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SADC to Be Transformed into More Efficient Regional Bloc
The Southern African Development Community (SADC), one of the major regional blocs in Africa, is consolidating and deepening its integration agenda through restruction, in a bid to better equip the organization to improve the welfare of its people.
During the past three days, heads of state from the southern African region gathered here for close-door discussions, with focus on the implementation of the new structure of SADC institutions, following the adoption of the Restructuring Plan by the SADC extraordinary summit held last March in Windhoek, capital of Namibia.
The 14 SADC member countries are aiming to put this organization on a very strong footing to enable it to respond timely to the numerous challenges facing the region.
The process of the restructuring, which is aimed at making the community more efficient, effective, appropriate, includes the review of the SADC institutional framework to effectively facilitate the transition from the coordination to community building.
The responsibility of restructuring SADC coincides with the new millennium, when communities and societies have to revisit their institutional framework and mechanisms to meet with the demands of the new century, making adjustments to have the appropriate institutional framework to meet the challenges and embrace the opportunities of the time.
The newly-restructured SADC is designed to provide a mechanism for conflict prevention, resolution and management in order to maintain peace, which is a prerequisite for socioeconomic development in the region.
The other provision in the restructuring is the framework for the meeting of ministers responsible for foreign affairs, which is meant to deepen the dialogue and find common positions on international issues affecting the countries and the region.
"As a region, we have a common destiny, and as such, solidarity and strengthened collective positions on matters of common interest is very, very important," said Sam Nujoma, President of Namibia and the late SADC chairman, in a speech delivered at the opening ceremony of the summit held here on Sunday.
SADC is characterized by diversities in sizes of economies, populations and resources endowment. As such, it has become necessary for the countries, in the context of the restructuring process, to seek to transform their natural endowment into advantages.
"As we move closer, as a regional institution, establishing new headquarters and recruiting regional staff, we're creating a super national organization, which impinge on our sovereignty, as individual states. Obvious, this is an action, which we're deliberately taking, for our region and peoples," Nujoma added.
With regard to the ownership of the organization, the restructuring exercise foresees the establishment of national committees in all member states, which will articulate the aims and aspirations of individual member states, and will initiate projects and programs for member countries to benefit from the regional programming, and also to ensure broader participation at grass root levels, in each of the countries.
"I'm certain that there will not be a loser or winner (in the restructuring process), but the entire region will emerge victorious," said Nujoma.
It will enable the organization to be a more efficient and effective vehicle for community building, as well as to be responsive to the challenges and opportunities of globalization.
Globalization is bringing more choices and new opportunities to raise living standards and overcome poverty. But in Africa, millions of people are living on the margins, in desperate poverty, with little prospect of realizing their potentials created by globalization.
According to estimates that were made in 2000, SADC has a total population of over 190 million and a combined gross domestic product amounting to around 219 billion U.S. dollars.
SADC occupies an area of about 9.3 million square kilometers, almost half of which is covered by rivers and lakes that can be jointly exploited for irrigation, hydropower, fisheries and tourism development.
Moreover, the region also produces most of the world's gold, diamonds and copper and has large quantities of uranium, nickel and cobalt.
It is clear that SADC has the potential to achieve accelerated growth in GDP. In this regard, although there has been significant progress in concluding important protocols that provide an enabling legal framework for accelerated regional integration, the critical issue for SADC now is how to utilize the various protocols to create wealth for members, especially given the different levels of development of each member state.
Therefore, in order to deal with the challenges that it currently faces, SADC needs to be reformed and consolidated into a lean and efficient organization, with clear mandates and capacity for making decisions.
Since the Declaration and Treaty for establishing SADC was signed in August 1992, the community has adopted a very decentralized operation system. The 14 member countries were each allocated different sectors for them to coordinate, which ensured the ownership of SADC program of action by member countries.
Over the years, the decentralized approach, which was although good to some extent, had its own indirect problems and constraints, which, for example, included the lack of inter-sectoral linkages and a unclear line of command between the sectors.
The SADC Secretariat, which is based in Gaborone, capital of Botswana, was itself an administrative secretariat for coordinating activities, organizing meetings, mobilizing resources. There is the need for a central point where different SADC institutions can be directed to move in the same direction.
Under such circumstances, heads of state agreed, at a SADC summit held in Maputo, Mozambique in August 1999, to restructure the group to ultimately improve its capacity to mobilize resources and streamline its performance.
Since then, there have been a number of national and regional consultations to make sure everybody is brought on board in the restructuring process.
It is being planned to streamline the 19 operating sectors into a core of four directorates, which will be coordinated from a central point at the Secretariat in Gaborone.
This means that member countries will no longer host sectoral coordinating offices. The sectors will move to the secretariat where they will operate under directorates supported by national committees.
The first directorate, which is on trade, industry, finance and investment, will be established before the end of the year when the secretariat identified appropriate staff for the entity.
The other directorates, namely food, agriculture and natural resources; infrastructure and services as well as social and human development and special programs are scheduled to be set up before the end of 2002.
"This is the think tank of the region. It will give policy guideline. This is a department that will tell the different directorates what they need to do to achieve a growth rate of 6 to 7 percent that will make it possible to reduce poverty, create employment that will solve a number of our problems," Prega Ramsamy, the Executive Secretary of SADC told reporters here.
"But it has to come from a centralized approach. We need to master our resources, our energies to a few priority areas but to do them well. We cannot afford to spread our resources on a number of activities at this particular time," he added.
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