adminStephen Mpofu Correspondent
The Southern African Development Community has set itself a mammoth task of economic transformation, and success in that area will lead the regional trading bloc into a brave new future, and so failure should not be allowed to stand as a hurdle in that regard.
To achieve that exciting but clearly monumental task, the 34th Summit of SADC Heads of State and Government in Victoria Falls on August 17 and 18 and the new chairmanship of Zimbabwe directed that industrialisation should take centre stage in Sadc’s regional integration agenda to lift the lives of people in the 15 member states. A ministerial committee was mandated to develop a strategy and roadmap for industrialisation in the region.
It cannot be doubted that the rest of the Sadc family reposes respect and admiration on South Africa for that country’s remarkable milestone in industrialisation, making that country a drawcard for job seekers from the bloc and other states farther, farther afield on the African continent.
But what South Africa are we talking about here? It is certainly not the black South Africa ruled by the African National Congress which waged a protracted liberation struggle that dislodged apartheid rule with the onset of majority rule in Pretoria in 1984.
The South Africa in point here is the one that was until 1984 regarded by the kith and kin of the white apartheid rulers as the “First World” located in a Third World.
It was the South Africa ruled by the Afrikaans, whose explorer godfather, Jan van Riebeck, landed at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, paving way for South Africa’s Dutch colonisation.
Also a First World South Africa where Americans, including a spy, John Burns, deported from Zambia, bought a summer house, and where Mark Thatcher, son of Britain’s former Iron Lady prime minister Margaret Thatcher, lived at one time.
By the same token, the whites who largely control the South African economy cannot be expected to have their secondary industries replicated in other Sadc states as that move automatically spells doom for the markets that South Africa serves.
At the same time, South Africa floods other countries with cheap products, threatening the survival of local products and their producers.
Given that Catch 22 scenario, therefore, the Sadc ministerial committee tasked to spearhead industrialisation will certainly have to look deeper and further than a casual glance at the South African industrial status quo as a precursor for industrialising sister states.
This pen humbly believes the committee has the ingenuity to deliver on its assignment, otherwise we might all wait forever if we sit back with our eyes just focused on the eggs in the South African basket.
But there is hope, not just a glimmer of it, but great hope for success in that enterprise, and the ministerial committee will certainly not be adjudged overzealous with pre-celebration even at this point in time, thanks to Zimbabwe which has just rolled out the mother of all developmental initiatives in Zim-Asset.
You (yes, you) see, Zimbabwe has already taken a huge lead ahead of other Sadc countries in putting the control of our economy in the hands of the majority, first with land reform and then indigenisation and black empowerment, while other states in Southern Africa and elsewhere on the African continent dither or still drag their feet under threat by white former rulers to pull the rug from underneath the black rulers’ feet should they “deprive” whites of “ownership of their properties”.
As a result, blacks in some independent states still live in tumbledowns and eke out existence on tiny, sometimes infertile strips of land because vast tracts of land, on some of which cattle range like wild animals, remain in the hands of whites, including absentee ones.
It is, therefore, no exaggeration to suggest that given time and if all Zimbabweans put their shoulders to the wheel as it were, the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation will become, as one former diplomat in Harare put it this week, “a shining example in social and economic emancipation for the whole of Africa”.
Online Reporter