A few decades ago, I was studying my masters degree in upstate New York. As my student visa was coming to its expiry date, I had to cross the border to Montreal, Canada to go to the US Embassy there to renew the visa as was the rule. During that summer I had worked tirelessly with a wonderful law professor from Zambia who was part of an academic team doing research on  the US government potentially creating enabling legislation for preferential trade terms to imported African manufactured goods. I spent a little bit of my research salary to rent a car to make the 494 kilometre journey. Having succeeded in my mission,  I set off on my return journey 48 hours later.  A few kilometres out of Montreal with the city’s sky scrapers still visible in my rear view mirror, I got pulled over by a Canadian policeman, with all the embarrassing bells and whistles of flashing lights and loud sirens. My crime: over speeding.

The policeman was a listener of sorts, who sympathized with my student visa blah blah stories for all of 20 seconds before slapping me with a $300 speeding ticket on the spot. He then told me he could drive me to an ATM machine where I could withdraw the funds. That was the exact amount remaining in my student bank account from the research salary I had received. I wasn’t even thinking about the traumatic experience of riding in the caged backseat of a police car. All I could think about was all my hard work was about to disappear into the Canadian police bank accounts. And that, my friends, is how I started my experience with the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) which ended up being signed into law two years later in May, 2000.

AGOA was signed into law by President Bill Clinton with the aim of giving preferential trade access of zero import tariffs to over 6,700 items manufactured by sub Saharan African countries. Originally starting with 34 countries, more countries were added to the list and some removed if found not to toe the line of what the American government defined as good governance such as Central African Republic, Eritrea, Cote d’Ivoire and Uganda. AGOA’s shelf life date was set for just 8 years, but it has been extended by the US Congress a number of times, with its current iteration set to expire in September 2025.

For Kenya, AGOA’s impact has been significant with the establishment of dozens of garment manufacturing factories in export processing zones (EPZs) around the country. The numbers are noteworthy. According to information sourced from Agoa.info,  since the signing of the act to the year 2022 we have exported $6.5 billion worth of garments duty free to the United States, making us the largest garment exporter in the continent under the act and with higher US exports than Mauritius and Madagascar combined. We have also exported over half a billion dollars’ worth of nuts in the same period. By 2022 Kenya’s balance of trade with the United States was a positive $337 million. With more exports to that country than we import their goods into Kenya. Of the 65 or so textile and apparel factories in Kenya, there were 39 manufacturing under AGOA in 2023 employing about 58,000 people.

Enter stage left: Liberation Day. On April 2nd 2025, President Donald Trump announced the end to a US government policy of low tariffs that has historically benefitted US consumers by allowing for a wide range of global imports into the United States at competitive prices. The US happens to be the largest importer of goods in the world at $3 trillion in 2023 while suffering the largest trade deficit of $1 trillion.

When you scrape below the surface of global (perhaps misplaced) righteous indignation at Trump’s act, you get to realize that he does have a point. The US has been providing a low trade barrier to access its markets while not necessarily enjoying the same with its own exports, Kenya’s positive trade balance of $337 million being a miniscule but classic case in point. Kenya was not left behind the countries affected by Liberation Day, being slapped with a 10% tariff on our exports to the US and portending the likelihood of a non-extension of AGOA upon its September 2025 expiry. Just like my AGOA research salary that ignominously disappeared into a Canadian police account, we are about to witness a painful blowback on the 39 apparel industries employing 58,000 people in Kenya. Or maybe not. If other clothing exporter countries have also been slapped with tariffs equal to or higher than us, maybe we are still in the export game. Only time will tell.

X@carolmusyoka

The Nitpicker Podcast