Tanzania Not to Force Malawians Back Home: Tanzanian President

Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa has said his government will not force Malawians who stay legally in Tanzania to go back home, an official statement said Monday.

Mkapa made the remarks at the weekend when he arrived at Blantyre, the largest city of Malawi, for the 2001 annual summit of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), according to a statement by his press secretary Maura Mwingira.

"Tanzania is not hostile to Malawians who stay in Tanzania provided they adhere to existing laws in the country," Mkapa told Malawian reporters at Chileka International Airport.

He admitted that there are many Malawians staying illegally in Tanzania, but the Immigration Department is conducting routine checks on illegal foreigners.

"Any foreigner found with a questionable immigration status normally received immigration guidelines to follow," he said.

According to Mkapa, Tanzania and Malawi have a long history of friendship and "we want to cement our existing relations and cordial relations provided that both Malawians and Tanzanians observe existing laws of respective countries."

On the annual summit, Mkapa expressed his hope that the summit will adopt a common approach to tackling development challenges facing the region.

"There is a strong political commitment among SADC leaders towards fostering socio-economic, political, defense and security ties in the region," he said.

Mkapa is scheduled to give a vote of thanks on Tuesday on behalf of SADC leaders attending the summit.

The three-day summit which started Sunday will focus on the process of regional integration and a major reform of the regional bloc's institutions in a bid to speed up development and improve its ability to deal with crisis in the southern African region.

It will also deal with the fight against AIDS and poverty, the conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola, as well as the situation in Zimbabwe.

Created on April 1, 1980 in Lusaka, capital of Zambia, the SADC now groups 14 states in the region: Angola, Botswana, the DRC, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, the Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The organization, which was originally formed to aid economic development and respond to the fundamental needs of the people, has extended its brief to include security and defense issues.

With a combined population of over 190 million and a combined gross domestic product of about 219 billion U.S. dollars in 2000, the SADC region is rich in human, natural, agricultural and mineral resources. But the region remains one of the largest unexploited markets in the world.

The region is also pestered with other problems such as poverty, the spreading of HIV/AIDS, huge external debt and a drop in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI).

Official statistics indicated that about 76 million people of the region's population live under the extreme poverty line, and the estimated total number of AIDS cases in the region is 4 million with an estimated 6 million others who are HIV-positive.

The total of external debt in the region currently stands at more than 79 billion U.S. dollars, and the flow of the FDI dropped from 5.3 billion dollars in 1999 to 3.9 billion dollars in 2000.






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