All systems set for summit

Below is a briefing made by Foreign Affairs Minister Simbarashe Mumbengegwi to ambassadors from Southern African countries on the 34th Sadc Summit to be held in Victoria Falls from August 17 to 18 at his Munhumutapa offices yesterday.
Well, Your Excellencies, you are very welcome indeed, we, as you all know, are now not very far from our annual family gathering, our summit, the Sadc Summit which as you all know is going to be held on the 17th and 18th of this month at Victoria Falls.

We are extremely pleased of the support and the co-operation that we have received from all of you and from our family within Sadc since this is a family affair and many of you around this table have been involved in the hosting of these summits, we will be grateful in sharing some of the experiences with you.

The summit, I am glad to say, everything is now in place, the logistics are now in place and the draft programme is now in place.
So, I thought it would be a good thing for us to meet with you to brief you and I am sure most of the information you already have.

But more importantly, to have your inputs in any of the areas where you may feel that some improvements may be required or any areas where we may have omitted anything by way of oversight.

When we come to the venue, Victoria Falls, it’s a very ideal venue from every respect and everything is now in place.

We have had advantage that a year ago we held the UNWTO (United Nations World Tourism) summit in conjunction with our Siamese twin across the Zambezi, Zambia, which was very successful.

So, using the same venue, we have taken advantage of most of that infrastructure which is already there.
We area also very, very pleased that the attendance rate to the summit is very, very high indeed.

We have received confirmation of attendance at the highest level from virtually all the Sadc countries, except for one or two which are still to confirm, but we a quite confident that we will have the confirmations within the next day or so.

We are very, very pleased that we have received this very impressive response from our family within Sadc. We have also invited a number of VIPs within the region and within the continent.

The chairperson of the African Union Commission Dr Nkosazana Zuma has also indicated that she is going to grace our summit with her presence.

We are also going to have the executive secretaries from various sister organisations like Comesa, like Sacu (Southern African Customs Union), like the Great Lakes region, the African Development Bank and so on.

So, we are very, very pleased indeed that our preparations have gone so well.

The programme of the summit actually begins tomorrow (today) with the meeting of the finance sub-committee and then that will be followed by the meeting of our senior officials on the 10th and the 12th of August.

After that we are going to have our Council of Ministers meeting on the 14th and 15th of August and this will be followed, as I have already indicated, by the summit itself on the 17th and 18th of August.