by Phyllis Johnson – SANF 15 no 17
Nathaniel Manheru raised an important issue in Zimbabwe’s Saturday Herald of 25 April 2015, when he said the flow of business between South Africa and other Southern African Development Community (SADC) member states need not be uni-directional, but must be a “movement of many centres”.
He added that this can be easily achieved through a “spatially balanced regional industrialization strategy, indeed something SADCC sought to achieve before South Africa and SADC.”
His proposal for the way forward is to search for the lost “C”.
He was discussing xenophobia in South Africa, the murder of Mozambican Emmanuel Sithole, and making the link with industrialization, which no other analyst has done, and he further addressed this issue in the context of the special SADC Summit that takes place this week in Harare.
“The culprits for xenophobia are not the unemployed South African youths who killed Sithole, themselves victims, the culprit is a long apartheid, with its sucking tentacles, its tendency of creating a huge, transnational underclass, always at war with itself. Is (President Jacob) Zuma ready to decapitate the apartheid dragon? Or is he about to defend it, to give it an African complexion. Let Harare test that.”
Thus the scene is set for this week’s important SADC Extraordinary Summit in Harare to achieve transformative results, and the gauntlet has been thrown to South Africa to be a part of the solution to regional development and prosperity, rather than viewing the region “as a giant supermarket chain”, as another analyst said.
SADC leaders are meeting in Zimbabwe on 29 April to discuss an industrialisation strategy as well as approve a revised regional development blueprint.
Therefore, it seems timely to unpack the history of regional economic cooperation initiated in 1980 and to search for the lost “C”.
The Southern Africa Development Coordination Conference (SADCC) was established in Arusha, Tanzania, in 1979 and launched in Lusaka, Zambia in April 1980, with nine Member States.
SADCC was re-invented as the Southern African Development Community (SADC) in 1992 after the independence of Zimbabwe (1980) and Namibia (1990), and as legal and institutional apartheid drew to an end in South Africa (1994). They and others joined the regional economic community, and SADC now has 15 Member States in southern Africa, including the mainland and the islands.
The SADCC had been established to coordinate regional economic development which could be strengthened with independent Zimbabwe at its core, and to reduce the dependence of neighbouring countries on the apartheid regime in South Africa, notably for trade and transport.
Britain and other European countries gave strong support to SADCC not so much through a desire to oppose the apartheid regime in South Africa which they regarded as a western ally, but rather to contain the about-to-become independent Zimbabwe and support the establishment of a “constellation of states” as envisaged with the South African government.
Critical to SADCC’s plan was the development of the regional transportation system to reduce dependence on South Africa, a new option for the contiguous states that Pretoria then set out to destroy.
An integral part of the SADCC transportation strategy was the access to alternative ports for shipments by sea, as most of the region was heavily dependent on South African ports due to the skewed transportation system that was constructed in the colonial period.
Construction of the Tanzania-Zambia (Tazara) railway had been completed with support from China in 1973 to transport Zambia’s trade, especially copper, on a northern route to the port of Dar es Salaam.
Zimbabwe took immediate action after independence to increase traffic through ports in Mozambique, which was almost non-existent in 1980 but was increased to just over half of the country’s total traffic by 1983.
Pretoria acted against this, by sabotaging the Beira railway line and other targets in Mozambique.
“The savagery of the attacks unleashed on Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Lesotho, and the escalation of the war in Angola and Namibia using military, economic and political weapons” is well documented in books and reports such as Frontline Southern Africa – Destructive Engagement and the United Nations report on South African Destabilization: The economic cost of frontline resistance to apartheid.
This economic and military action caused extensive damage to the region in the 1980s estimated at between US$45 and US$60 billion, starkly illustrating the importance to the South African economy of retaining regional trade.
Another example was energy, as South Africa was (and is) dependent on the continued flow of low-cost electricity from the giant Cahora Bassa Dam on the Zambezi River in Mozambique, then owned by South Africa and Portugal, and now owned by Mozambique.
As Manheru mentions in his reference to the creation of a “transnational underclass”, the workers of the region were recruited to the South African mines and other labour-intensive jobs as human capital. They didn’t flow across borders and through fences, they were recruited by the big mining companies who could pay them less than local South African workers. Often they established new families and stayed on.
So people from the region, as well as the transport, electricity and trade flowed to South Africa to sustain and expand the apartheid economy. Little has changed in that pattern since the official end of apartheid in South Africa 20 years ago and the emergence of a black majority government through democratic elections.
After SADC was established as an economic community in 1992 in Windhoek, the plans and targets focused mainly on the removal of barriers to trade, but as only one of the member states, South Africa, was industrialized, this has continued the pattern of skewed development, both within and outside South Africa.
That is what the region is now trying to change, with the industrialization strategy to be debated this week by SADC leaders at Summit in Harare, to replace the uni-directional trade patterns with the “movement of many centres”.
The lost “C” has been located and the region is on its way to multi-sector, multi-country development, based on the decisions to be made this week about a regional industrialization strategy and a new regional strategic plan. sardc.net
