by Bayano Valy – SANF 07 No 44
The Presidents of Mozambique and Angola believe that southern Africa will eventually resolve the tricky question of multiple memberships in regional organisations.
President Armando Guebuza of Mozambique and his Angolan counterpart, José Eduardo dos Santos, expressed their belief at a press conference held in Maputo at the end of a two-day visit by dos Santos.
Most member states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) belong to other regional blocs with different trade arrangements, and this has constituted a major challenge to regional economic integration, not least because the World Trade Organisation specifies that no country can belong to more than one customs union.
President Guebuza said that the issue of multiple memberships is very important and that was why “the study of regional blocs was part of the African Union Summit agenda” held in 2006 in the Gambian capital of Banjul. Indeed, the question of multiple affiliations had featured so high on the agenda that the summit’s theme was “Rationalisation of the Regional Economic Communities and Regional Integration.”
“This shows that we’re marching, we’re thinking and we’re reflecting, and that we’ll get there, where we want to get,” stressed Guebuza.
Dos Santos also echoed this view but advocated caution. “We’ve to take into account that countries have been integrated into regional blocs, they’ve been integrated into specific customs unions. All these challenges have to be resolved gradually,” he said.
He thought that the challenges should not be solved in an abrupt manner.
“We must protect the specific interests of each country and of the region,” said dos Santos, adding that “this is an ongoing reflection. We’re engaged in a permanent march to improve the SADC structures until we reach the stage of complete integration of our economies, and who knows one day we might integrate politically.”
He said that the exercise is being undertaken with a “certain course in mind and determination to realise our objectives. Sooner or later we’ll be one — a single body.”
He did not discard the possibility that SADC and the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) will one day become a single trade entity – the call made at the Banjul summit was for the different African regional groups to work towards making the whole continent a single trade bloc.
Evidence of this is the fact that the infrastructure that is being developed interlinks southern African countries and those of other regions. “I believe completely that sooner, in five or ten years time, all the infrastructure that we’re putting in place will be completely interlinked, and that Southern Africa, East Africa and West Africa can quickly constitute a single market below the Equator.”
Countries in the SADC region whose memberships overlap are all the 13 but Mozambique. They either belong to the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) or to the South Africa Customs Union (SACU) or to the East African Community (EAC) or to the ECCAS or the Regional Integration Facilitation Forum (RIFF).
Recently, SADC Executive Secretary Tomaz Salomão argued in Maputo that multiple affiliations threatened to derail the ongoing process towards the establishment in 2010 of a regional customs union.
