The 44th SADC Summit – A Concise Review

By Fambai Ngirande

At a time when Southern Africa is regarded as the poorest region on the African continent, as well as the most unequal in the world. And as Southern African countries face a host of pressing common action challenges, from heavy indebtedness to militarised conflicts, climate pressures and new disease outbreaks. All of these conditions put millions of lives at risk, and all of them require concerted regional action. Many would be justified to expect an urgent sense of exertion from Regional leaders during their only gathering of the year. For the 44th Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) Heads of State and Government Summit, the problems were certainly there to be addressed as was the highest number of SADC leaders gathered together in a decade. However, a brief look at the 44th Summit’s outcomes is revealing of both the immense opportunities for SADC leaders to leverage regional cooperation to make a difference but also of the entrenched constraints against common action.

On the Zimbabwe question

The 44th Summit provided the Government of Zimbabwe an opportunity to rehabilitate its image and showcase an image of national unity and security. As such, no expense was spared in sprucing up road networks, constructing villas for summit visitors and keeping out dissenting voices from ruining proceedings. This seemed to have worked as depicted by the Summit Communique congratulating Zimbabwe for successfully hosting the Summit. This measure of success came at the expense of a fair reckoning with the Zimbabwean situation, particularly given the legitimate expectations of a SADC intervention to help mediate simmering electoral conflict following the disputed 2023 harmonised elections. Instead, SADC leaders ignored concerns raised by the SADC Election Observation Mission, whose findings noted that the 2023 harmonised elections failed to meet the standards of the SADC Principles and Guidelines governing democratic elections. The message is that SADC is unwilling or unable to intervene in the domestic affairs of its member states. The accepted reality also is of SADC structures' vast limitations to enforce SADC principles and guidelines. A non-interventionist approach therefore prevails. However, SADC leaders must remain mindful of the potential for underlying political volatility in Zimbabwe to descend into conflict. A SADC-led inclusive national dialogue to resolve political tensions in Zimbabwe is still needed. In addition to calling for the removal of targeted sanctions on Zimbabwe, a SADC-led engagement with sanctioning countries would be more useful to unravel the factors triggering the imposition of sanctions. In the end, the Summit was a massive public relations triumph for the government of Zimbabwe and a missed opportunity for SADC leaders to explore lasting solutions to the Zimbabwean political question.

SADC Integration

There is no doubt that SADC countries need closer regional integration now more than ever. Indeed, SADC’s main objective is ‘to promote economic and social development through cooperation and integration’. As a show of unity, the 44th Summit succeeded in bringing together the highest number of SADC leaders for a regional summit in a decade. Yet in many ways, SADC remains a house divided – beset by long-held challenges such as multiple and concurrent memberships in different Regional Economic Communities, growing nationalism, heavy indebtedness and dependency on major economies particularly China and the West, asymmetrical levels of economic development and the inbuilt limitations to achieving integration through consensus and goodwill. Although the Summit communique urged member states to sign or ratify legal instruments to accelerate regional integration, a lot more needs to be done to address the factors inhibiting greater regional integration.

Industrialisation

The industrialisation theme highlighted during the Summit provides great scope for increased regional economic integration. However, this vision for industrialisation is perpetually undermined by the contrasting approaches to integration for example between SADC, the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA). It is also encumbered by the inability of SADC leaders to pool together resources to finance industrialisation, leaving member countries dependent on the unfavourable debt-inducing financing terms and policies of International Finance Institutions. At present, intra-regional trade remains too low amongst SADC’s predominantly raw material exporting economies to provide economies of scale, joint production and sourcing capabilities, strategic market protections and resource transfers to stimulate rapid industrialisation. And it doesn’t help either that SADC’s weak economic governance structures have repeatedly failed to resolve perennial trade disputes and tariff barriers undermining intra-regional trade. A typical example of this is Zambia’s decision to shut down its border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) following a trade dispute over import rights before the Summit. What this says is that the industrialisation focus though essential to Regional economic growth must be accompanied by SADC leaders’ equal commitment to collectively leverage the SADC region's comparative advantages, particularly as a strategic minerals hub, to better compete in a rapidly shifting global economic order.

Democratisation

The conduct of free and fair elections remains at the centre of the Region's prospects for democratisation. Zimbabwe having provided occasion for an unprecedented SADC Elections Observation Mission's (SEOM) qualification of an electoral process should have provided reason for greater introspection about more effective means to safeguard the SADC principles and guidelines governing democratic elections. However, the Summit broadly acclaimed the peaceful conduct of the five elections held since the last Summit, including the disputed 2023 elections in Zimbabwe. This felt dismissive of the legitimate concerns raised by the SEOM in the case of Zimbabwe. More so, it highlighted a level of inconsistency given for example the lack of political will to explore other possible measures such as the deployment of the SADC Panel of Elders as in the case of SADC's support to Lesotho.

