In May 2026, two events have framed the AfCFTA’s fifth-year sequence. On 9 May 2026 in Algiers, AfCFTA Secretary-General Wamkele Mene addressed the Africa Investment and Trade Conference (AFIC12). According to the Business & Financial Times, Mene stated that the AfCFTA has entered a critical new phase focused on implementation and practical delivery, marking a major step forward in Africa’s economic integration agenda. He noted that AfCFTA has successfully moved beyond negotiations, with the necessary legal instruments, operational frameworks, and institutional mechanisms now in place to support trade and investment across the continent.
Less than ten days later, the same Secretariat is convening Biashara Afrika in Lomé. According to African Newspage, the third edition of Biashara Afrika will convene African policymakers, investors, businesses, and trade institutions in Lomé, Togo, from May 18–20, 2026 as a strategic platform for consolidating AfCFTA gains, deepening investor confidence, and accelerating implementation through scalable cross-border African enterprise. The Forum is jointly convened by the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Secretariat and the Government of the Republic of Togo.
Two events, ten days apart, the same Secretariat, the same fundamental message: AfCFTA has moved past the negotiation phase and entered the implementation phase. The question this article raises is not whether this message is accurate, but what it actually measures.
Reading: the same statement, repeated, calls for a verifiable test
The narrative pivot is itself coherent and supported. Wamkele Mene has been carrying the same message for several months. In January 2026, at The Africa Dialogues on the sidelines of the Davos forum, the Secretary-General emphasised that the continent must now pivot urgently from planning to delivery if the AfCFTA is to fulfill its promise. “After five years of designing the policy framework, the focus must now shift rapidly to delivery”. The same wording, the same posture, repeated in Algiers, then in Lomé. This is not an accident of communication: it is the deliberate position of the Secretariat, which is trying to shift the public conversation from text adoption to operational execution.
The data partially supports this transition. As of January 2026, 49 of the 54 African Union members had deposited their instruments of ratification. By mid-2025, participating nations had issued 8,561 certificates of origin. Twenty-four state parties had gazetted their provisional schedules of tariff concessions and could legally trade under AfCFTA rules. An impressive 92.4 percent of rules of origin had been finalized, with remaining sticking points concerning textiles, clothing, and automotive products, sectors where competing national industrial strategies have complicated consensus.
But the empirical state of intra-African trade complicates the implementation narrative. According to the AfCFTA Accelerator analysis published in April 2026, the AfCFTA has been operational since January 2021, but five years on, implementation has been uneven at best. The promise of a single continental market of over 1.5 billion consumers and a combined GDP of around $3.4 trillion still remains largely aspirational for the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that form the backbone of West African economies. The same analysis notes that according to the AfCFTA’s own 2024-2025 Implementation Report, many African SMEs remain unaware of the agreement’s provisions, struggle to access trade finance, and face complex customs procedures and regulatory inconsistencies that make exporting prohibitively expensive.
At the ECOWAS Parliament’s 2026 extraordinary session, the Speaker explicitly named the operational gap: “If AfCFTA does not grant goods access from Lagos to Accra, from Dakar to Abidjan, from Banjul to Cotonou without hindrance, then we have not yet fulfilled our charge. If traders remain stranded at borders by administrative confusion, then integration remains an aspiration rather than a fact. If the small entrepreneur cannot navigate our regulatory thickets, then reform remains unfinished”.
This is the structural tension that the Algiers-Lomé sequence does not resolve. The Secretariat asserts that the implementation phase has begun. The operational state of cross-border trade indicates that the bottlenecks remain those that have been documented for several years.
Implications: what Algiers and Lome are trying to produce
Three reading lines emerge from this dual sequence.
The first concerns the function of repetition itself. By delivering the same message twice in ten days, on two different continental platforms, the Secretariat is constructing public pressure for the implementation narrative to become operational. This is a known approach: a Secretariat with limited prerogatives over national legislative work uses platform-level communication to push State Parties towards execution. The risk is that repetition without verifiable measurement converts into rhetorical inflation. The LSE analysis published in late 2025 explicitly warned about this: “After five years, Africa needs to guard against AfCFTA complacency”. Repeating the implementation message does not constitute implementation.
The second reading line is the conversion logic the Secretariat is trying to operationalise. Biashara Afrika is explicitly oriented toward producing measurable deliverables. According to the Lomé organisers, beyond declarations, the Forum aims to generate measurable outcomes including B2B and G2G investment deals, partnership agreements, policy roadmaps, and strengthened commercial linkages capable of significantly expanding intra-African trade and supporting inclusive job creation across the continent. This is the test the May 2026 sequence imposes on itself: not whether the message is well-received, but whether the events produce signed deals, signed agreements, signed roadmaps. The metric is therefore self-imposed.
The third reading line concerns the geography of the two events. Algiers and Lomé are not interchangeable choices. Algeria, hosting the AFIC12, is a country that has signed the AfCFTA but whose effective participation in intra-African trade has been historically limited. The signal sent by the Secretariat’s presence in Algiers is one of integration of the Maghreb into the implementation conversation. Togo, hosting Biashara Afrika, is positioned as a logistical gateway of West Africa, with a deep-sea port and an ongoing reform agenda. The choice of these two locations covers two different regional logics: a re-engagement of North Africa, and a consolidation of West African logistics. The Secretariat is therefore not just communicating; it is geographically distributing where it places its operational anchors.
Outlook: what the next twelve months will measure
For decision-makers, the value of the Algiers-Lomé sequence is not measured by the speeches it produces, but by what follows it. Three indicators will determine whether the year-five narrative pivot translates into operational reality.
The first is the trajectory of tariff offer domestication. By mid-2025, 48 countries had submitted tariff offers, but only 23 countries had domesticated these offers into their national legislation. The gap between submission and domestication is precisely the operational space the implementation narrative is supposed to close. If the gap narrows significantly over the next twelve months, the message carried at Algiers and Lomé will have produced an effect. If it does not, the message will return to the same script at the next forum.
The second is the conversion of operational instruments. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) was launched in 2022 as a centralised financial market infrastructure enabling the efficient and secure flow of money across African borders, working in collaboration with central banks to provide payment and settlement services to commercial banks, payment service providers and fintech organisations. The actual use of PAPSS, measured in transaction volumes and number of participating banks, will be a direct signal of intra-African trade execution. Without scaled use of PAPSS, the implementation narrative remains constrained by the basic mechanics of cross-border payment.
The third is the resolution of remaining sticking points. The 7.6% of rules of origin not yet finalised concerns textiles, clothing, and automotive products, sectors where competing national industrial strategies have complicated consensus. These are not technical residuals: they are precisely the sectors where the highest-value continental industrial integration would occur. The completion or persistence of this gap in 2026 will be the most direct indicator of whether implementation is actually under way.
The Algiers-Lomé sequence puts forward a coherent narrative thesis. The structural data continues to show that the gap between agreement and execution has not yet closed. The single question on execution is therefore not whether the Secretariat is right to announce the implementation phase, but whether the period that follows the two May events will produce the documented signals (domestication, PAPSS volumes, finalisation of rules of origin) that have so far been missing. The year-six review will measure this. The communication of year five will only have been worth the data it manages to bring to the table.