SANF 07 No 51
The curtain comes down on a year that was largely mixed in terms of political, social and economic fortunes of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and its 14 member states.
It is a year that was mostly stable from a political perspective with relative peace in the more unpredictable parts of the regions such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), although latest developments in the east of the country remain a cause for concern.
In February, President Joseph Kabila formed a new government after winning the 2006 polls, the country’s first democratic elections in more than four decades.
The government faces the challenge of consolidating current macroeconomic reforms, as well as ensuring a general improvement in infrastructure and a return to normalcy in all spheres of life. The return to sustainable peace will strengthen the DRC’s ability to exploit its vast mineral and other resources in a more sustainable and equitable manner.
There has been optimism in Zimbabwean politics with a number of positives emerging from the SADC-brokered talks between the ruling ZANU-PF party and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, including mutually agreed constitutional and other legislative amendments.
At the Extra Ordinary SADC Summit in Tanzania in March, leaders appointed South African President Thabo Mbeki to mediate in talks between the two parties while the SADC Executive Secretary, Tomaz Salomão was mandated to find a regionally-backed economic solution to assist the country in dealing with its current economic crisis. With the latest political signals, all seems to be progressing well ahead of the harmonised parliamentary and presidential elections in March 2007.
It was a relatively quiet year in terms of elections, with Lesotho and Madagascar holding general and legislative elections respectively.
The ruling Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD), led by Prime Minister Pakalitha Mosisili, won in 61 of the 80 directly contested constituencies while the remaining seats went to the opposition parties in elections held in February.
In Madagascar, President Marc Ravalomanana’s ruling party, I Love Madagascar, captured 106 out of the 127 national assembly seats in elections contested in September. These followed presidential elections held in December 2006 when Ravalomanana was given a second term in office.
At its August Summit, SADC noted the peaceful and orderly manner in which people had exercised their democratic right in recent elections including those in Lesotho and Madagascar.
The 2007 SADC Summit, held in Lusaka, Zambia, will be remembered for the historic launch of the SADC Brigade, a regional multidimensional peace support operations capability established under the framework of the African Standby Force.
The SADC Brigade, launched through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed by southern African leaders at the summit, was established to guarantee peace, security and political stability, which are prerequisites for development.
A disappointment from the 2007 Summit was, from a gender perspective, the decision by the leaders to defer the signing of the Protocol on Gender and Development. This was done to give member states more time to conclude national consultations, especially on the timeframe.
The draft protocol is now going through another phase of discussions with a view to reaching consensus at the national level, early enough to be considered for signature at the next Summit of Heads of State and Government in 2008.
Other issues that took centre stage at the 2007 SADC Summit were deliberations on infrastructure development in the wake of slow progress in implementation of identified projects.
The existing transport, communication, water, energy and tourism infrastructure in SADC needs rehabilitation and new investments to meet the region’s current objectives of deeper regional integration. As a regional response, the Summit committed to embarking on radical measures aimed at strengthening implementation including a more vigorous campaign to raise more financial resources.
SADC is currently facing a crippling energy shortage. The effects of the energy shortage have been quite visible in 2007 across southern Africa including in South Africa, the region’s biggest economy. The situation has forced some countries to resort to load shading as a mitigating measure.
Electricity generation capacity in SADC at present is only 52,743 MW of which 41,000 MW is secured capacity available for distribution to consumers against demand of 42,000 MW.
The mismatch between demand and supply is a result of a number of factors including lack of investment over the last decade, and burgeoning population as well as expanding industries.
The main challenge for SADC member states is to invest in energy infrastructure in order to clear the current shortfall and generate sufficient surplus capacity to guarantee smooth supply across the SADC region. The Southern Africa Power Pool (SAPP) has been at the forefront of such initiatives, with a responsibility for planning, execution and monitoring of power projects.
SAPP has developed a roadmap which seeks to address current challenges including the shortfall which is expected to be overcome by 2010, while by 2013 the region is expected to enjoy adequate energy resources, including the desired 10 percent reserve margin.
This is based on the commissioning of a number of planned generation and transmission projects including the massive Inga III in the DRC with a capacity of 3,600 MW.
In a major development for the southern African region, the ownership of the Cahora Bassa dam on the Zambezi river was finally transferred from Portuguese control into Mozambican hands at a ceremony witnessed on 27 November by seven regional leaders. The importance of the dam was summed up by Mozambican President Armando Guebuza when he said that the development marked “a second independence to Mozambique”.
