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The 44th Summit of Heads of State and Government of the Southern Africa Development Community runs today and tomorrow in Harare with President Mnangagwa taking over the chair this morning and presiding over the discussions that will produce a more detailed industrial strategy for Southern Africa, as well as dealing with other regional issues.
A lot of Zimbabweans, both in Government and the private sector, have worked very hard to ensure that the Summit will be a success and that our very important visitors will have a very good impression of Zimbabwe.
The SADC Secretariat under the Executive Secretary have a primary responsibility for summit organisation, but obvious rely on the host country for all the facilities and for much of the staff needed to make the Summit a success. This is why they were checking up on Zimbabwe during the preparations and making sure that what we promised we delivered. They signed us off without any reservations.
Zimbabwe went for an ambitious hosting, using the recently commissioned New Parliament Building as the Summit facility since it was the best for the purpose rather than using older facilities, and then having to ensure that the required infrastructure, largely the road network and other facilities were commissioned in time. They were, along with the extensions and upgrade of RGM International Airport.
The Summit is preceded by a meeting of the Council of Ministers, and that by meetings of officials. But considering the main topic on the agenda this year, a crucial addition was the Industrialisation Week at the very beginning of the month where the private sectors for the member states and their investment development agencies could meet and work out practical suggestions.
SADC has come a long way since the Southern African Development Co-ordination Conference met in its first summit with its original nine members to start the process of seeing how the region could build its economies as the tide of colonialism and settler regimes receded, with Namibia and South Africa still to be freed in those days.
But the core thrust has remained, to develop Southern Africa and build its economy for the benefit of all the people. This has to be a regional effort as so much of the region is interconnected, having one of the largest group of landlocked states in the world and with transport routes that run across several countries. We cannot develop separately, or at least not all that effectively.
Security issues do arise, but SADC carefully parcelled these out to the related but separate SADC Organ on Politics, Defence and Security Affairs, with that organ’s ministerial meeting taking place yesterday for reporting to the Summit, so that the main SADC thrust remains focussed on development and economic growth.
The double is necessary, as regional security is a necessary, although not sufficient condition, for economic development, and in any case neighbours need to help each other out when necessary. But by keeping the double we have ensured that the development and economic issues remain at the top of the agenda, where they belong.
From the nine original members, Namibia and South Africa joined as expected as they achieved their freedom. But, interestingly, the four Indian Ocean island nations in the African Union saw SADC as their obvious regional home, and the DRC as it emerged from a dreadful period of difficulties marked by a civil war also saw its old economic ties with its southern and eastern neighbours being of critical importance as it rebuilt. SADC’s successes were attractive.
SADC is one of the wealthiest parts of the world in terms of mineral resources, with just about every mineral on tap, and with huge agricultural potential which is only now being exploited as intensive farming is built up. But that wealth still has to be realised and become a far greater part of our economies, and that means industrialisation, hence the agenda for the 44th Summit.
President Mnangagwa is ideally placed to chair this agenda, this being a central plank of his own economic agenda since he took office in Zimbabwe at the end of 2017. Southern Africa is a major commodity exporter, and even then the commodities are largely only initially processed, and at best are bars of metal or bales of agricultural produce. Zimbabwe is fairly typical here when you look at our exports, a collection of minerals and tobacco leaf heading the lists.
The real money comes from converting this vast outpouring of commodities into industrial products. So far Southern African countries have been largely industrialising through import substitution, even South Africa, the most industrialised. Yet our development must see this potentially rich part of the world become actually rich by becoming a major global workshop, manufacturing and exporting the products made from our resources.
This will require innovation, as we work out new ways of using our raw materials, another plank of President Mnangagwa’s economic policies, and ways of involving our own populations and our own private sectors, rather than just trying to rely on external investors, valuable as they may be.
The regional approach is vital, since although Southern Africa as a whole has almost all the raw materials required by an advanced industrial economy, no one country, even the best endowed, has even a majority.
So many other factors are of critical importance, such as transport, still largely what was inherited from colonial days although upgraded with the railway across Tanzania being the largest addition, and energy, with many options opening up once we look at regional development rather than everyone going it alone, or even with just their immediate neighbours.
Economic growth, and this includes industrialisation, needs to be spread so that the large and growing population of the region all benefit, without anyone being left behind, another Zimbabwean plank. The colonialists tried to develop by concentrating wealth in a few hands. Our policies must be on working out how to have faster growth and in many hands, a sound economic doctrine since tens of millions of better off people provide a huge regional market. So the Heads of State and Government have their work cut out for them this weekend.
And meanwhile, we hope that Zimbabweans will relish being at the centre and will enjoy showing off what we are accomplishing and what we have accomplished.
Online Reporter