LETTER: Timely solution to stop Agoa becoming Agone?

With tariffs rising internationally, supporters of the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement have argued that this initiative needs to be complemented by additional measures to ensure the benefits of closer integration are realised, especially if the African Growth & Opportunity Act (Agoa) is replaced by “Agone”.

The use of African time has been proposed, with time zones within the continent scrapped so that businesspeople and politicians find it easier to schedule meetings, removing one reason for arriving late. After all, Russia has more time zones than the US, and during the Cold War its economic growth was slower than that of the US at a statistically significant level, which means time zones must slow economic growth.

April Fool’s Day is only 24 hours long if you have one time zone, but every time you add another zone the day gets an hour longer. African fools will have to suffer longer if we don’t get rid of time zones.

Then there’s the case of Ethiopia, which was never colonised. Its clocks are seven or eight years behind the Gregorian calendar used in the rest of Africa. By moving to the Ethiopian calendar we would be able to overwrite the past seven years, and this time try to do so with GDP per-capita growth, without a rising debt-to-GDP, without ratings agency downgrades, without state capture, and without the July 2021 riots.

It is rumoured that some in the ANC are considering this, as the party had more support seven years ago, but another faction has realised that if this time shift is implemented the party will just have more supporters to lose, and things will only be different this time around if precious ANC policies are changed.

Parliamentary discussion of these proposals may even be squeezed into the parliamentary programme before lunch today, between the DA’s juggling act and the inevitable EFF choral number. Only the foolish will not be anticipating a delay.

Greg Becker
Via email

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