Online Reporter
SADC is pushing forward with its industrialisation agenda with supply chains for industry, basically the farmers and miners, providing raw materials that must be processed by a rapidly growing industrial sector.
This is important as Sadc is not some debating society, but must be an exceptionally active participant in ensuring that the tens of millions of us who live in the region have a much better life.
No one country in Sadc has all the resources necessary to build a viable and self-sustaining industrial base. Adding value and trading among member states would be profitable and strengthen individual economies.
Their strength is an exceptional breadth and depth of agricultural and mineral resources across the region. Those riches, which include rapidly developing practical and technical skills in our populations, show that we can build a regional industrial base that includes just about every industry.
Not only that, but that industrial base can be a good mix of large, medium and small industries with a fair spread of processing plants and factories since often it makes sense to have these next to the farmers or miners growing the crops and digging up the minerals. We will still have to have big industrial cities, but these artificial environments do not have to monopolise industry.
What is now important is moving a lot faster away from the talk and policy formulation and pushing action. We have been talking for 46 years since the Frontline States took the first step with the formation of the Southern African Development Co-ordination Conference that included themselves and Zimbabwe after our independence elections.
We all knew we had to build up a regional economy that worked and this meant we had to do quite a bit in common and more importantly make sure that our value chains and transport links matched up. In a way this was the talk stage, important as we were planning an economic revolution that would do a lot more than just enrich a handful of successors of the old colonial resource grabbers.
By 1992, we were reasonably certain we were on the right path and upgraded the old SADCC, a conference, to the modern Southern African Development Community, which implied a lot more including action. At times preserving peace, sovereignty and democracy took up a lot of the available time to regional leaders, and these are obviously the foundation of an economic giant.
But while political and security issues still have to be dealt with, a highly confident group of countries and their leaders want to see SADC become a lot more. Hence this year’s theme: “Resilient, sustainable and inclusive industrialisation through infrastructure development, agricultural and critical minerals transformation in pursuit of a just world.”
The theme expresses the need for more than just industrialisation; rather we want industrialisation that brings benefits to all our people and which, to be viable and self-sustaining, has to be based on what we grow and can grow and what we mine and can mine. The infrastructure is necessary because no country is close to self-sufficiency yet between us we do not do too badly. So we need to move things around and make sure that farmers and miners are able on economic grounds to produce more.
There are obvious specialities in each country that can make SADC self-sufficient in food for a start. It has already been pointed out that Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania are strong in rice production and can lead the way to regional self-sufficiency in that crop. We note rice has to be processed and bagged before it appears on a supermarket self.
Zimbabwe has built up a large irrigated wheat crop, sufficiently big that processors are looking for new products. Other countries also have their specialities, but the stress is now more on producing food for sale than mountains of crops for bulk exports.
In mining and its ability to provide downstream value chains of products we will need to take care to avoid zero-sum games with each country desperate for its own self-sufficiency. We can become a lot richer by pooling resource and talent. To take one example, modern lithium-ion electric batteries that within a decade will be powering more than half the world’s cars.
There are several critical minerals in such a battery. Zimbabwe might have the largest lithium production but Zambia and DRC dominate in world cobalt markets for that critical mineral, and for that matter in copper which is needed for some types of batteries, but more importantly for the connections that put a whole lot of cells together. There are also traces of other required minerals, but someone somewhere in SADC is digging each one up.
Zimbabwe has been making major strides since the advent of the Second Republic with industry now having overtaken both mining and farming as the most value-creating sector, although without miners and farmers there would not be much industry.
Part of this progress has been a determination for action, not talk and promises, and that is the sort of example that SADC must follow.