Cahora Bassa contributes immensely towards Mozambique’s Gross Domestic Product, raking in some US$150 million per annum through power sales, mainly to South Africa and Zimbabwe. The dam has an installed capacity of 2,075 MW and its economic significance reaches far and wide, beyond the borders of Mozambique.
Efficient and effective transboundary infrastructure facilities in all key service sectors including assured energy security is vital if southern Africa is to deepen regional integration and improve access for the benefit of its 240 million citizens, thereby reducing poverty.
The need for reliable infrastructure facilities becomes even more urgent given SADC’s plans to increase intra-regional trade in line with the targets of a Free Trade Area by 2008, Customs Union in 2010 and a Common Market by 2015.
Thus the Year 2007 has been a crucial one for the region as it prepared for the historic launch of the FTA expected around August 2008. The target is to ensure that 85 percent of all intra-regional trade is at zero tariffs by 2008.
A major challenge will be how to ensure that the tariff phase down does not weaken regional economies. The phase down is based on a variable geometry model, taking into account the asymmetrical level of development in member states.
SADC member states are at different levels of development, with South Africa far much more developed than the rest in terms of industrial base.
Countries within the Southern African Customs Union – Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland – are liberalising faster, followed by Mauritius and Zimbabwe, while the rest follow.
As SADC progresses towards higher levels of economic integration, the question of overlapping memberships to regional groupings has become more relevant. This is because World Trade Organisation rules do not allow a member state to belong to more than one Customs Union.
Yet some SADC member states belong to regional economic communities that already have or plan to have Customs Unions. These include the Common Market for East and Southern Africa (COMESA) and the East African Community.
The challenges of overlapping memberships were a major impediment to progress during negotiations on Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between regions in the African, Pacific and Caribbean (ACP) group and the European Union, which officially ended in June.
The 14-member SADC found itself having to go into the negotiations as a depleted grouping. About six countries – who are members of both SADC and COMESA – broke ranks with SADC for purposes of the negotiations and discussed with the EU under the Eastern and Southern Africa banner. These were the DRC, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Only Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia and Swaziland negotiated as SADC. Angola and Tanzania, which initially discussed under the SADC banner, later moved to Central Africa and East Africa respectively, while South Africa participated only as an observer after having concluded its own trade agreement with the EU in the late 1990s.
EPAs were to be concluded by December 2007 but with the substance of the overall economic agreement between Africa and the EU having failed to see the light of day during the December Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, the fate of EPAs remains unclear.
Another issue that gripped southern Africa in 2007, as it did the entire planet earth, was climate change. While the specifics of climate change are unclear, two general trends in southern Africa are discernable.
Firstly, heavy rainfalls and droughts are likely to become more frequent and severe, but an accurate prediction of these events remains difficult.
Secondly, in the longer term, rises in temperature are expected to have negative impacts on crop yield and areas of cultivable land.
Nearly all future scenarios indicate that Africa is expected to be worst hit. Some models predict up to a nine percent decrease in potential agricultural land by the 2080s and reductions in yield of up to 10 percent and 18 percent for cereals and maize, respectively by 2050.
What has been underscored in 2007 is that climate change is real. It is a global issue with catastrophic consequences. It is an issue that southern Africa has to pay special attention to, especially given the severity of the dry spells that has worsened over the years.
Fortunately, the 2007/2008 agricultural season has been forecast to be a good one on the back of normal to above normal rainfall in most parts of the region. Yet the threat of flooding remains.
In a positive development, Mozambique has strengthened its capacity to deal with natural disasters. The flooding in February in the Mozambican central provinces of Tete, Sofala, Manica and Zambezia killed about 40 people and affected more than 120,000 people. Nearly 90,000 people were evacuated using helicopters and inflatable boats.
It was the worst flooding to hit the country since the 2000 and 2001 floods that killed about 800 people and drove half a million from their homes.
The Mozambican National Disaster Management Institute contends that the country was better prepared to deal with the flooding in February, caused by Cyclone Favio, compared to previous cyclones. This sense of due diligence on the party of Mozambican authorities deserves commendation and should be emulated by other countries that face a similar risk.
With such a level of preparedness and one that is ever improving, it is expected that the optimism generated by the heavy rains that have been received so far in most parts of southern Africa will not be diminished by the threat of destruction by floods in 2008.