A lack of political will to promote democratisation in the Region was also evident in the case of the kingdom of Eswatini, which was removed from the agenda of the SADC Organ on Politics, Defence and Security Cooperation (Organ Troika), despite King Mswati’s obduracy to engage his people in an inclusive national dialogue to secure Eswatini’s democratic future outside of absolute monarchical rule. This in many ways is a betrayal of the tens of amaSwati who have been killed and injured over the past three years for calling for an end to Africa’s last absolute monarchy. The much-welcomed solidarity with the suffering people of occupied Palestinian territory and the call for talks towards lasting peace must similarly be extended to the people of Eswatini seeking a chance to democratically decide their own future in the land of their birth.

Despite the clearances for selected civil society actors to organise parallel processes to influence the SADC Summit, the role of civil society in SADC decision-making remains peripheral. Efforts by SADC to implement a 'Non-State Actors Engagement Framework' though commendable fall far short of the genuine inclusion and citizen participation envisaged in the SADC Treaty itself. Additionally, the space for civil society to democratically participate in the affairs of their respective countries has been rapidly shrunk through anti-civil society legislation and the maintenance of hostile environments in many places throughout the region. Zimbabwe, the host of the 44th Summit even went as far as pre-emptively arresting dissenting civil society voices before the Summit as a means of culling dissent. The SADC People's Summit, an autonomous civil society platform held alongside the Heads of Summit meeting was confined by police order to dispersed venues with a maximum of only fifty people per session as a means to stifle the space. This was blatantly undemocratic and against the ethos of SADC as a unifying force. SADC must do more to open the space and facilitate the democratising benefits of an independent civil society.

Peace and security

Responses to the two ongoing militarised conflicts in Mozambique and the DRC both highlighted the region's deep-seated vulnerabilities to resource-driven conflicts and the limitations of militarisation as a means to securing peace. It cannot be emphasised enough that SADC leaders must do better to safeguard the strategic minerals, oil and gas reserves that are at the heart of emerging and ongoing conflicts in a rapidly polarised geo-political order. The end of the SADC mission to Mozambique, despite ongoing military tensions, internal displacements and the unmet demands of affected communities seems to indicate the outsourcing of regional challenges to corporate interests and foreign military actors – barely a lasting solution to a conflict embedded in the access and control of critical natural resources. On the contrary, the broader strategic value of the DRC to the Region is highlighted in the diplomatic efforts of the Luanda process and the military engagement through the SADC Mission in the DRC (SAMIDRC) mission comprising troops from Malawi, South Africa and Tanzania. However, as the Summit communique indicated, the conflict in the DRC requires a permanent settlement with imperial Rwanda, which has so far expressed reservations about SADC involvement and United Nations support to the SAMIDRC. In this regard, the DRC conflict will likely persist and potentially draw in more SADC countries. The lasting solution still lies in enhancing the capacity of the people of DRC to safeguard and benefit from their own natural resources.

MPOX and Climate Change

The Summit rightly flagged the emerging MPOX disease outbreak and climate change disasters as key challenges requiring robust coordinated regional intervention. A SADC Regional Humanitarian Appeal to the El-Nino-induced droughts and floods and a similar call to the World Health Organisation and other partners for Mpox resources have been launched. However, recurring lessons from the region's response to the COVID pandemic highlight the need for SADC leaders to better mobilise permanent resources and disaster response capacities as opposed to a dependency on emergency appeals. Furthermore, as the climate change crisis has become a present reality affecting millions across the region, particularly those dependent on rain-fed agriculture for food security, SADC leaders need to move beyond contingency measures to long-term climate response measures. This begins with availing sufficient resources and strengthening the SADC Secretariat's capacity to coordinate robust climate responses.

Moving on to Madagascar

The next SADC Heads of State Summit will be held around the same time of the year in Madagascar perhaps with renewed energy to advance the aspiration of Regional integration and cooperation. This takes more than an individual Summit. The major achievement of the Zimbabwean government in bringing together the biggest number of leaders for this cause in a decade is certainly commendable. However, the real work of regional integration happens between Summits and in the context of a volatile and rapidly shifting global order. As Zimbabwe will be the sitting Chair of the Regional bloc responsible for facilitating the implementation of the 44th Summit’s recommendations, it is difficult to expect much beyond the usual, as Zimbabwe grapples with its own perennial political and economic crises. And indications are that it is Zimbabwe itself most in need of regional intervention.

Fambai Ngirande is a Social Worker and Civic Leader from Zimbabwe. He served as the Coordinator of the Southern African People Solidarity Network from 2020 - 2023.