NATIONAL STANDARDS IN AFRICA

SAMCRA NEWS DENNIS WHITE DIRECTOR, SAMCRA

With the establishment of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) in May 2019 to date all but Eritrea of the fifty five members of the African Union (AU) have signed the agreement and twenty nine members have signed and ratified their participation. As can be seen on the map these countries in the main are mainly former British and French colonies. Whilst most of these countries have some form of national standards they are based to a large extent on the BS and EN standards with the scattering of SANS standards.

When it comes to the development of infrastructure and mineral resources the national standards are largely supplanted by the standards of the corporation and/or country financing the venture.

A further aspect is that there are eight regional economic communities including SADC recognized by the AU and a further six regional economic cooperation bodies not recognized by the AU including SACU. Several of these bodies have a mismatch of their own standards as well as overlaps in their membership.

A little known fact is that in 1977 the AU and the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) established the African Organization for

Standardization (ARSO) within twenty one member states. Membership now comprises thirty nine members including the RSA who are represented by the SABS. ARSO attained observer membership in the WTO TBT Committee in November 2015.

To date they have published standards for iron and steel products, fasteners plus construction materials and buildings, in addition they have established a regional certification system for quality and promotion of African products. Part of the ARSO mandate is to:

harmonize national and/or subregional standards as African Standards and issue necessary recommendations to member bodies for this purpose initiate and co-ordinate the development of African Standards (ARS) with references to products which are of peculiar interest to Africa encourage and facilitate adoption of international standards by member states co-ordinate the views of its members at the ISO, IEC, OIML, Codex and other international organisations concerned with standardisation activities. Although the SABS is an active participant at ARSO we have not been able to ascertain how they intend harmonizing the SANS standards with those of ARSO.

Currently the SABS is favoring the adoption of ISO standards over EN and ASTM and discourage the adoption from other countries such as Australia and Canada.

Another problem is a large number of SANS standards are long overdue for review, the current practice is to arbitrarily reaffirm standards, mainly due to dysfunctional technical committees which are comprised of a small number of members resulting in a constricted field of expertise. Some workgroups are comprised of members of a single industry, never a healthy situation.

There are a number of foreign companies who have established local subsidiaries pushing for the adoption of the standards in their country of origin rather than complying with existing SANS standards. Clearly there is a need for industry to be aware of these circumstances but more importantly to ensure they ardently support their representative associations to participate on the SABS technical committees during this transitionary period.