market always negotiates with a pistol on the table, even if it is holstered. As for Rwanda, the material we have does not allow the impact to be quantified; we can only note that two very different countries are being treated in the same move.

As always, the first to pay will be those who did not sign the agreements: car workers, orchard seasonal labourers, small hauliers. If jobs disappear, it will not be in Washington that they are counted. And the temptation will be great to pit workers against one another, those in "protected" sectors against those in "exposed" ones, or one nation against another. Let us always ask who benefits from division.

Then there is the lesson Nkrumah drew from independence long ago: a flag is not enough if the financial and commercial levers remain elsewhere. Sixty years on, the formula has not aged a day, which is precisely the problem. What to watch now: the official justifications, the timetable, and the ability of African countries to diversify their outlets rather than beg to keep the old ones.

(Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, a leading voice of pan-African independence.)